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

WHAT IS HISTORY
beings not to confine themselves to seeking piecemeal improvements in the way things are
done, but to present fundamental challenges in the name of reason to the current way of
doing things and to the avowed or hidden assumptions on which it rests. I look forward to
a time when the historians and sociologists and political thinkers of the English-speaking
world will regain their courage for that task.
It is, however, not the waning of faith in reason among the intellectuals and the political
thinkers of the English-speaking world which perturbs me most, but the loss of the
pervading sense of a world in perpetual motion. This seems at first sight paradoxical for
rarely has so much superficial talk been heard changes going on around us. But the
significant thing is that change is no longer thought of as achievement, as opportunity, as
progress, but as an object of fear. When our political and economic pundits prescribe, they
have nothing to offer us but the warning to mistrust radical and far-reaching ideas, to shun
anything that savours of revolution, and to advance - if advance we must - as slowly and
cautiously as we can. At a moment when the world is changing its shape more rapidly and
more radically than at any time in the last 400 years, this seems to me a singular blindness,
which gives ground for apprehension not that the world-wide movement will be stayed,
but that this country - and perhaps other English-speaking countries - may lag behind the
general advance, and relapse helplessly and uncomplainingly into some nostalgic
backwater. For myself, I remain an optimist; and when Sir Lewis Namier warns me to
eschew programmes and ideals, and Professor Oakeshott tells me that we are going
nowhere in particular and that all that matters is to see that nobody rocks the boat, and
Professor Popper wants to keep that dear old T-model on the road by dint of a little
piecemeal engineering, and Professor Trevor-Roper knocks screaming radicals on the
nose, and Professor Morison pleads for history written in a sane conservative spirit, I shall
look out on a world in tumult and a world in travail, and shall answer in the well worn
words of a great scientist: 'And yet - it moves.'
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