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

WHAT IS HISTORY
of the domain of reason, an increase in man's power to understand and control himself and
therefore his environment; and it represents a revolutionary and progressive achievement.
In this respect, Freud complements, and does not contradict, the work of Mane. Freud
belongs to the contemporary world, in the sense that, though he himself did not entirely
escape from the conception of a fixed and invariable human nature, he provided tools for a
deeper understanding of the roots of human behaviour and thus for its conscious
modification through rational processes.
For the historian Freud's special significance is two-fold. In the first place, Freud has
driven the last nail into the coffin of the ancient illusion that the motives from which men
allege or believe themselves to have acted are in fact adequate to explain their action: this
is a negative achievement of some importance, though the positive claim of some
enthusiasts to throw light on the behaviour of the great men of history by the methods of
psycho-analysis should be taken with a pinch of salt. The procedure of psycho-analysis
rests on the cross-examination of the patient who is being investigated: you cannot crossexamine
the dead. Secondly, Freud, reinforcing the work of Marx, has encouraged the
historian to examine himself and his own position in history, the motives - perhaps hidden
motives - which have guided his choice of theme or period and his selection and
interpretation of the facts, the national and social background which has determined his
angle of vision, the conception of the future which shapes his conception of the past. Since
Marx and Freud wrote, the historian has no excuse to think of himself as a detached
individual standing outside society and outside history. This is the age of selfconsciousness
:the historian can and should know what he is doing.
This transition to what I have called the contemporary world - the extension to new
spheres of the function and power of reason - is not yet complete: it is part of the
revolutionary change through which the twentieth-century world is passing. I should like
to examine some of the main symptoms of the transition.
Let me begin with economics. Down to 1914 belief in objective economic laws, which
governed the economic behaviour of men and nations, and which they could defy only to
their own detriment, was still virtually unchallenged. Trade cycles, price fluctuations,
unemployment, were determined by those laws. As late as 1930, when the great
depression set in, this was still the dominant view. Thereafter things moved fast. In the
1930s, people began to talk of ‘the end of economic man', meaning the man who
consistently pursued his economic interests in accordance with economic laws; and since
then nobody, except a few Rip Van Winkles of the nineteenth century, believes in
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