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

WHAT IS HISTORY
which form a state', has been justly criticised as attaching an exclusive value to one form
of social organisation and paving the way for an obnoxious state-worship. But, in
principle, what Hegel is trying to say is correct, and reflects the familiar distinction
between prehistory and history; only those peoples which have succeeded in organising
their society in some degree cease to be primitive savages and enter into history. Carlyle in
his French Revolution called Louis XV 'a very World Solecism .incarnate'. He evidently
liked the phrase, for he embroidered it later in a longer passage:
What new universal vertiginous movement is this: of institutions, social arrangements,
individual minds, which once worked co-operative, now rolling and grinding in distracted
collision? Inevitable; it is the breaking-up of a World Solecism, worn out at last.
The criterion is once more historical: what fitted one epoch had become a solecism in
another, and is condemned on that account. Even Sir Isaiah Berlin, when he descends from
the heights of philosophical abstraction and considers concrete historical situations,
appears to have come round to this view. In a broadcast delivered some time after the
publication of his essay on Historical Inevitability, he praised Bismarck, in spite of moral
shortcomings, as a 'genius' and 'the greatest example in the last century of a politician of
the highest powers of political judgement', and contrasted him favourably in this respect
with such men as Joseph II of Austria, Robespierre, Lenin, and Hitler, who failed to
realise 'their positive ends'. I find this verdict odd. But what interests me at the moment is
the criterion of judgement. Bismarck, says Sir Isaiah, understood the material in which he
was working; the others were led away by abstract theories which failed to work. The
moral is that 'failure comes from resisting that which works best ... in favour of some
systematic method or principle claiming universal validity'." In other words the criterion
of judgement in history is not some 'principle claiming universal validity', but 'that which
works best '. It is not only - I need hardly say - when analysing the past that we invoke this
criterion of 'what works best'. If someone informed you that he thought that, at the present
juncture, the union of Great Britain and the United States of America in a single state
under a single sovereignty was desirable, you might agree that this was quite a sensible
view. If he went on to say that constitutional monarchy was preferable to presidential
democracy as a form of government, you might also agree that this was quite sensible. But
suppose he then told you that he proposed to devote himself to conducting a campaign for
the reunion of the two countries under the British crown; you would probably reply that he
would be wasting his time. If you tried to explain why, you would have to tell him that
issues of this kind have to be debated on the basis not of some principle of general
application, but of what would work in given historical conditions; you might even
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