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

WHAT IS HISTORY
the future as with the past. Thucydides believed that nothing significant had happened in
time before the events which he described, and that nothing significant was likely to
happen thereafter. Lucretius deduced man's indifference to the future from his indifference
to the past:
Consider how that past ages of eternal time before our birth were no concern of ours. This
is a mirror which nature holds up to us of future time after our death.' Poetic visions of a
brighter future took the form of visions of a return to a golden age of the past - a cyclical
view which assimilated the processes of history to the processes of nature. History was not
going anywhere: because there was no sense of the past, there was equally no sense of the
future. Only Virgil, who in his fourth eclogue had given the classical picture of a return to
the golden age, was inspired in the Aeneid momentarily to break through the cyclical
conception: 'Imperium sine fine dedi' was a most unclassical thought, which later earned
Virgil recognition as a quasi-Christian prophet.
It was the Jews, and after them the Christians, who introduced an entirely new element by
postulating a goal towards which the historical process is moving - the teleological view of
history. History thus acquired a meaning and purpose, but at the expense of losing its
secular character. The attainment of the goal of history would automatically mean the end
of history : history itself became a theocracy. This was the medieval view of history. The
Renaissance restored the classical view of an anthropocentric world and of the primacy of
reason, but for the pessimistic classical view of the future substituted an optimistic view
derived from the Jewish-Christian tradition. Time, which had once been hostile and
corroding, now became friendly and creative: contrast Horace's 'Damnosa quid non
imminuit dies? with Bacon's 'Veritas temporis filia'. The rationalists of the Enlightenment,
who were the founders of modern historiography, retained the Jewish-Christian
teleological view, but secularized the goal; they were thus enabled to restore the rational
character of the historical process itself. History became progress towards the goal of the
perfection of man’s estate on earth. Gibbon, the greatest of the Enlightenment historians,
was not deterred by the nature of his subject from recording what he called 'the pleasing
conclusion that every age of the world has increased, and still increases, the real wealth,
the happiness, the knowledge, and perhaps the virtue, of the human race'. The cult of
progress reached its climax at the moment when British prosperity, power, and selfconfidence
were at their height; and British writers and British historians were among the
most ardent votaries of the cult. The phenomenon is too familiar to need illustration; and I
need only quote one or two passages to show how recently faith in progress remained a
postulate of all our thinking. Acton, in the report of 1896 on the project of the Cambridge
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