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

WHAT IS HISTORY
I have no space to touch in detail on the similar processes at work in other fields. Even
science, as we have seen, is now less concerned to investigate and establish objective laws
of nature, than to frame working hypotheses by which man may be enabled to harness
nature to his purposes and transform his environment. More significant, man has begun,
through the conscious exercise of reason, not only to transform his environment but to
transform himself. At the end of the eighteenth century Malthus, in an epoch-making
work, attempted to establish objective laws of population, working, like Adam Smith's
laws of the market, without anyone being conscious of the process. Today nobody
believes in such objective laws; but the control of population has become a matter of
rational and conscious social policy. We have seen in our time the lengthening by human
effort of the span of human life and the altering of the balance between the generations in
our population. We have beard of drugs consciously used to influence human behaviour,
and surgical operations designed to alter human character. Both man and society have
changed, and have been changed by conscious human effort, before our eyes. But the most
significant of these changes have probably been those brought about by the development
and use of modern methods of persuasion and indoctrination. Educators at all levels are
nowadays more and more consciously concerned to make their contribution to the shaping
of society in a particular mould, and to inculcate in the rising generation the attitudes,
loyalties, and opinions appropriate to that type of society; educational policy is an integral
part of any rationally planned social policy. The primary function of reason, as applied to
man in society, is no longer merely to investigate, but to transform; and this heightened
consciousness of the power of man to improve the management of his social, economic,
and political affairs by the application of rational processes seems to me one of the major
aspects of the twentieth- century revolution.
This expansion of reason is merely part of the process which I called in an earlier lecture
'individualisation' - the diversification of individual skills and occupations and
opportunities which is the concomitant of an advancing civilisation. Perhaps the most farreaching
social consequence of the industrial revolution has been the progressive increase
in the numbers of those who learn to think, to use their reason. In Great Britain our
passion for gradualism is such that the movement is sometimes scarcely perceptible. We
have rested on the laurels of universal elementary education for the best part of a century,
and have still not advanced very far or very quickly towards universal higher education.
This did not matter so much when we led the world. It matters more when we are being
overtaken by others in a greater hurry than ourselves, and when the pace has everywhere
been speeded up by technological change. For the social revolution and the technological
revolution and the scientific revolution are part and parcel of the same process. If you
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