E. H. Carr
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 131st anniversary of the birth of Edward Hallett “Ted” Carr, better known to most as E. H. Carr (28 June 1892–03 November 1982), who was born in London on this date in 1892.
Carr’s 1961 book What is History? was only of the most influential works of historiography published in the twentieth century. Being as influential as it was, it inevitably drew criticisms, the most prominent of which was that of Geoffrey Elton. Sometimes the contrary views of Carr’s What is History? and Elton’s The Practice of History are referred to as the “Carr-Elton Debate.” Here is some of Elton’s criticism of Carr:
“Is there a purpose in history? Mr Carr grows very scornful at the expense of an honest man like H. A. L. Fisher, who in a famous sentence explained that he could see none. Mr Carr is surely right to denounce the theory of the pure accident, the theory that history is just one damn thing after another. Though in a sense, of course, the sequence of events is just that, it becomes history only when marshalled by the interpretative human intelligence. This is not to overlook the importance of accidents, which do happen (though Mr Carr would seem to suppose that they can be written out of history), but to stress that in the understanding of the past the accident is just another point to be explained, considered and accommodated. Accidents may affect the course of events, but the historian, in his analysis, must not be accident-prone. No historian, including Fisher, has in fact ever treated his subject as though it were entirely without meaning; if he had, he would have been unable to write. What is really at issue is whether one may discern a larger purpose, whether things produce effects that are continuous and, up to a point, predictable. When Mr Carr, and others, seek a purpose in history, they are trying to fill the vacuum created when God was removed from history. Even historians who hold that God reveals himself in history would not to-day feel entitled to use him by way of explanation, but the temperament which demands a certain guidance from the past by way of illumination for the future — the religious temperament — continues to exist among historians and produce theories of the course of history which seek this prophetic purpose.”
I am not aware of Carr offering a detailed response to Elton, but the editor of the posthumous second edition of What is History? R. W. Davies, takes a swipe at Elton:
“Professor G. R. Elton in his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of Modem History condemned the harmful influences of the social sciences on undergraduate history teaching in Cambridge, and insisted that the study of English history should occupy a dominant position in the history tripos. English history would show ‘the manner in which this society managed to civilize power and order itself through constant changes’; ‘an age of uncertainty, beset by false faiths and the prophets of constant innovation, badly needs to know its roots.’ These events would have seemed to Carr symptomatic of a sick society which sought comfort in recollection of a glorious past, and to provide a striking demonstration of the extent to which historians reflect the prevailing trends in society.” (pp. 173–174)
By the above statements, we might conclude that Elton thought Carr a self-deluded prophet, while Carr thought Elton the representative of a sick society. One can understand the attraction of the debate when couched in these strong terms. Purple passages aside, the role of accident in history, discussed in the Elton quote, overlaps with the problem of causality, which is addressed by Carr in many places, include this in The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939:
“The idea of causation in history is as old as the writing of history itself. But so long as the belief prevailed that human affairs were subject to the continuous supervision and occasional intervention of a Divine Providence, no philosophy of history based on a regular relationship of cause and effect was likely to be evolved. The substitution of reason for Divine Providence enabled Hegel to produce, for the first time, a philosophy based on the conception of a rational historical process. Hegel, while assuming a regular and orderly process, was content to find its directing force in a metaphysical abstraction — the Zeitgeist. But once the historical conception of reality had established itself, it was a short step to substitute for the abstract Zeitgeist some concrete material force. The economic interpretation of history was not invented, but developed and popularized, by Marx.”
Earlier in the same book Carr drew a nicely schematic contrast between utopian and realist thought by way of the distinction between free will and determinism:
“The antithesis of utopia and reality can in some aspects be identified with the antithesis of Free Will and Determinism. The utopian is necessarily voluntarist: he believes in the possibility of more or less radically rejecting reality, and substituting his utopia for it by an act of will. The realist analyses a predetermined course of development which he is powerless to change. For the realist, philosophy, in the famous words of Hegel’s preface to his Philosophy of Right, always ‘comes too late’ to change the world. By means of philosophy, the old order ‘cannot be rejuvenated, but only known’. The utopian, fixing his eyes on the future, thinks in terms of creative spontaneity: the realist, rooted in the past, in terms of causality. All healthy human action, and therefore all healthy thought, must establish a balance between utopia and reality, between free will and determinism. The complete realist, unconditionally accepting the causal sequence of events, deprives himself of the possibility of changing reality. The complete utopian, by rejecting the causal sequence, deprives himself of the possibility of understanding either the reality which he is seeking to change or the processes by which it can be changed. The characteristic vice of the utopian is naivety; of the realist, sterility.”
