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

WHAT IS HISTORY
progress in the Prussian monarchy - apparently the result of an overstrained interpretation
of his view of the impossibility of prediction. But Hegel's aberration was capped by that
eminent Victorian, Arnold of Rugby, who in his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of
Modern History in Oxford in 1841 thought that modern history would be the last stage in
the history of mankind: ' It appears to bear marks of the fullness of time, as if there would
be no future history beyond it.' Marx's prediction that the proletarian revolution would
realise the ultimate aim of a classless society was logically and morally less vulnerable;
but the presumption of an end of history has an eschatological ring more appropriate to the
theologian than to the historian, and reverts to the fallacy of a goal outside history. No
doubt a finite end has attractions for the human mind; and Acton's vision of the march of
history as an unending progress towards liberty seems chilly and vague. But if the
historian is to save his hypothesis of progress, I think he must be prepared to treat it as a
process into which the demands and conditions of successive periods will put their own
specific content. And this is what is meant by Acton's thesis that history is not only a
record of progress but a 'progressive science', or, if you like, that history in both senses of
the word - as the course of events and as the record of those events - is progressive. Let us
recall Acton's description of the advance of liberty in history:
It is by the combined efforts of the weak, made under compulsion, to resist the reign of
force and constant wrong, that, in the rapid change but slow progress of four hundred
years, liberty has been preserved, and secured, and extended, and finally understood.
History as the course of events was conceived by Acton as progress towards liberty,
history as the record of those events as progress towards the understanding of liberty: the
two processes advanced side by side." The philosopher Bradley, writing in an age when
analogies from evolution were fashionable, remarked that 'for religious faith the end of
evolution is presented as that which ...is already evolved'. For the historian the end of
progress is not already evolved. It is something still infinitely remote; and pointers
towards it come in sight only as we advance. This does not diminish its importance. A
compass is a valuable and indeed indispensable guide. But it is not a chart of the route.
The content of history can be realised only as we experience it.
My third point is that no sane person ever believed in a kind Of progress which advanced
in an unbroken straight line without reverses and deviations and breaks in continuity, so
that even the sharpest reverse is not necessarily fatal to the belief. Clearly there ate periods
of regression as well as periods of progress. Moreover, it would be rash to assume that,
after a retreat, the advance will be resumed from the same point or along the same line.
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