WHAT IS HISTORY

Edward Hallett Carr’s book, What Is History?, has already had double career. In it, Professor Carr originally addressed himself as George Macaulay Trevelyan Lecturer for 1961 to his colleagues, his peers at Cambridge University. But his ideas seemed so pre-eminently important to the directors of the B.B.C. that the entire six lectures were broadcast to the British people. Professor Carr’s wide learning and his lively and surprising views about the meaning of history –and, indeed, the elegance, the wit, and the clarity of his style–have captured the attention of both scholars and the generality of people. Perhaps for the first time for a large number of his listeners, Professor Carr suggests that history is as significant for man’s expectations for his future as for his understanding of his past. In this context, Professor Carr has returned the philosophy of history to the historians, for although his subject has attracted a good deal of attention in recent years, that attention has come less from historians than from philosophers. Having given, or rather having taken, it back, he shows why it is quite a large responsibility. In a brilliantly elaborated series of arguments on the role of fact, value, morality, progress, bias and relativism, accident and causation, Professor Carr not only develops a distinctly modern and viable approach to the study of history, and to the other social sciences, but demonstrates that the way man sees history conditions his outlook on his own time and has an impact on his willingness and his ability to cope with the great questions concerning his future. For Professor Carr, history is a science. If the historian finds himself embedded in the stream of history, then the path to objectivity lies not only in finding facts but in managing to assess them in the face of the limitations placed on his vision by his own time. Professor Carr thus defends the notion that history is a continuing dialogue between the past and the present, or rather, between the events of the past and the accelerating emergence of man’s future goals. What Is History? asks old questions in new ways and points to new approaches to some of the answers. The author’s gift for lively exposition, for fitting argument with apt illustration, is well suited to a subject of such broad perspectives.

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