We see that, for Carr, Hegel is a point of reference, though he was himself in no sense a Hegelian. This, I think, is to be welcomed. We all recognize the preeminent role that Hegel has in the philosophy of history, but few philosophers of history have been willing to draw ideas from Hegel without utterly subordinating themselves to Hegel’s thought. Carr, in drawing on Hegel, is able to make use of Hegel without subordinating himself to Hegel. As Seán Molloy put it: “Although Carr uses elements of Hegel’s philosophy of history, he does not subscribe to it in totality.” (p. 69) And, in more detail:
“Carr’s method throughout is historico-cultural, in which the clash of ideologies plays the most important role in animating international politics. The influence of Hegel is prevalent, as the intellectual conflict between forms of democracy and political organization dominates the core of the book. Hegel’s conception of history as the inevitable progress of liberal democracy is mirrored in Conditions of Peace, but Carr’s aim is to demonstrate the redundancy of Hegel’s liberal-democratic state as the termination of history.” (p. 61)
Amelia Heath discusses both Carr and Molloy’s interpretation of Carr in her paper “EH Carr: Approaches to understanding experience and knowledge”:
“Both Molloy and Wilson expand on the philosophical critique of reason used by Carr in TYC, beyond the political or rhetorical purposes of the work, in acknowledging the importance of Carr’s rejection of a priori rationalism, which Carr saw as the philosophical basis for individual, self-interest driven ethics of utilitarianism as heavily criticized in Conditions of Peace. A theme of Molloy’s work lies in unpacking Carr’s critique of reason specifically as it relates to moral values. For example, he considers Carr’s moral philosophy of international politics as driven by the dialectic of Realism, ‘the view that no moral obligations are binding on states’, and Utopianism, ‘the view that states are subject to the same moral obligations as individuals.’ For Molloy, an explanation of the ‘whole range of projects undertaken in the Twenty Years’ Crisis’ is his commitment to pragmatism, where the ‘political ethics of reality are unfixed’.”
The idea that utopianism is subjecting states to the moral obligation of civilizations is a nice summary of an amorphous idea that can be elusive to pin down, and this formulation suggests other formulations, such as, for example, that position that holds the individual to be subject to the moral obligations of the state. If we deny the state to have any moral obligations whatsoever (as implied by Carr’s definition of realism), then this is a moot point, but if we hold that there are moral obligations distinctive to persons and distinctive to states, and that these obligations are disjoint (or, in a weaker formulation, do not coincide), then we could discuss whether the individual is obligated by any of the moral obligations of a state. Certainly, an individual serving as an agent of a state would be obligated, by the nature of his office, to uphold the moral obligations of the state, but the extent to which the moral obligations of the state and the moral obligations of the individual are mixed in such an individual is a further question. Here I think we could be helped by Rickert’s conception of values in relation to history, but this tradition of thought does not seem to have informed scholarship focused on Carr.
Heath also discusses the influence of Collingwood on Carr:
“Carr’s understanding of historical experience is a theory of ontology — a theory of how the world is (being) and how relations occur within it. However, his understanding of historical experience is directly related to an epistemic theory present in The New Society and even more so in What is History?. The argument is that, in addition to the influences of Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, an important influence on Carr’s understanding of the interconnection of thought and action was R.G. Collingwood’s philosophy of history. In many ways this argument has parallels with Robert Cox’s explanation of the ‘historical mode of thought’ as a means of comprehending the social world. Here two areas are explored in which the influence of Collingwood’s philosophy of history on Carr is unmistakable. First is the Historical Imagination, which encompasses aspects of an epistemological idealism. Second is a consideration of the problem of objectivity in history, whereby it is also considered how Collingwood and Carr use history as a critique of reason that exposes heuristic principles of modes of inquiry. Collingwood’s thought is argued to have more implicit influence on the structure, inquiry, and analysis of WIH than might be assumed upon first glance. Rather than differing from the sociology of knowledge characteristic of works in which Carr focuses on an understanding of historical experience, the insights Carr drew from Collingwood can be seen as further presenting a categorical theory of knowledge that underlies his historical approach.”
It is to be noted that Elton was also influenced by Collingwood, and it might make an interesting approach to the Car-Elton debate to try to draw out the relationship of each to Collingwood’s thought.
Further Resources
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Molloy, S. (2006). EH Carr and the Complexity of Power Politics. In The Hidden History of Realism: A Genealogy of Power Politics (pp. 51–74). New York: Palgrave Macmillan US.
Heath, A. (2010). EH Carr: Approaches to understanding experience and knowledge. Global Discourse, 1(1), 24–46.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/23269995.2010.10707835
