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

WHAT IS HISTORY
present, and future are linked together in the endless chain of history.
The change in the modern world which consisted in the development of man's
consciousness of himself may be said to begin with Descartes, who first established man's
position as a being who can not only think, but think about his own thinking, who can
observe himself in the act of observing, so that man is simultaneously the subject and the
object of thought and observation. But the development did not become fully explicit till
the latter part of the eighteenth century, when Rousseau opened up new depths of human
self-understanding and self-consciousness, and gave man a new outlook on the world of
nature and on traditional civilisation. The French revolution, said de Tocqueville, was
inspired by 'the belief that what was wanted was to replace the complex of traditional
customs governing the social order of the day by simple elementary rules deriving from
the exercise of the human reason and from natural law'. 'Never till then,' wrote Acton in
one of his manuscript notes, 'had men sought liberty, knowing what they sought.'" For
Acton, as for Hegel, liberty and reason were never far apart. And with the French
revolution was linked the American revolution.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation,
conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
It was, as Lincoln's words suggest, a unique event - the first occasion in history when men
deliberately and consciously formed themselves into a nation, and then consciously and
deliberately set out to mould other men into it. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
man had already become fully conscious of the world around him and of its laws. They
were no longer the mysterious decrees of an inscrutable providence, but laws accessible to
reason. But they were laws to which man was subject, and not laws of his own making: In
the next stage man was to become fully conscious of his power over his environment and
over himself, and of his right to make the laws under which he would live.
The transition from the eighteenth century to the modern world was long and gradual. Its
representative philosophers were Hegel and Marx, both of whom occupy an ambivalent
position. Hegel is rooted in the idea of laws of providence converted into laws of reason.
Hegel's world spirit grasps providence firmly with one hand and reason with the other. He
echoes Adam Smith. Individuals 'gratify their own interests; but something more is
thereby accomplished, which is latent in their action though not present in their
consciousness'. Of the rational purpose of the world spirit he writes that men 'in the very
act of realising it, make it the occasion of satisfying their desire, whose import is different
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