E.H. Carr and Historical Thought - Essay Example

E.H. Carr and Historical Thought The extent to which one can give a definitive meaning to the word ‘history’ has ever been an endeavour fraught with controversy. The history of the question itself is very much intertwined with the development of modernity, the three-tiered epistemology found in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities, and the supposed loss of objectivity engendered by the onset and dissemination of postmodernist thought. Edward Hallett Carr, in his work What Is History?, answered the question by claiming that ‘...[history] is a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past’ (1961, p.35). Though to properly assess the academic value and relevance of his claim, it is first necessary analyze the broader intellectual context to which Carr sought to make a contribution. As such, it will be necessary to briefly address the very same question he himself posed, for the pragmatic purpose of assessing the accuracy of his claims. The American historian and political philosopher Allan Bloom, in his cultural jeremiad on the state of university education in the closing decades of the twentieth century, lamented what he saw as the contemptuous antagonism felt for one another by the aforementioned three main divisions of modern academia. According to Bloom: While both social science and humanities are more or less willingly awed by natural science, they have mutual contempt for one another, the former looking down on the latter as unscientific, the latter regarding the former as philistine. They do not cooperate. And most important, they occupy much of the same ground. Many of the classic books now a part of the humanities talk about the same things as do social scientists but use different methods and draw different conclusions;... (1987, p. 357) And yet history does not easily fit into any of these main categories. History, unlike the natural sciences, cannot conduct a controlled experiment because its object of study, being the past, is incapable of being ‘recreated.’ Bloom made note of this general dilemma, that is, the categorization of the work of the historian. History may not, on the other hand, claim to be a social science: its goal is not to predict human action (as is the case in any sort of study of human behaviour), but rather to understand past actions (Bloom 1987, pp. 243-380). Thus, in many ways history enjoys a sort of liminal existence which transcends the natural and social sciences, not to mention the humanities. As Bloom further highlighted, history is a discipline which enjoys an ancient provenance. History, unlike many other modern disciplines, finds its origins with the Ancient Greeks, and so existed long before the era of positivism and the social sciences (1987, pp. 243-312). History does not, however, fit well into any of the putatively prescribed academic categories. The true meaning and accuracy of Carr’s characterisation of history as being ‘an unending dialogue between the past and present’ must be evaluated within the context of the evolution of academic and scientific thought in the last two centuries. This may in fact seem to lend credence to Carr’s assumptions, given that such an assertion in effect contextualizes (historically) those factors which were at the root of his thought. By tracing the origins of Carr’s thought, one is in fact agreeing with the assertion that the past is but the reflection of the present, and moreover that any given present has its own conception of the past. And yet this interesting quandary lies at the root of the weakening of objectivist methodology, the sine qua non of the postmodern era. The French thinker Jean-Francois Lyotard characterized one aspect of postmodernist doctrine as largely being a rejection of any form of universalist approach to history. ‘By simplifying in the extreme, one holds that ‘postmodern’ is the disbelief in meta-narratives. This is without a doubt an effect of the progress of the sciences’ (Lyotard 1979, p. 7). The nineteenth century’s love affair with objectivity gave way to a lust for the subject and his/her/its relation to the object. The work of Carr echoed this transformation. He wrote that ‘[T]he empirical theory of knowledge presupposes a complete separation between subject and object. Facts, like sense-impressions, impinge on the observer from outside, and are independent of his consciousness’ (Carr 1961, p. 6). Carr sought to link this type of historiography to the work of Lord Acton and others. He wrote that nineteenth century historiography ...consist[ed] of the compilation of a maximum number of irrefutable and objective facts....[This has produced] in Germany, in Great Britain, and in the United States a vast and growing mass of dry-as-dust factual histories, of minutely specialized monographs, of would-be historians knowing more and more about less and less, sunk without a trace in an ocean of facts. (p. 14) As part of the advent postmodernist thought, more recent historians like R.G. Collingwood sought to emphasize the importance of the temporal influence on the historian. In line with traditional Marxist historiography, any one person for the most part reflects the socio-historical milieu in which he/she lives. Carr quoted Collingwood: ‘St. Augustine looked at history from the point of view of the early Christian; Tillemont, from that of a seventeenth-century Frenchman; Gibbon, from that of an eighteenth-century Englishman; Mommsen, from that of a nineteenth-century German. There is no point in asking which was the right point of view. Each was the only one possible for the man who adopted it.’ (Carr 1961, p. 30) The concept of a philosophy of history, as pointed out by both Carr and Collingwood, was one first forwarded by Voltaire but which has itself enjoyed a plurality of meanings over time. Collingwood, in some ways anticipating the ideas of Carr, was among the many historians of the twentieth century who sought to downplay the nineteenth century obsession with facts and concentrate more on an interpretation of a chosen set of historical facts. This new meaning of the ‘philosophy of history’ largely stood as a methodology for the research and writing of history. Collingwood wrote: In the present case this will mean a general overhauling of all philosophical questions in the light of the results reached by the philosophy of history in the narrower sense, and this will produce a new philosophy which will be a philosophy of history in the wide sense, i.e., a complete philosophy conceived from a historical point of view. (1956, pp. 6-7) Thus, an overriding emphasis was here placed on the interpreter of the events and not the events themselves. Carr largely followed in Collingwood’s footsteps by distinguishing twentieth century historiography, with its questioning of the subject’s ability to ‘objectively’ perform the task of writing history, from its fact-obsessed, ‘objective’ nineteenth century predecessor. A great part of Carr’s thesis was that each and every historian necessarily employs, willingly or not, a philosophy of history. The chosen methodology, interpretation, and conclusions thus merely reflect said necessity. He affectionately wrote: Since then [the nineteenth century] we have known Sin and experienced a Fall; and those historians who today pretend to dispense with a philosophy of history are merely trying, vainly and self-consciously, like members of a nudist colony, to recreate the Garden of Eden in their garden suburb. Today the awkward question [as to which philosophy of history to abide by] can no longer be evaded. (Carr 1961, p. 21) According to Carr then, in lockstep with the onset of postmodern thought, the possibility of objective historiography has forever been stripped of its capacity to accurately tell the tale of history. By leaving the ‘Garden’ of facts, the modern historian must pick and choose his/her facts and then interpret them according to an overarching philosophy and perspective. Carr, though largely in agreement with Collingwood, did seek to avoid some of the latter’s extremism. Facts should still play a central role. Interpretation cannot be everything. ‘The function of the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present’ (Carr 1961, p. 29). Thus Carr sought to create a sort of middle-of-the-road reconciliation of nineteenth century empiricism with the ideas of Collingwood and their emphasis on the importance of interpretation. Carr’s notion of ‘present-mindedness’ ought to receive the praise that it deserves. One would be hard-pressed to find anyone in academia today who has not been affected by the loss of objectivity and the rise of the subject to predominance. In a recent book review, Professor Georg Iggers wrote: While the modernist paradigm assumes that the past can be reconstructed on the basis of methodologically guided research, postmodernism understands history in primarily constructivist terms. The postmodernist conception accepts the so-called linguistic turn, which assumes that language does not reflect reality or the actual past, but creates reality and the past. For Jacques Derrida, with his famous formulation ‘il n’y a pas dehors texte,’ the text is subject to different interpretations. Although Derrida’s interpretation is extreme, historians in recent decades have largely accepted a constructivist conception that sees the past in present-day terms. (Iggers 2009, p. 123) The challenge of living and thinking in the postmodern era is very much related to the apparent loss of universality. As the social sciences progressed, the subject-object paradigm, fundamental to empiricism, was forever weakened. One cannot, by definition, objectively study the self, that is the subject. This epistemological problem found expression in the writings of E.H. Carr. Like any other discipline, history, though perhaps not perfectly fitting into any of the general academic categories, was forever changed by postmodernist thought. Carr acknowledged as mush by pointing to the loss of objectivity. He praised the ideas of those who sought to interpret, as opposed to just ‘study,’ history. He sought a middle ground between the two poles, which incidentally is why his approach is correct in the way that it is. ‘Present-mindedness’ surely stands as inevitable part of the work of any historian, at any point in history. It is especially true today with the widespread distrust of any claim to objectivity. The fact that the ‘present’ actually has an entire system of thought which emphasises its extreme importance should come as no surprise to one familiar with Carr’s thought. The past then is undeniably the product of the present in which it is invoked. Reference List Bloom, Allan. 1987, The Closing of the American Mind, Simon & Schuster, New York. Carr, E.H. 1961, What Is History?, Vintage Books, New York. Collingwood, R. G. 1956, The Idea of History, Oxford University Press, New York. Iggers, Georg G. 2009, ‘A Search for a Post-Modern Theory of History’, History & Theory, vol. 48. no. 1, pp. 122-128. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. 1979, La Condition Postmoderne: Rapport sur le Savoir, Les Editions de Minuit, Paris. Read More