things because, if pushed a little further allows historians to
run the risk of subjectivity through their intervention in the
reconstruction of the past. Carr, of course, denies that risk
through his objectivist bottom line. There is clear daylight
between this position and that occupied by Hayden White. It is
that while historical events may be taken as given, what Carr
calls historical facts are derived within the process of
narrative construction. They are not accurate representations of
the story immanent in the evidence and which have been brought
forth (set free?) as a result of the toil, travail, and exertion
of the forensic and juridical historian.
Since the 1960’s Carr’s arguments have moved to a central
place in British thinking and now constitute the dominant
paradigm for moderate reconstructionist historians. This is
because, as Keith Jenkins has demonstrated, Carr pulls back from
the relativism which his own logic, as well as that of
Collingwood, pushes him. In the end Carr realises how close to
the postempiricist wind he is running, so he rejects
Collingwood’s insistence on the empathic and constitutive
historian, replacing her with another who, while accepting the
model of a dialogue between past events and future trends, still
believes a sort of objectivity can be achieved. This then is not
the crude Eltonian position. It is a claim to objectivity because
it is position leavened by a certain minimum self-reflexivity.
This is a conception of the role of the historian affirmed by the
most influential recent American commentators Joyce Appleby, Lynn
Hunt and Margaret Jacob who claim there can be no postmodern
history by repeating (almost exactly) Carr’s fastidious
empiricist position. Carr received only one oblique reference in
their book Telling the Truth About History which may help
explain why they re-packed Carr’s position as practical realism
(Appleby, Hunt and Jacob 1994: 237, 241-309 passim). Is it
that his position is so central to the intellectual culture of
mainstream history that it wasn’t even necessary to reference
him? In the early 1990’s the historian Andrew Norman endorsed the
Carr mainstream position more directly by arguing writing history
necessitates historians engaging directly with the evidence
“A good historian will interact dialogically with the
historical record” (Norman 1991: 132). Facts in history are
thus constituted out of the evidence when the historian
selects sources contextually in order to interpret and explain
that to which they refer, rather than in the narrative about
which they describe.
It is because Carr remains at the end of the day a convinced
objectivist despite (or because of?) his dalliance with
relativism – that his legacy in What is History? is still
so potent among British historians. His objectivist appeal in What
is History? is potent because it is not of the naive variety.
We know the Carr historian cannot stand outside history, cannot
be non-ideological, cannot be disinterested, or be unconnected to
her material because she is dispassionate. But she is telling us
what actually happened because she can overcome those obstacles.
She knows that the significance of the evidence is not
found solely in the evidence. The historian, as he said,
“does not deal in absolutes of this kind” (Carr 1961:
120). There can be no transcendental objective measures of truth.
However, while accepting the “facts of history cannot be
purely objective, since they become facts of history only in
virtue of the significance attached to them by the
historian” (Carr 1961: 120), Carr was forced by his naked
objectivist desire to underplay the problems of historical form
and the situatedness of the historian. he did this by arguing
that the standard for objectivity in history was the
historian’s “sense of the direction in history” by
which he meant the historian selected facts based not on personal
bias, but on the historian’s ability to choose “the right
facts, or, in other words, that he applies the right standard of
significance” (Carr 1961: 123).
Carr’s philosophical sleight-of-hand produced the objective
historian who “has a capacity to rise above the limited
vision of his own situation in society and history” and also
possesses the capacity to “project his vision into the
future in such a way as to give him a m-ore profound and more
lasting insight into the past than can be attained by those
historians whose outlook is entirely bounded by their own
immediate situation” (Carr 1961: 123). The objective
historian is also the historian who “penetrates most
deeply” into the reciprocal process of fact and value, who
understands that facts and values are not necessarily opposites
with differences in values emerging from differences of
historical fact, and vice versa. This objective historian also
recognises the limitations of historical theory. As Carr says a
compass “is a valuable and indeed indispensable guide. But
it is not a chart of the route” (Carr 1961: 116).
Social theory historians (constructionists) understand past
events through a variety of methods statistical and/or
econometric, and/or by devising deductive covering laws, and/or
by making anthropological and sociological deductive-inductive
generalisations. For hard-core reconstructionist-empiricists on
the other hand, the evidence proffers the truth only through
the forensic study of its detail without question-begging theory.
These two views are compromised by Carr’s insistence that the
objective historian reads and interprets the evidence at the same
time and cannot avoid some form of prior conceptualisation – what
he chooses simply (or deliberately loosely?) to call
“writing” (Carr 1961: 28). By this I think he means the
rapid movement between context and source which will be
influenced by the structures and patterns
(theories/models/concepts of class, race, gender, and so forth)
found, or discovered, in the evidence.
