E.H. Carr and 'What is History'

Edward Hallett Carr is well known for his work What is History? in which he put forward a well-balanced definition of history. The book was the result of his lectures delivered in a series in 1961. This book discusses the themes: (1) The historian and his facts (2) Society and the individual (3) History, Science and Morality (4) Causation (5) History as Progress, and (6) The Widening horizon of history. One of the prominent aspects of this book is that Carr tried to establish a linkage between the historian and facts. E.H. Carr defined “History is a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past”. In this dialogue, the historian represents the present and the facts represent the past. History is the construction of a historian’s interpretation of facts. In this regard, Carr advises the readers to “study the historian before you begin to study the facts”. He argued that any account of the past is largely written from the perspective of the historian.

Carr divided facts into two categories:

§  Facts of the past: These are the corpus of all historical information about the past.

§  Historical facts: These are the information that the historians have decided is important and taken for the interpretation.

He argued that historians randomly determine which of the "facts of the past" to turn into "historical facts" according to their own biases and agendas. He remarks that the historian continuously moulds his facts to suit their interpretation. In the first place, the facts of history never come to us ‘pure’, since they do not and cannot exist in a pure form: they are always refracted through the mind of the recorder.

Carr rejected the empirical view of the historian's work. He points out that “it used to be said that facts speak for themselves. This is of course, untrue. The facts speak only when a historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context.” To Carr ‘History consists of a corpus of ascertained facts. The facts are available to historians in documents, inscriptions, and so on, like fish in the fishmonger’s slab. The historian collects them, takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to him’.

Carr believed that everything that happened in this world happened because of cause and effect. Carr holds on to a deterministic outlook on history and firmly believes that events could not have happened differently unless there was a different cause. He feels that the main job of a historian is to investigate the reasons/causes as to why events occurred.