by Chris Campbell, @Chris__Campbell
E. H. Carr must surely be one of the most seasonal names in British historical education. It emerges towards the end of summer in suggested reading lists, multiplies throughout the autumn in sixth form history classrooms, and returns to hibernation shortly after the personal statement deadline passes. How many times throughout that period must admissions tutors skim over the lines ‘I have found E. H. Carr’s What is History? particularly thought-provoking’, and how many times must they resolve to recommend a different book, only to list it once again when August rolls around?
In fact, there is no work that quite matches What is History? for its combination of readable brevity and its ability to challenge a sixth former’s A-Level conception of history. No other book before or since has so succinctly dispelled the notion of narrative-driven historical objectivity that still pervades secondary teaching, nor invited the reader to consider issues like causation and determinism with such clarity. It sits comfortably in that accessible middle ground of historical philosophy, pushing against an old-fashioned positivism while not yet having succumbed to the postmodernist’s cry that there is no such thing as a knowable historical truth. That, of course, is why so many students are given it to read, and that is why so many students discuss it in their personal statements. That is why, out of season, it remains an excellent entry-point into academic history for the general public.
This is not to say that Carr’s conception of History, or indeed the manner in which he practiced it, is perfect. One of What is History?’s more famous invocations is to ‘study the historian before you begin to study his facts.’[1] So what, then, are we to make of studying Carr?
That any historian should enjoy such a perennial cycle of engagement with their ideas is impressive enough, but it is all the more so since Carr was not actually a historian by training. He read Classics at Trinity College, Cambridge, before joining the Foreign Office in 1916. As a diplomat, he attended the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and assisted in drafting sections of the Treaty of Versailles, though he later came to believe that it was too punitive towards Germany.
Resigning from the Foreign Office in 1936, Carr entered academia as the Woodrow Wilson Professor of International Relations at Aberystwyth, his diplomatic experience no doubt compensating for his lack of postgraduate education. Here he published on the interwar crisis – controversially drawing on the work of the notorious American fascist Lawrence Dennis – and provided regular commentary in The Times, among other places,on contemporary geopolitics. He was an outspoken defender of Appeasement, urged for the creation of a federated Europe, and became increasingly attracted to the planned economy of Soviet Russia.
Following his departure from Aberystwyth in 1947, Carr was briefly a tutor at Balliol College, Oxford, before returning to his Cambridge alma mater as a fellow. It was at Trinity that he delivered the series of lectures that would later become What is History?, and also published the bulk of his magnum opus: a fourteen-volume history of Soviet Russia which remained unfinished at the time of his death.
Carr’s scholarly interests were informed by political views that shifted dramatically over several years, from his liberalistic criticism of Versailles, to his interest in fascistic political thought, to a sustained reverence of socialism. His public output in newspapers and lectures mirrored those shifts, and he harnessed the historicism of his politics to call for changes in the present. When he wrote that the historian is ‘a social phenomenon’ who exists ‘in flux’ with current events, he described his own academic career with characteristic precision.[2]
Yet Carr’s belief that ‘the historian who is most conscious of his own situation is also more capable of transcending it’ seems remarkably ironic given his own scholarly output.[3] For all his deconstruction of historical determinism, he vigorously believed that the rise of the Nazis could be traced in an almost teleological manner to Versailles. He embarked on his mammoth survey of Soviet history without ever having studied it before, and in full view of his admiration for Soviet economic development. His detractors saw in his work a tendency towards using history as a form of apologia first for the expansionism of the Nazis and then for the atrocities of Stalin.[4] Indeed, it is on that basis that so much of his work has dwindled out of the historiographical canon. David Pryce-Jones rather harshly observed that as a historian, Carr ‘has a special claim to attention: he was consistently and egregiously wrong.’[5]
Nevertheless, Carr’s legacy clearly rests not with the accuracy or longevity of his scholarship, but in that slim volume which succinctly provokes some of the most fundamental contentions within history. Perhaps that provocation was made all the more successful by Carr’s lack of formal historical training and his attachment to his own political biases. In any case, sixty years after its publication, What is History? remains the seminal work which bridges the classroom and the lecture hall, and, even though the phrase would be anachronistic to Carr, it stands as a landmark piece of public history.
Further Reading (all by E. H. Carr except where stated)
The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919-1939 (London: Macmillan, 1939)
Conditions of Peace (London: Macmillan, 1944)
A History of Soviet Russia (London: Macmillan, 1950-1978)
What is History? (London: Penguin, 1961)
The October Revolution: Before and After (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969)
Jonathan Haslam, The Vices of Integrity: E. H. Carr, 1892-1982 (Verso; New York, 1999)
Michael Cox, ‘Will The Real E. H. Carr Please Stand Up?’ in International Affairs 75:3 (1999)
[1] E. H. Carr, What is History? (Penguin; London, 1961) 26
[2] Ibid., 42;51
[3] Ibid., 53
[4] On Carr’s critics, see Jonathan Haslam, The Vices of Integrity: E. H. Carr, 1892-1982 (Verso; New York, 1999)
[5] David Pryce-Jones, ‘Unlimited Nastiness’ in The New Criterion (December 1999)
Doing History in Public 