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

WHAT IS HISTORY
THE conception which I have put forward in these lectures of history as a constantly
moving process, with the historian moving within it, seems to commit me to some
concluding reflexions on the position of history and of the historian in our time. We live in
an epoch when - not for the first time in history - predictions of world catastrophe are in
the air, and weigh heavily on all. They can be neither proved nor disproved. But they are
at any rate far less certain than the prediction that we shall all die; and, since the certainty
of that prediction does not prevent us from laying plans for our own future, so I shall
proceed to discuss the present and future of our society on the assumption that this country
- or, if not this country, some major part of the world - will survive the hazards that
threaten us, and that history will continue.
The middle years of the twentieth century find the world in a process of change probably
more profound and more sweeping than any which has overtaken it since the medieval
world broke up in ruins and the foundations of the modern world were laid in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries. The change is no doubt ultimately the product of scientific
discoveries and inventions, of their ever more widespread application, and of
developments arising directly or indirectly out of them. The most conspicuous aspect of
the change is a social revolution comparable with that which, in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, inaugurated the rise to power of a new class based on finance and commerce,
and later on industry. The new structure of our industry and the new structure of our
society present problems too vast for me to embark on here. But the change has two
aspects more immediately relevant to my theme - what I may call a change in depth, and a
change in geographical extent. I will attempt to touch briefly on both of these.
History begins when men begin to think of the passage of time in terms not of natural
processes - the cycle of the seasons, the human life-span - but of a series of specific events
in which men are consciously involved and which they can consciously influence. History,
says Burckhardt, is 'the break with nature caused by the awakening of consciousness'.'
History is the long struggle of man, by the exercise of his reason, to understand his
environment and to act upon it. But the modern period has broadened the struggle in a
revolutionary way. Man now seeks to understand, and to act on, not only his environment
but himself; and this has added, so to speak, a new dimension to reason, and a new
dimension to history. The present age is the most historically-minded of all ages. Modern
man is to an unprecedented degree self-conscious and therefore conscious of history. He
peers eagerly back into the twilight out of which he has come, in the hope that its faint
beams will illuminate the obscurity into which he is going; and, conversely, his aspirations
and anxieties about the path that lies ahead quicken his insight into what lies behind. Past,
file:///C|/Documents and Settings/Vidula/Local Settings/Temp/Rar$EX00.750/carr.htm (82 of 97)7/20/2006 11:28:45 AM