[Peace-discuss] E. H. Carr

[David Green]

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2019/05/eh-carr-what-is-history-truth-subjectivity-facts


*History according to EH Carr*

The historian was prescient in warning that the value of facts depends on
who wields them.

BY HELEN CARR <https://www.newstatesman.com/writers/317386>

Between January and March 1961, the historian and diplomat Edward Hallett
Carr delivered a series of lectures, later published as one of the most
famous historical theories of our time: *What is History?* In his lectures
he advises the reader to “study the historian before you begin to study the
facts”, arguing that any account of the past is largely written to the
agenda and social context of the one writing it. “The facts… are like fish
on the fishmonger’s slab. The historian collects them, takes them home and
cooks and serves them.”

My childhood memories of history and the learning of history were enhanced
by the omnipresent familial legacy of my great-grandfather, EH Carr,
nicknamed “the Prof”. He was the sort of man that always had holes in his
sleeves, ate milk pudding every night and loathed fuss. Despite this, he
was highly revered, so much so that my grandmother would dust the house
plants prior to his arrival. He died six years before I was born, but his
energy lived on within our family and encouraged my insatiable interest in
history. As I rolled out my family tree on my grandparents’ living-room
floor and closed in on the name Edward Hallett Carr I began a lifelong
interest – and an imagined dialogue – with my great-grandfather.

Last year, *What is History?* was released as a Penguin Classic, and since
its original publication has sold over a quarter of a million copies. It
remains a key text in the study of history, and its provoking questions
endure, still holding weight over some of the most prevalent issues our
society faces when dealing with the problem of “facts”.

EH Carr, known by family and friends as “Ted”, led his daily life with
stringent routine. He was up early, every day, and after tea and toast he
would lock himself away for the day in his study. He wrote everything by
hand in pencil; only his secretary was able to transcribe his scrawls. His
endless handwritten pages finally resulted in a contorted joint in his
right hand, a physical impression of his pencil. His work was extremely
successful, but his personal life was not. He had two unsuccessful
marriages, the second of which was to the esteemed historian Betty Behrens,
and one of my grandfather’s memories of “the Prof” was that towards the end
he was frequently at loggerheads with his wife. Ultimately, his work was
his first love.

Carr was not a historian by traditional standards. 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 1916 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 1919 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. The memory of this period of his life lies on the bookshelves
of my father’s study. A leather-bound copy of *Don Quixote* “to Ted”, a
leaving gift from his colleagues at the Ministry of Information; Guy
Burgess was a signatory.

In 1936, 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* (1939) 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 1941, he became assistant editor at the *Times*, before committing
himself to academia, first at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1953, and two
years later at Trinity College, Cambridge. He continued to write up until
the day he died, in 1982, 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?* may have been planted
even earlier, while still a Cambridge undergraduate. He recalled an
influential professor who argued that Herodotus’s account of the Persian
Wars in the 5th century BC was shaped by his attitude to the Peloponnesian
War. Carr called this a “fascinating revelation”, and “gave me my first
understanding of what history was about”. For Carr, Herodotus demonstrated
that the historian frequently does not draw from objective fact, but his
experiences of them. “Our picture of Greece in the 5th century BC is
defective not primarily because so many of the bits have been accidentally
lost, but because it is, by and large, the picture formed by a tiny group
of people in the city of Athens.”

Originally a liberal, Carr began to look at the world with “different
eyes”, and as early as 1931, after the Great Depression, he began to lose
faith in the concept of capitalism and the political structure in which his
early character was forged. In his developing interest in Russian history –
and reading the Russian literature that was available to him – he was
inspired to write the 14-volume *A History of Soviet Russia*, the first
part of which was published in 1950. During its composition he became more
convinced by Soviet ideology and before his death in 1982, 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.

