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

WHAT IS HISTORY
subject to no limits that we can or need envisage - towards goals which can be defined
only as we advance towards them, and the validity of which can be verified only in a
process of attaining them. Nor do I know how, without some such conception of progress,
society can survive. Every civilised society imposes sacrifices on the living generation for
the sake of generations yet unborn. To justify these sacrifices in the name of a better world
in the future is the secular counterpart of justifying them in the name of some divine
purpose. In Bury's words, ‘the principle of duty to posterity is a direct corollary of the idea
of progress'.' Perhaps this duty does not require justification. If it does, I know of no other
way to justify it.
This brings me to the famous crux of objectivity in history. The word itself is misleading
and question-begging. In an earlier lecture I have already argued that the social sciences -
and history among them - cannot accommodate themselves to a theory of knowledge
which puts subject and object asunder, and enforces a rigid separation between the
observer and the thing observed. We need a new model which does justice to the complex
process of interrelation and interaction between them.
The facts of history cannot be purely objective, since they become facts of history only in
virtue of the significance attached to them by the historian. Objectivity in history - if we
are still to use the conventional term - cannot be an objectivity of fact, but only of relation,
of the relation between fact and interpretation, between past, present, and future. I need
not revert to the reasons which led me to reject as unhistorical the attempt to judge
historical events by erecting an absolute standard of value outside history and independent
of it. But the concept of absolute truth is also not appropriate to the world of history - or, I
suspect, to the world of science. It is only the simplest kind of historical statement that can
be adjudged absolutely true or absolutely false. At a more sophisticated level, the historian
who contests, say, the verdict of one of his predecessors will normally condemn it, not as
absolutely false, but as inadequate or one-sided or misleading, or the product of a point of
view which has been rendered obsolete or irrelevant by later evidence. To say that the
Russian revolution was due to the stupidity of Nicholas II or to the genius of Lenin is
altogether inadequate - so inadequate as to be altogether misleading. But it cannot be
called absolutely false. The historian does not deal in absolutes of this kind.
Let us go back to the sad case of Robinson's death. The objectivity of our inquiry into that
event depended not on getting our facts right - these were not in dispute - but on
distinguishing between the real or significant facts, in which we were interested, and the
accidental facts, which we could afford to ignore. We found it easy to draw this
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