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

WHAT IS HISTORY
mote closely what is implied in the concept of progress, what assumptions lie behind it,
and how far these have become untenable.
I should like, first of all, to clear up the muddle about progress and evolution. The thinkers
of the Enlightenment adopted two apparently incompatible views. They sought to
vindicate man's place in the world of nature: the laws of history were equated with the
laws of nature. On the other hand, they believed in progress. But what ground was there
for treating nature as progressive, as constantly advancing towards a goal ~ Hegel met the
difficulty by sharply distinguishing history, which was progressive, from nature, which
was not. The Darwinian revolution appeared to remove all embarrassments by equating
evolution and progress: nature, like history, turned out after all to be progressive. But this
opened the way to a much graver misunderstanding, by confusing biological inheritance,
which is the source of evolution, with social acquisition, which is the source of progress in
history. The distinction is familiar and obvious. Put a European infant in a Chinese family,
and the child will grow up with a white skin, but speaking Chinese. Pigmentation is a
biological inheritance, language a social acquisition transmitted by the agency of the
human brain. Evolution by inheritance has to be measured in millennia or in millions of
years; no measurable biological change is known to have occurred in man since the
beginning of written history. Progress by acquisition can be measured in generations. The
essence of man as a rational being is that he develops his potential capacities by
accumulating the experience of past generations. Modern man is said to have no larger a
brain, and no greater innate capacity of thought, than his ancestor 5000 years ago. But the
effectiveness of his thinking has been multiplied many times by learning and incorporating
in his experience the experience of the intervening generations. The transmission of
acquired characteristics, which is rejected by biologists, is the very foundation of social
progress. History is progress through the transmission of acquired skills from one
generation to another.
Secondly, we need not and should not conceive progress as having a finite beginning or
end. The belief, popular less than fifty years ago, that civilisation was invented in the Nile
Valley in the fourth millennium B.C. is no more credible today than the chronology which
placed the creation of the world in 4004 B·C· Civilisation, the birth of which we may
perhaps take as a starting-point for our hypothesis of progress, was surely not an
invention, but an infinitely slow process of development, in which spectacular leaps
probably occurred from time to time. We need not trouble ourselves with the question
when progress - or civilisation - began. The hypothesis of a finite end of progress has led
to more serious misapprehension. Hegel has been rightly condemned for seeing the end of
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