Eh carr what is history summary

So, new evidence and new theories can always offer new interpretations, but revisionist vistas still correspond to the real story of the past because they correspond to the found facts.

In fact, with each revision narrative version? So, we are for ever inching our way closer to its truth? Arthur Marwick makes the claim that by standing on " Standing on the shoulders of other historians is, perhaps, a precarious position not only literally but also in terms of the philosophy of history. No matter how extensive the revisionary interpretation, the empiricist argument maintains that the historical facts remain, and thus we cannot destroy the knowability of past reality even as we re-emphasise or re-configure our descriptions.

Marxists and Liberals alike sustain this particular non sequitur which means they can agree on the facts, legitimately reach divergent interpretations and, it follows, be objective. The truth of the past actually exists for them only in their own versions.

For both, however, the walls of empiricism remain unbreached. The empiricist-inspired Carr-endorsed epistemological theory of knowledge argues that the past is knowable via the evidence, and remains so even as it is constituted into the historical narrative.

This is because the 'good' historian is midwife to the facts, and they remain sovereign. They dictate the historian's narrative structure, her form of argumentation, and ultimately determine her ideological position. For Carr, as much as for those who will not tarry even for the briefest of moments with the notion of epistemological scepticism, Hayden White's argument that the historical narrative is a story as much invented as found, is inadmissible because without the existence of a determinate meaning in the evidence, facts cannot emerge as aspects of the truth.

Most historians today, and l think it is reasonable to argue Carr also endorses this view in What is History? But Carr's unwillingness to accept the ultimate logic of, in this instance, the narrative impositionalism of the historian, and his failure to recognise the representational collapse of history writing, even as he acknowledges that "the use of language forbids him to be neutral" Carr 25 , has helped blind many among the present generation of British historians to the problematic epistemological nature of the historical enterprise.

Take the vexed issue of facts. Carr's answer to the question "What is a historical fact? It is how the historian then arranges the facts as derived from the evidence, and influenced by her knowledge of the context, that constitutes historical meaning. For Carr a fact is like sack, it will not stand up until you put 'something' in it. The 'something' is a question addressed to the evidence.

As Carr insists, "The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context" Carr It is easy to see why Elton and others like Arthur Marwick misconstrue the Collingwood- Carr position when Carr says such 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? Since the '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 , 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 '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 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 objectivist appeal in What is History? 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 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 , Carr was forced by his naked objectivist desire to underplay the problems of historical form and the situatedness of the historian. 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 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 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? 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 " Few historians today, thanks to Carr, work from these principles in pursuit of, as Winn says " 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?

The seed of thought that grew into What is History? For Carr, Herodotus demonstrated that the historian frequently does not draw from objective fact, but his experiences of them. In his developing interest in Russian history — and reading the Russian literature that was available to him — he was inspired to write the volume A History of Soviet Russia , the first part of which was published in During its composition he became more convinced by Soviet ideology and before his death in , he was urged to formalise his political beliefs, which he did in a personal three-page letter to my grandfather.

This now survives, hidden deep within family archives; it stipulates he was a Marxist. A History of Soviet Russia was a bold attempt carefully and meticulously to collect all the facts available, and in doing so, he articulated an impressively objective approach to Russian history. However, it was in this pursuit of objectivity that Carr came up against the same issue raised all those years ago at Cambridge with Herodotus. He found the objective approach to historical theory difficult to achieve.

In the lengthy process of writing A History of Soviet Russia he appears to have become torn in his approach. Nineteenth-century historians believed in objective history. However, as he compiled A History of Soviet Russia , Carr found achieving such penetration into the age an impossible task: while we can formulate a subjective understanding of the past, we cannot of course know it exactly as it was.

Facts can be changed or manipulated to benefit those relaying them, something we are acutely aware of today. With this is in mind, it is the continued misrepresentation and misuse of fact, deliberate or accidental, that Carr interrogates in What is History? He does so by dividing facts into two categories: facts of the past and facts of the present. History means interpretation. The Introduction by the editor is particularly helpful, especially to those Carr novices who will turn to the book in quite large numbers I hope and suspect to find out about the Great Man.

Professor Cox carefully links the man and the career. He connects the passion and the history written. He couples the historian to the foundation of international relations as an academic discipline. Carr's views on world politics are explained as are his controversial attitude at various times to Germany and the Soviet Union, the West, the USA and capitalism, and his generally dissenting political positions.

Professor Cox asks how we should judge Carr? Was he, as his critics suggest, just a man of his times, now nothing more than a curio? A historian always associated with a failed economic and political system? Literally, perhaps, he was the Last Man, and was the last author of a certain kind of history?

Or should he be seen as an historian whose influence over the discipline of? IR is greater now than it has ever been, and whose views on the nature of history are even more pertinent today especially in the face of the continued postmodern threat as perpetually denounced by various know-nothing historians like Marwick?

This book will certainly help its readers to make up their own minds unless they are already made up? In these terms I would warmly recommend all historians who care about historical thinking and practice to read this collection.

A short summary of what the reader will find may be helpful. They point up his outcast nature and career. After reading this section, I started to feel one might reasonably question the worth of the definition offered in it of an academic outcast as not being a Professor of History at Oxford or Cambridge.

At any rate, Carr's search for meaning led him to a somewhat fraught eleven years at Aberystwyth while also writing pro-Russian leaders for The Times as he became known the Red Professor of Printing House Square. Davies friend and collaborator of Carr , Stephen White, the editor Michael Cox and Hillel Ticktin write the second section in four chapters.

This part of the collection deals with Carr's evolving attitude toward the Soviet Union within the context of the Cold War, how the Soviet Union received and responded to his work not always favourably , his close relationship with Isaac Deutscher and an analysis of Carr's Anglo-empiricist Marxism.

The third section written in five chapters by Peter Wilson, Paul Rich, Tim Dunne, Andrew Linklater and Fred Halliday, speaks to Carr's contribution to the founding of the discipline of international relations. In sum, the conclusion seems to be that Carr's gift to the embryonic discipline was intellectual. Specifically, in that he had a peculiar view of the sociology of knowledge, notably in terms of his realist sense of relativism, the role of circumstance in history and of power disguised as truth.

But equally Carr understood that realism was and is? The final section of the book is composed of three chapters written by Anders Stephanson, Keith Jenkins and Randall Germain and examines Carr' philosophy of history. For Stephanson and Germain Carr is a problematic thinker in that he really failed to answer the questions he sets himself about history but his What is History? For Jenkins, who injects a disturbing and dark sense of the ultimate futility of the empirical-analytical paradigm in which Carr worked, Carr is 'out of date' p.

For Jenkins and unlike most historians, presumably including the other contributors to this collection? By his own admission An Autobiography written for Tamara Deutscher in and reprinted in the in the first section of the collection Carr claims to his always feeling as something of a dissident.

It seems to me this can only refer to his mature ideological position as a sort of humanist anti-Positivist Marxist. It cannot refer to his view of history, which it has always seemed to me as it does to Keith Jenkins the author of Chapter Fourteen , to be that of a mainstream constructionist.

As Jenkins points out in this collection and in his own On 'What is History? Professor Cox's collection is timely.