What Is History?

First published in 1961, this work of historiography examines the nature, methods, and purpose of historical inquiry. The second edition includes the original six chapters, a new preface Carr completed before his death in 1982, and an additional section assembled by the editor R. W. Davies from Carr's unpublished notes.

In the preface, Carr situates the work within the changed global climate of the early 1980s. He recalls that the first edition emerged during a period of cautious optimism, marked by de-Stalinization, de-McCarthyization, postwar economic booms in Germany and Japan, and the approaching Kennedy era. The intervening decades brought renewed Cold War tensions, the threat of nuclear war, global economic crisis, and a shift in power toward oil-producing states and what was then called the "third world." Carr resists the prevailing intellectual despair, arguing that predictions of doom emanate almost exclusively from western Europe and its overseas offshoots, regions whose centuries-long dominance has been eroded. This pessimism, he contends, is a form of elitism carried by intellectuals who purvey the ideas of the ruling social group.

The first chapter, "The Historian and His Facts," contrasts two views of historical knowledge. Lord Acton, planning the first Cambridge Modern History in 1896, expressed confidence that scholars could approach a definitive account of the past. Roughly 60 years later, Sir George Clark, introducing the second edition, rejected this prospect, noting that historical knowledge always passes through human minds. Carr frames this contrast as reflecting a shift from Victorian self-assurance to 20th-century scepticism.

Carr critiques the "commonsense" view that history consists of a fixed body of facts the historian merely collects. He traces this view to the empiricist tradition from the philosopher John Locke through Bertrand Russell. Against this, he argues that not all facts about the past qualify as historical facts, since the distinction depends on the historian's judgement. He illustrates the point with the surviving records of fifth-century Greece, preselected by a small group of Athenians, and with the papers of Gustav Stresemann, Foreign Minister of Germany's Weimar Republic, whose secretary favored documents on western diplomacy over those on Soviet relations. Drawing on the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce and the British philosopher R. G. Collingwood, Carr argues that the past is always seen through the eyes of the present. Facts are refracted through the recorder's mind; the historian requires imaginative understanding of the people studied; and the historian's own time and place shape perspective. He warns against pushing these insights to total scepticism. His first answer to the title question is that history is "a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past" (30).

The second chapter, "Society and the Individual," argues that the opposition between the individual and society is a false one. Every human being is born into a society that shapes language, thought, and character. The cult of individualism, which Carr traces from the Renaissance through capitalism and the French Revolution, was itself a social phenomenon. The historian, too, is a social product. Carr shows how major works reflected their societies: the British banker George Grote's idealized history of Athenian democracy mirrored Victorian middle-class aspirations, while the German historian Theodor Mommsen's hero-worship of Julius Caesar expressed a longing for strong leadership after the failed revolution of 1848. Carr insists that individual actions frequently produce unintended results and that the facts of history concern relations between individuals in society and the social forces shaping collective outcomes.

The third chapter, "History, Science, and Morality," addresses whether history qualifies as a science. Carr notes that the question is peculiar to English; in other European languages the equivalent of "science" includes history without hesitation. He argues that modern science has moved from fixed laws toward working hypotheses subject to revision, and that historians operate similarly. Against common objections, he contends that history requires generalization, that the past yields lessons, and that the interaction between observer and observed does not fundamentally differentiate history from science. On morality, Carr argues that historians should judge institutions and policies rather than individuals. Abstract moral concepts such as liberty and justice acquire meaning only when filled with specific historical content, and values are themselves historically conditioned.

The fourth chapter, "Causation in History," examines how historians assign causes. Carr identifies two characteristics of the historian's approach: assigning multiple causes and organizing them into a hierarchy of significance. Against the charge of determinism, popularized by the philosopher Karl Popper and the political theorist Isaiah Berlin, he argues that the belief that everything has a cause is a condition of rational understanding, not a denial of moral responsibility. Against the overemphasis on accident, he acknowledges that accidents modify events but argues they cannot be generalized and so fall outside the historian's hierarchy of significant causes. He illustrates this with an analogy: if a man dies crossing a road, his errand to buy cigarettes is technically a cause, but the driver's intoxication or a blind corner are the causes that matter because they yield actionable conclusions.

The fifth chapter, "History as Progress," defends progress as a necessary working hypothesis. Carr distinguishes biological evolution, which operates through inheritance over millennia, from social progress, which operates through the transmission of acquired skills across generations. Progress should not be conceived as having a fixed endpoint or advancing in an unbroken line; periods of regression occur, and leadership passes from one group to another. On objectivity, Carr contends that the historian's standard of significance depends on an evolving sense of direction, and that objectivity requires projecting one's vision into the future to gain deeper insight into the past.

The sixth chapter, "The Widening Horizon," examines the transformation of the 20th-century world. Carr traces the expansion of human self-consciousness from the philosopher René Descartes through the French Revolution to the social theorist Karl Marx and the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. He argues that the modern period is characterized by a growing capacity to reshape both environment and self through conscious rational action. He identifies the shift of global power toward Asia and Africa as the most significant geographical change since the 15th century, criticizes the insularity of British historical education, and calls on historians to embrace a universal perspective. Against the conservative empiricism of contemporaries such as the historian Sir Lewis Namier and the philosophers Popper and Michael Oakeshott, Carr insists that genuine progress depends on fundamental challenges to established assumptions.

The final section, assembled by Davies from Carr's posthumous papers, reconstructs the directions in which Carr intended to revise the work. His notes reinforce original arguments while making several adjustments. He acknowledges more explicitly that accident matters in the short run, speculating that the Soviet revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin, had he lived, would have pursued policies similar to those of his successor Joseph Stalin but without the extreme coercion. He extends his critique to structuralism, an approach that analyzes static structures rather than tracing historical change, which he calls the philosophy of a conservative era. His notes argue that while Marx's predictions about the industrial working class's revolutionary role largely failed, the revolt of colonial peoples against capitalism may constitute the world revolution Marx anticipated. Carr foresees decline for Western society in its present form but believes that new forces are germinating beneath the surface.