Carr what is history

He did not study history at university, nor did he go on to take a PhD and follow a conventional academic career. After graduating from Cambridge in with a classics degree he joined the Foreign Office, which proved hugely influential in the way he later approached the study of history.

During his political career, in alone he was present at the Paris Peace Conference, involved in the drafting of the Treaty of Versailles and in determining the new border between Germany and Poland. He later had a post in the Foreign Division of the Ministry of Information, where he worked with the notorious Russian spy Guy Burgess.

In , he took up a post at Aberystwyth University as professor of international politics. Here, he began his writings on foreign policy, including The Twenty Years Crisis released just before the outbreak of the Second World War, in which he interrogated the structural political-economic problems that were to give rise to conflict.

In , he became assistant editor at the Times , before committing himself to academia, first at Balliol College, Oxford, in , and two years later at Trinity College, Cambridge. He continued to write up until the day he died, in , aged 90, when his body was achingly tired, but his mind was still running at a relentless pace. Carr was one of our greatest and most influential thinkers. However, it was his interest in the Russian Revolution, which he witnessed from a distance as a Foreign Office clerk, that inspired his fascination with history.

The seed of thought that grew into What is History? For Carr, Herodotus demonstrated that the historian frequently does not draw from objective fact, but his experiences of them. In his developing interest in Russian history — and reading the Russian literature that was available to him — he was inspired to write the volume A History of Soviet Russia , the first part of which was published in During its composition he became more convinced by Soviet ideology and before his death in , he was urged to formalise his political beliefs, which he did in a personal three-page letter to my grandfather.

This now survives, hidden deep within family archives; it stipulates he was a Marxist. But what surprises me, and it is my only critical commentary on the collection, is that more of the contributors don't make similar arguments. This comment is a reflection on the state of history thinking today.

With our heightened consciousness about the deconstructed nature of the past as history doubts about representation, the knowing subject, referentiality, inductive inference, the truth conditional statement, the pivotal epistemological position of agency to talk about any major historical thinker and perhaps Carr of all historians without more broadly acknowledging their intellectual contribution to the early phases of this debate is an oversight.

Carr is, for me, perhaps one of the two or three leading historians of the last century. This is evidenced by the variety of ways in which he has been evaluated and consistently vilified by hard-core and unthinking empiricists. The simple point about Carr was that he signposted the failings of a Rankean approach to the past.

As one of our leading political constructionist historians it is often what he did not say and that he did not follow up his insights that often surprises me. His scepticism about the nature and status of historical knowledge, his sociology of knowledge if you like, is summarised in his view that ideology 'is the point where history and politics meet' from a review by Carr in the TLS quoted by Thomas Smith, History and International Relations , Routledge, , p.

This echoes his epistemological position first revealed most cogently in his judgement that the distinction of the observer and the observed is facile and misleading. In other words, Carr was moving toward the view that meaning is not given to us through an empirical knowledge of the past event.

But he was not intellectually equipped to face what was about to happen to historical studies, viz. That Stephen C. Pepper had written extensively about this in the early 's World Hypotheses , University of California Press, and it had not come to Carr's attention is not something for which he could be blamed. But I do believe what has happened subsequently in our post-epistemology world does add up to a more basic critique of historical knowledge than Carr imagined in What is History?

The new legitimacy given to epistemic relativism these days can make Carr's contribution seem lightweight. As Jenkins argued in his book On 'What is History? This substantially reduces the value of what he had to say for today's more world-weary reader Munslow, 'E. Having said that, the vitriol still poured on Carr's head by the likes of Arthur Marwick in the latest incarnation of his book on the nature of history, reveals that Carr the philosopher of history remains a dangerous thinker.

Of course, it also demonstrates the antediluvian nature of much history thinking today among those who regard themselves as the only historians who know what is proper and what is not in doing history. Carr's critique of realism was and is clearly sophisticated enough to set on edge the teeth of reconstructionist historians everywhere. Carr's legacy in terms of being a historian who seriously thought about what it is that historians do, can be judged from what he said in What is History?

In seeking objective knowing Carr argued the historian must have an end in view and be willing to use theory. The historian must also recognise there are no absolutes in doing history apart from the certainty that all is relative. This is not to suggest every interpretation is as good as any other, but that each can only be judged by the 'sense of direction' of the historian producing it What is History?

This sense of direction can be seen not just in getting the facts right, but in each historian having a judgement as to the ultimate nature of their 'long-term vision over the past and over the future' ibid. To my mind this is an early and telling engagement with the complexities of what historians do.

It is this that makes Carr still worthy of collections such as Professor Cox's. I warmly recommend this collection to all historians interested in what is history?

Created Autumn by the Institute of Historical Research. Copyright notice. No javascript: other issues. Book Review Books: E. While this was not a fresh insight with Carr, it still carved him out for a number of years as someone with a novel stance. However, over time, the effect of his argument which generated such initial notoriety was to increasingly balance the excesses of the hard core empiricists.

In What is History? Carr propelled British historiography toward a new equilibrium - one that pivoted on a new epistemological certitude. The claim to epistemological radicalism on behalf of Carr does not seem to me especially convincing.

My doubts about the message in What is History? Today, with our greater awareness of the frailties and failures of representationalism, referentialism, and inductive inference, more and more history writing is based on the assumption that we can know nothing genuinely truthful about the reality of the past.

