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

WHAT IS HISTORY
serious and dramatic setback to developments which had seemed imminent when Marx
began to work. The latter part of the nineteenth century passed in an atmosphere which
was still predominantly one of prosperity and security. It was not till the turn of the
century that we completed the transition to the contemporary period of history, in which
the primary function of reason is no longer to understand objective laws governing the
behaviour of man in society, but rather to reshape society, and the individuals who
compose it, by conscious action. In Marx, 'class', though not precisely defined, remains on
the whole an objective conception to be established by economic analysis. In Lenin, the
emphasis shifts from 'class' to 'party', which constitutes the vanguard of the class and
infuses into it the necessary element of class-consciousness. In Marx, ‘ideology' is a
negative term - a product of the false consciousness of the capitalist order of society. In
Lenin, 'ideology' becomes neutral or positive - a belief implanted by an elite of classconscious
leaders in a mass of potentially class-conscious workers. The moulding of classconsciousness
is no longer an automatic process, but a job to be undertaken.
The other great thinker who has added a fresh dimension to reason in our time is Freud.
Freud remains today a somewhat enigmatic figure. He was by training and background a
nineteenth-century liberal individualist, and accepted without question the common, but
misleading, assumption of a fundamental antithesis between the individual and society.
Freud, approaching man as a biological rather than as a social entity, tended to treat the
social environment as something historically given rather than as something in constant
process of creation and transformation by man himself. He has always been attacked by
the Marxists for approaching what are really social problems from the standpoint of the
individual, and condemned as a reactionary on that account; and this charge, which was
valid only in part against Freud himself, has been much more fully justified by the current
neo-Freudian school in the United States, which assumes that maladjustment’s are
inherent in the individual, and not in the structure of society, and treats the adaptation of
the individual to society as the essential function of psychology. The other popular charge
against Freud, that he has extended the role of the irrational in human affairs, is totally
false, and rests on a crude confusion between recognition of the irrational element in
human behaviour and a cult of the irrational. That a cult of the irrational does exist in the
English- speaking world today, mainly in the form of a depreciation of the achievements
and potentialities of reason, is unfortunately true; it is part of the current wave of
pessimism and ultra-conservatism, of which I will speak later. But this does not stem from
Freud, who was an unqualified and rather primitive rationalist. What Freud did was to
extend the range of our knowledge and understanding by opening up the unconscious
roots of human behaviour to consciousness and to rational enquiry. This was an extension
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