For Carr the evidence suggests certain appropriate explanatory
models of human behaviour to the objective historian which will
then allow for ever more truthful historical explanation. This
sleight-of-hand still has a certain appeal for a good number of
historians today. The American historian James D. Winn accepts
this Carr model of the objective historian when he says that
deconstructionist historians “…tend to flog extremely dead
horses” as they accuse other historians of believing history
is knowable, that words reflect reality, and their un-reflexive
colleagues still insist on seeing the facts of history
objectively. Few historians today, thanks to Carr, work from
these principles in pursuit of, as Winn says “…the
illusory Holy Grail of objective truth” but strive only to
ground “…an inevitably subjective interpretation on the
best collection of material facts we can gather” (Winn 1993:
867-68). At the end of the day, this position is not very much
different to the hard line reconstructionist-empiricist.
What Carr is doing then in What is History? is setting
up the parameters of the historical method – conceived on
the ground of empiricism as a process of questions suggested to
the historian by the evidence, with answers from the evidence
midwifed by the application to the evidence of testable theory as
judged appropriate. The appropriate social theory is a
presumption or series of connected presumptions, of how people in
the past acted intentionally and related to their social
contexts. For most objective historians of the Carr variety, his
thinking provides a more sympathetic definition of history than
the positivist one it has replaced, simply because it is more
conducive to the empirical historical method, and one which
appears to be a reasoned and legitimate riposte to the
deconstructive turn.
For such historians Carr also deals most satisfactorily with
the tricky problem of why they choose to be historians and write
history. The motivation behind the work of the historian is found
in the questions they ask of the evidence, and it is not,
automatically to be associated with any naked ideological
self-indulgence. Any worries of deconstructionists about either
ideology, or inductive inference, or failures of narrative form
has little validity so long as historians do not preconceive
patterns of interpretation and order facts to fit those
preconceptions. Carr would, I think, eagerly challenge the
argument that historians are incapable of writing down
(reasonably) truthful narrative representations of the past. The
position that there is no uninterpreted source would not be a
particularly significant argument for Carr because historians
always compare their interpretations with the evidence they have
about the subject of their inquiry. This process it is believed
will then generate the (most likely and therefore the most
accurate) interpretation.
So, when we write history (according to the Carr model) our
motivation is disinterestedly to re-tell the events of the past
with forms of explanation already in our minds created for us
through our prior research in the archive. ‘Naturally’ we are not
slaves to one theory of social action or philosophy of history -
unless we fall from objectivist grace to write history as an act
of faith (presumably very few of us do this? Do you do this?).
Instead we maintain our models are generally no more than
‘concepts’ which aid our understanding of the evidence indeed,
which grow out of the evidence. We insist our interpretations are
independent of any self-serving theory or master narrative
imposed or forced on the evidence. It is the ‘common sense’ wish
of the historian to establish the veracity and accuracy of the
evidence, and then put it all into an interpretative fine focus
by employing some organising concepts as we write it. We do it
like this to discover the truth of the past.
To conclude, Carr’s legacy, therefore, shades the distinction
between reconstructionism and constructionism by arguing we
historians do not go about our task in two separate ways with
research in the sources for the facts, and then offering an
interpretation using concepts or models of explanation. Rather
the historian sets off, as Carr says “…on a few of what I
take to be the capital sources” and then “inevitably
gets the itch to write”. This I take to mean to compose an
interpretation and “…thereafter, reading and writing go on
simultaneously” (Carr 1961; 28). For Carr this suggests the
“…untenable theory of history as an objective compilation
of facts…and an equally untenable theory of history as the
subjective product of the mind of the historian…” is much
less of a problem than any hard-nosed reconstructionists might
fear. It is in fact the way in which human beings operate in
everyday life, a “…reflection of the nature of man”
as Carr suggests. (Carr 1961: 29). Historians, like Everywoman
and Everyman work on the evidence and infer its most likely
meaning – unlike non-historians we are blessed with the
intellectual capacity to overcome the gravitational pull of our
earthly tethers.
The id e fixe of mainstream British historians today
is to accept history as this inferential and interpretative
process that can achieve truth through objectivism. Getting the
story straight (from the evidence). The unresolved paradox in
this is the dubious legacy of What is History?. I assume a
good number of historians recommend Carr to their students as the
starting point of methodological and philosophical
sophistication, and a security vouchsafed by the symmetry between
factualism, objectivism and the dialogic historian. While I am
unconvinced by its message, I think this is why What is
History? remains, for the majority of British historians, a
comforting bulwark against post-constructive and post-empirical
history.
References:
Appleby, Joyce, Hunt, Lynn, and Jacob, Margaret (1994) Telling
the Truth About History, W.W. Norton and Co., London.
Callinicos, Alex (1995) Theories and Narratives:
Reflections on the Philosophy of History, Cambridge, Polity
Press.
Carr, E.H. (1961) What is History? London, Penguin.
———— (1987) What is History? (Second Edition)
London, Penguin.
Collingwood R.G. (1994) The Idea of History (First
published 1946) Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Iggers, Georg, G. (1997) Historiography in the Twentieth
Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge,
Hanover, NH, Wesleyan University Press.
Jenkins, Keith (1995) On ‘What is History?’, London,
Routledge.
———– (1997) Postmodern History Reader, London,
Routledge.
Knight, Alan (1997) “Latin Americ