1–24. But how do historians write history. 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”. Frank believes that "the readings in, What is History? The absolute, then, does not exist at the beginning or at the end of time. ‘Remembrance of these things 60 or 70 years later’, he wrote in 1979, ‘must, I feel, sharpen one’s consciousness of the deep cleft which divides that remote age from the present, and of the historical process that brought it about. History has not been kind to EH Carr. Indeed, it is not that the world is really in decline, let alone ending. His present concerns generated his interpretation of the past and vice versa. He had almost come of age, and yet the world in which he was to be initiated, the world in which he thought he would make his way, was at that very moment coming to an end. Rather, we play an active, interpretive role in producing facts. This marks Carr’s thought profoundly. To enquire about republishing spiked’s content, a right to reply or to request a correction, please contact the managing editor, Viv Regan. Just have to remember that ‘facts are sacred, opinion free” (7). Professor Carr shows that the 'facts' of history are simply those which historians have selected for scrutiny. Likewise, the constantly transforming interpretation of the past provides a means to understand the present, of how we came to exist as we do, or failed to come to exist as we ought to have done. And what grants the interpreter, the de facto historian, this degree of freedom, this space in which to revise, is… history. It is the historian who has decided for his own reasons that Caesar's crossing of that petty stream, the Rubicon, is a fact of history, whereas the crossing of the Rubicon by millions of other people before or since interests nobody at all. But it was more than that, too. ‘Everything changes’ is cliché, not insight. In What is History? Even that is not quite right, because for Carr, the absolute is not in history, like a swimmer is in the water; the absolute is the rich, contradiction-ridden movement of history itself, its predominant direction, its trajectory, its (always provisional) teleology. If Lenin dreams of self-determination or freedom at all, it is only when sleeping. The absolute, the movement of history, persists. Reprinted in Penguin Books 1990 . As Carr writes, ‘the concrete ends pursued by mankind arise from time to time out of the course of history, not from some source outside it’. Yet this judgement is not only hasty; it also hides what makes Carr’s work of continuing value. I summarise E.H. Carr's 1961 classic in historiography, What is History? E.H. Carr's What Is History? ‘Great history is written’, writes Carr, ‘precisely when the historian’s vision of the past is illuminated by insights into the problems of the present.’, But Carr is making a stronger point to refute the charges of relativism. But what marks Carr out was not only his refusal to be downcast, and embrace the cultural pessimism of his peers, but his intellectual determination to reckon with, and even support, the historical forces transforming the world around him. I had long been interested in history and had the benefit of excellent teachers but had never read anything specifically on what it meant to do or to write history. Thus, both the realist philosopher of history Michael Stanford and reconstructionist historian Arthur Marwick emphasised Carr's judgement that the answer … Yet today Carr is an almost wilfully obscured figure. The mistake his critics make is to assume that it must therefore exist simultaneously outwith history, as something static and forever true, when, for Carr, it can only exist within history. Carr’s own trajectory was similarly and assuredly upwards. Please try submitting the form again. Carr’s absolute, then, turns out to be something close to an idea of progress. He was a 19th-century philosopher, a friend of Nietzsche and, as an historian, he sought out the individualistic genius of the Renaissance as a counterpoint to the levelling tendencies of incipient mass democracy. The answer lies in the book on which his popular reputation still rests: What is History?. He also pointed out that a historian’s work cannot be written with out understanding the mind and time in which it came from. He argues that it is the necessary interpretations which mean personal biases whether intentional or not, define what we see as history. He was always a singular, fiercely individualistic character but at this point in the early 20th century, he was at home in the world. In Edward Hallatt Carr’s book, What is. Except, for Carr, history’s movement, its direction, its trajectory is increasingly and simultaneously our societal movement, our societal direction, our societal trajectory. be detached from, the subjectivities of scholars' . The poet Siegfried Sassoon echoed Woolf’s sense of rupture and loss: ‘What a peaceful world it was! All his youthful touchstones, from the sense of inexorable progress to a sense of national mission, were shattered. In mid-20th-century Britain, there was still much talk of change, he continued, but ‘the significant thing is that change is no longer thought of as achievement, as opportunity, as progress, but as an object of fear’. Well, yes, to an extent that is what he’s saying, although in arguing this, Carr never doubts the facticity of reality – he merely argues that the stuff of history is constantly in the process of being illuminated by the changing light cast by the development and trajectory of the present. This is why the Lenin that emerges on Carr’s pages appears less as a revolutionary and internationalist than as a nation builder, a constitution designer. Yet to think that Carr slipped into ‘the bottomless pit of subjective relativity’, as he himself put it in 1953, is to misunderstand the historical vision that he was in the process of developing. In the mid-1930s, Carr leaves the Foreign Office and takes up two roles: the Woodrow Wilson Chair of International Politics at the University of Aberystwyth; and an editorial role at The Times. 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