*A History of Soviet Russia* was a bold attempt carefully and meticulously
to collect all the facts available, and in doing so, he articulated an
impressively objective approach to Russian history. However, it was in this
pursuit of objectivity that Carr came up against the same issue raised all
those years ago at Cambridge with Herodotus. He found the objective
approach to historical theory difficult to achieve. In the lengthy process
of writing *A History of Soviet Russia* he appears to have become torn in
his approach. He was initially optimistic; “it is possible to maintain that
objective truth exists”, yet by 1950 he concluded: “objectivity does not
exist”.

Nineteenth-century historians believed in objective history. They adopted a
timeline of events and evidence, a method made famous by the scholar
Leopold von Ranke in the 1830s, who wanted “simply to show how it really
was”. Carr rejected this outdated approach, describing it as a
“preposterous fallacy”.

TS Eliot once stated: “If one can really penetrate the life of another age,
one is penetrating the life of one’s own.” Eliot also acknowledged that the
study of history is key to understanding the contemporary world. However,
as he compiled *A History of Soviet Russia*, Carr found achieving such
penetration into the age an impossible task: while we can formulate a
subjective understanding of the past, we cannot of course know it exactly
as it was.

Facts can be changed or manipulated to benefit those relaying them,
something we are acutely aware of today. During Carr’s lifetime, Stalin’s
regime destroyed documents, altered evidence and distorted history. With
this is in mind, it is the continued misrepresentation and misuse of fact,
deliberate or accidental, that Carr interrogates in *What is History?* He
encourages any student of history to be discerning: “What is a historical
fact? This is a crucial question into which we must look a little more
closely”.

Carr begins his interrogation by analysing how the “fact” is prepared and
presented by the historian who studies it. He does so by dividing facts
into two categories: facts of the past and facts of the present. A fact of
the past – for example, “the Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066” – is
indisputable but basic. A fact of the present is something a historian has
chosen to be a fact: “By and large, the historian will get the kind of
facts he wants. History means interpretation.”

Carr was not the pioneer of subjective historical theory. RG Collingwood
thought that the objective past, and the historian’s opinion of it, were
held in mutual relation; suggesting that no historian’s view of the past
was incorrect and also that history only manifests with the historian’s
interpretation. Carr contested this approach, arguing that it is the
historian’s job to engage with the fact as a dialogue; “it is a continuous
process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending
dialogue between the present and the past”.

*What is History?* not only addresses the issue of interpreting fact, but
also how the historian is shaped by it. History, he states, is “social
process” and no individual is free of social constraint, so we cannot
impose our modern understanding of the world on our ancestors. “Progress in
human affairs,”  he wrote, “whether in science or in history or in society,
has come mainly through the bold readiness of human 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.”

In 1962, Isaiah Berlin, a contemporary and opponent of Carr, reviewed *What
is History?* in the *New Statesman* and criticised the central issues
raised. Berlin took issue with the theory that personal motivation did not
account for action and disagreed with Carr on the key matter of
objectivity, which Berlin argued was obtainable through the methods used by
the historian.

Despite criticism, *What is History?* promotes the necessity of
subjectivity in the study of history, arguing that we are all shaped by the
society and the time that we live in. Ultimately, by understanding this, we
are able to think critically about the evidence laid before us, before we
begin to piece together the jigsaw puzzle of the past.

Shortly before his death, Carr had prepared material for a second edition
of *What is History?* Only his preface was written, but in it he looks for
“an optimistic, at any rate for a saner and more balanced outlook on the
future”.

My grandfather, John Carr, describes how his father “would choose to sit in
the main sitting-room, with us around, following our own pursuits, while he
wrote his profound thoughts on pieces of paper accumulated around his
chair”. It is this memory of the chaos of deep thought, the scraps of paper
fluttering about his feet, that I would like to cherish, and in my mind,
perhaps sit and watch as he conjures his next book. In reality, I am
fortunate enough to observe the work he created take its place on the grand
stage of history, and share with my grandfather the hope that it will
“stimulate further study and understanding of the future way forward in the
world”.

*Helen Carr is a writer, medieval historian and EH Carr’s
great-granddaughter*
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