It would be tempting, but wholly incorrect, to say that history's pendulum has swung far more to the notion of history as a construction or fabrication of the historian. Rather, what has happened, is that our contemporary conditions of existence have created a much deeper uncertainty about the nature of knowledge-creation and its mis- uses in the humanities. It is not about swings in intellectual fashion. It follows, a growing number of historians believe that we don't 'discover' the truthful?

I do not think many historians today are naive realists. Few accept there must be given meaning in the evidence. While we may all agree at the event-level that something happened at a particular time and place in the past, its significance its meaning as we narrate it is provided by the historian.

Meaning is not immanent in the event itself. Moreover, the challenge to the distinction of fact and fiction as we configure our historical narratives, and further acknowledgments of the cognitive power of rhetoric, style and trope metaphors are arguments and explanations provide not only a formal challenge to traditional empiricism, but forces us to acknowledge that as historians we are making moral choices as we describe past reality.

Does all this add up to a more fundamental criticism of historical knowing than Carr imagined in What is History? I think so. If this catalogue is what historical relativism means today, I believe it provides a much larger agenda for the contemporary historian than Carr's apparently radical at the time acceptance that the historian is in a dialogue with the facts, or that sources only become evidence when used by the historian. As Jenkins has pointed out at some length, Carr ultimately accepts the epistemological model of historical explanation as the definitive mode for generating historical understanding and meaning Jenkins , This fundamentally devalues the currency of what he has to say, as it does of all reconstructionist empiricists who follow his lead.

This judgment is not, of course, widely shared by them. For illustration, rather misunderstanding the nature of "semiotics - the postmodern? To maintain, as Knight does, that Carr is thus in some way pre-empting the postmodern challenge to historical knowing is unhelpful to those who would seriously wish to establish Carr's contribution in What is History?. It would be an act of substantial historical imagination to proclaim Carr as a precursor of post-modernist history.

Carr is also not forgotten by political philosopher and critic of post-modernist history Alex Callinicos, who deploys him somewhat differently. In his defence of theory in interpretation Marxist constructionism in this case , Callinicos begins with the contribution of a variety of so called relativist historians of which Carr is one others include Croce, Collingwood, Becker and Beard. Acknowledging the "discursive character of historical facts" Callinicos 76 Callinicos quotes Carr's opinion following Collingwood that the facts of history never come to us pure, but are always refracted through the mind of the historian.

For Callinicos this insight signals the problem of the subjectivity of the historian, but doesn't diminish the role of empirically derived evidence in the process of historical study. Of course Carr tried to fix the status of evidence with his own objections to what he understood to be the logic of Collingwood's sceptical position.

Collingwood's logic could, claims Carr, lead to the dangerous idea that there is no certainty or intrinsicality in historical meaning - there are only what I would call the discourses of historians - a situation which Carr refers to as "total scepticism" - a situation where history ends up as "something spun out of the human brain" suggesting there can be no "objective historical truth" Carr Carr's objectivist anchor is dropped here.

He explicitly rejected Nietzsche's notion that historical? Historians ultimately serve the evidence, not vice versa. This guiding precept thus excludes the possibility that "one interpretation is as good as another" even when we cannot as we cannot in writing history guarantee 'objective or truthful interpretation'.

Carr wished to reinforce the notion that he was a radical. As he said in the preface to the Second Edition of What is History? But his contribution really lies in the manner in which he failed to be an epistemological radical.

In the precise manner of his return to the Cartesian and foundationalist fold lies the importance of What is History? The book's distinction resides in its exploration and rapid rejection of epistemological scepticism - what I call post-empiricism. From the first chapter Carr accepts relativism would an unacceptable price to pay for imposing the historian on the past beyond his narrow definition of dialogue.

Dialogue even cast as interrogation is all very well and good, but an intervention that cannot ultimately become objective is quite another matter. After all, Carr argues, it is quite possible to draw a convincing line between the two. This argument still appeals to many historians today for whom the final defence against the relativism of deconstructionism lies in the technical and forensic study of the sources through the process of their authentication and verification, comparison and colligation.

In Britain, most realist-inspired and empiricist historians thus happily accept the logical rationalisation of Carr's position - that of the provisional nature of historical interpretation.

This translates inevitably and naturally it is argued as historical revisionism re-visionism? The provisionality of historical interpretation is a perfectly normal and natural historian's state-of-affairs that depends on discovering new evidence and revisiting old evidence for that matter , treating it to fresh modes analysis and conceptualisation, and constantly re-contextualising it.

For illustration, in my working career since the early s the omission of women in history has been 'rectified', and now has moved through several historiographical layers to reach its present highly sophisticated level of debate about the possibility for a feminist epistemology ies.

So, new evidence and new theories can always offer new interpretations, but revisionist vistas still correspond to the real story of the past because they correspond to the found facts. In fact, with each revision narrative version? So, we are for ever inching our way closer to its truth? Arthur Marwick makes the claim that by standing on " Standing on the shoulders of other historians is, perhaps, a precarious position not only literally but also in terms of the philosophy of history.

No matter how extensive the revisionary interpretation, the empiricist argument maintains that the historical facts remain, and thus we cannot destroy the knowability of past reality even as we re-emphasise or re-configure our descriptions. Marxists and Liberals alike sustain this particular non sequitur which means they can agree on the facts, legitimately reach divergent interpretations and, it follows, be objective.

The truth of the past actually exists for them only in their own versions. For both, however, the walls of empiricism remain unbreached. The empiricist-inspired Carr-endorsed epistemological theory of knowledge argues that the past is knowable via the evidence, and remains so even as it is constituted into the historical narrative.