What is History / by Edward Hallett Carr - Universal History Library

WHAT IS HISTORY
hitherto consistently used the conventional phrase 'past and present'. But, as we all know,
the present has no more than a notional existence as an imaginary dividing line between
the past and the future. In speaking of the present, I have already smuggled another time
dimension into the argument. It would, I think, be easy to show that, since past and future
are part of the same time-span, interest in the past and interest in the future are
interconnected. The line of demarcation between prehistoric and historical times is crossed
when people cease to live only in the present, and become consciously interested both in
their past and in their future. History begins with the handing down of tradition; and
tradition means the carrying of the habits and lessons of the past into the future. Records
of the past begin to be kept for the benefit of future generations. 'Historical thinking,',
writes the Dutch historian Huizinga, 'is always teleological.' Sir Charles Snow recently
wrote of Rutherford that 'like all scientists ... he had, almost without thinking what it
meant, the future in his bones'." Good historians, I suspect, whether they think about it or
not, have the future in their bones. Besides the question 'Why? is the historian also asks
the question 'Whither ?'
5. History as Progress
LET me begin by quoting a passage from Professor Powicke's inaugural lecture as Regius
Professor in Modern History in Oxford thirty years ago:
The craving for an interpretation of history is so deep-rooted that, unless we have a
constructive outlook over the past, we are drawn either to mysticism or to cynicism.
'Mysticism' will, I think, stand for the view that the meaning of history lies somewhere
outside history, in the realms of theology or eschatology - the view of such writers as
Berdyaev or Niebuhr or Toynbeee 'Cynicism' stands for the view, examples of which I
have several times quoted, that history has no meaning, or a multiplicity of equally valid
or invalid meanings, or the meaning which we arbitrarily choose to give to it. These are
perhaps the two most popular views of history today. But I shall unhesitatingly reject both
of them. This leaves us with that odd, but suggestive, phrase 'a constructive outlook over
the past'. Having no way of knowing what was in Professor Powicke's mind when he used
the phrase, I shall attempt to read my own interpretation into it.
Like the ancient civilisations of Asia, the classical civilisation of Greece and Rome was
basically unhistorical. As we have already seen, Herodotus as the father of history had few
children; and the writers of classical antiquity were on the whole as little concerned with
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