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

WHAT IS HISTORY
Hegel's or Marx's four or three civilisations, Toynbee's twenty-one civilisations, the theory
of a life-cycle of civilisations passing through rise, decline, and fall - such schemes make
no sense in themselves. But they are symptomatic of the observed fact that the effort
which is needed to drive civilisation forward dies away in one place and is later resumed
at another, so that whatever progress we can observe in history is certainly not continuous
either in time or in place. Indeed, if I were addicted to formulating laws of history, one
such law would be to the effect that the group - call it a class, a nation, a continent, a
civilisation, what you will - which plays the leading role in the advance of civilisation in
one period is unlikely to play a similar role in the next period, and this for the good reason
that it will be too deeply imbued with the traditions, interests, and ideologies of the earlier
period to be able to adapt itself to the demands and conditions of the next period. Thus it
may very well happen that what seems for one group a period of decline may Seem to
another the birth of a new advance. Progress does not and cannot mean equal and
simultaneous progress for all. It is significant that almost all our latter-day prophets of
decline, our sceptics who see no meaning in history and assume that progress is dead,
belong to that sector of the world and to that class of society which have triumphantly
played a leading and predominant part in the advance of civilisation for several
generations. It is no consolation to them to be told that the role which their group has
played in the past will now pass to others. Clearly a history which has played so scurvy a
trick on them cannot be a meaningful or rational process. But, if we are to retain the
hypothesis of progress, we must, I think, accept the condition of the broken line.
Lastly, I come to the question what is the essential content of progress in terms of
historical action. The people who struggle, say, to extend civil rights to all, or to reform
penal practice, or to remove inequalities of race or wealth, are consciously seeking to do
just those things: they are not consciously seeking to 'progress', to realise some historical
'law' or 'hypothesis' or progress. It is the historian who applies to their actions his
hypothesis of progress, and interprets their actions as progress. But this does not invalidate
the concept of progress. I am glad on this point to find myself in agreement with Sir Isaiah
Berlin that 'progress and reaction, however much the words may have been abused, are not
empty concepts'.' It is a presupposition of history that man is capable of profiting (not that
he necessarily profits) by the experience of his predecessors, and that progress in history,
unlike evolution in nature, rests on the transmission of acquired assets. These assets
include both material possessions and the capacity to master, transform, and utilise one's
environment. Indeed, the two factors are closely inter-connected, and react on one another.
Marx treats human labour as the foundation of the whole edifice; and this formula seems
acceptable if a sufficiently broad sense is attached to 'labour'. But the mere accumulation
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