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

WHAT IS HISTORY
progressively emerging future ends. The historian's interpretation of the past, his selection
of the significant and the relevant, evolves with the progressive emergence of new goals.
To take the simplest of all illustrations, so long as the main goal appeared to be the
organisation of constitutional liberties and political rights, the historian interpreted the past
in constitutional and political terms.
When economic and social ends began to replace constitutional and political ends,
historians turned to economic and social interpretations of the past. In this process, the
sceptic might plausibly allege that the new interpretation is no truer than the old; each is
true for its period. Nevertheless, since the pre occupation with economic and social ends
represents a broader and more advanced stage in human development than the
preoccupation with political and constitutional ends, so the economic and social
interpretation of history may be said to represent a more advanced stage in history than the
exclusively political interpretation. The old interpretation is not rejected, but is both
included and superseded in the new. Historiography is a progressive science, in the sense
that it seeks to provide constantly expanding and deepening insights into a course of
events which is itself progressive. This is what I should mean by saying that we need 'a
constructive outlook over the past'. Modern historiography has grown up during the past
two centuries in this dual belief in progress, and cannot survive without it, since it is this
belief which provides it with its standard of significance, its touchstone for distinguishing
between the real and the accidental. Goethe, in a conversation towards the end of his life,
cut the Gordian knot a little brusquely:
When eras are on the decline, all tendencies are subjective; but on the other hand when
matters ate ripening for a new epoch, all tendencies are objective.
Nobody is obliged to believe either in the future of history or in the future of society. It is
possible that our society may be destroyed or may perish of slow decay, and that history
may relapse into theology - that is to say, a study not of human achievement, but of the
divine purpose - or into literature - that is to say, a telling of stories and legends without
purpose or significance. But this will not be history in the sense in which we have known
it in the last 200 years.
I have still to deal with the familiar and popular objection to any theory which finds the
ultimate criterion of historical judgement in the future. Such a theory, it is said, implies
that success is the ultimate criterion of judgement, and that, if not whatever is, whatever
will be, is right. For the past 200 years most historians have not only assumed a direction
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