nm0085: so this can people see this all right despi-, cou-, cou-, well i know 
you can't you can't see it 'cause of the pillar can you tough [laugh] those who 
w-, for whom it's in their line of vision can you read it [laughter] yeah okay 
er i'd i wanted to get a better picture of Carr but that's the one on the front 
of a recent biography of him er if i move it up you'll see that the crucial 
thing about it is that Cambridge dons live on tea er but that gives some idea 
of who this guy who i hope you've all been reading is er the dates are there 
you should all have a handout as well with some quotes i hope you've all got 
that have you yeah right and since i watched the tape of namex's lecture i 
don't know if any of you remember one of you in the room must er i'm supposed 
to take my glasses on and off [laughter] all the time 
right i've not i noticed after you told namex that that he i don't think he put 
his glasses on once [laughter] i'll try and keep mine on but i can't guarantee 
it er right who was E H Carr a middle class boy from north London a student at 
Cambridge er during the First World War escaped conscription on health grounds 
and he had these four distinct careers er first at the end of the First World 
War through the nineteen-twenties he's a Foreign Office official working on er 
north European and Russian affairs er at the Versailles conference er posted to 
the British Legation in Riga in Latvia to work on Russian questions during the 
nineteen-twenties and during the early thirties when the League of Nations was 
falling apart he was part of the British diplomatic team in Geneva watching 
that int-, international institution fall apart in nineteen-thirty-five he 
quit the Foreign Office er and became Professor of International Relations at 
Aberystwyth er where he er sat down and wrote er a book er er called The Thirty 
Years' Crisis which i'll say more about later but it's basically the 
foundational text or a foundational tax-, text of the realist science of 
international relations i'll er er expand on that later er very well worth 
reading published in er the end in nineteen-thirty-nine during the Second World 
War and immediately afterwards he's a leader writer er on the Times and he's a 
key figure among the middle of the road intellectuals who are shifting the 
whole political census in Britain to the left and preparing a way for the 
Labour victory in nineteen-forty-five er Winston Churchill used to call the 
Times er the threepenny edition of the Daily Worker the Communist paper er 
because of the way the Times was no longer er voicing the er conventional views 
of er the Conservative establishment when the Cold War set in this basically 
turned Carr from being a reformist intellectual at the hub of the way things 
were going in nineteen-forties Britain into an academic outsider because he 
stuck to the view that good relations with the Soviet Union were crucial for 
British foreign policy er very much an outsider er definitely found it 
difficult to get an academic job at the height of the Cold War he ended up er 
in a Cambridge college where he spent the rest of his life er as a historian of 
the Soviet Union and that's his main claim to fame as a historian er he started 
that fourth career when he was fifty-four he published fourteen volumes on the 
history of the Soviet Union between er the revolution and he got to nineteen-
twenty-nine by the time he was er what was he eighty-three he published the 
last volume in nineteen-seventy-seven so the a fourteen volume massive work on 
basically the emergence of a planned economy in the sov-, from the revolution 
to nineteen-twenty-nine and in nineteen-sixty-one 
er he gave a series of lectures to history students in Cambridge called What is 
History which is the book that i hope you're reading er i wish i could say i 
was there ac-, i arrived in Cambridge actually the that autumn just missed them 
but i did buy the book and when i f-, when when we put this course on i got it 
back off my shelves and reread it and it's full of my er infantile notes at the 
time bought in December nineteen-sixty-one so i was in at the beginning of this 
er i completely misunderstood much of it at the time but of course you won't 
because you'll be guided by this lecture and by the wonderful discussions 
you're going to have in seminars er since nineteen-sixty-one this book er has 
been it must be the most widely read er text on the nature of the historical 
discipline er in this country now before er i discuss Carr i want to say a few 
words about the chief object of his 
attack which you could label naive empiricism i namex did a show of hands 
didn't he last week about how many people had heard of Ranke and it wasn't very 
many which is very good because Ranke's a n-, er a very long time ago and 
everything's moved on but as he said we have to engage with Ranke and it's 
actually he's g-, actually going to be very interesting the most quoted phrase 
of all that you'll find in this course i suspect is Ranke's notion which was 
foundational for the nineteenth century emergence of history as an organized 
academic discipline that the purpose the what the historian did was discovered 
how it really was what actually happened in the past now as you'll gather when 
you read about Ranke and in the next lecture in this course there was nothing 
at all simple-minded about Ranke's own take on historical method he certainly 
was not a naive empiricist but much of the profession that he was responsible 
in some ways for inventing has 
been extremely simple-minded about the sources of its own knowledge and hasn't 
really thought much about the sources of its own knowledge Patrick Burke's book 
History and Social Theory which is on the er er reading list er traces he 
starts the book by tracing the nineteenth century divorce between history and 
the other social sciences from the later nineteenth century as history became 
professionalized into an academic discipline and it became professionalized 
around an antitheory ethos especially in this country where of course 
empiricism and a culture of no nonsense common sense is something of a national 
fixation now for the antitheory cast of mind which certainly anybody who has 
been socialized in British culture part of their mind is certainly belongs 
however hard they struggle against it [laugh] to this antitheory cast of mind 
er doing history is just applied common sense the way to produce objective 
positive 
knowledge about the past is to go through the sources without preconceptions 
with an open mind to rid yourself as best you can of any preconceptions and of 
present minded questions questions arising out of present issues and study the 
past for its own sake for its own sake not in order to grind axes in arguments 
going on in the present except of course arguments among historians the most 
eloquent proponent of the antitheory view is another Cambridge historian 
Geoffrey Elton who er most famous for his er discussion of sixteenth century 
statecraft er the Tudor revolutionary government who published a counterblast 
to Carr in nineteen-sixty-seven called The Practice of History er Elton argues 
in that book that er historians have got their own methods they're rooted in 
practical common sense and these give you a real if always of course 
provisional knowledge about the past practical common sense the problem of 
course about common sense is that one person's common sense is another 
person's nonsense common sense describes untheorized prejudice what just comes 
to your mind through the ether as it were without too much enquiry about where 
it comes from unless one engages seriously with theory we're never going to 
realize our own unconscious prejudicises and those prejudices are going to 
prefigure our reading of the sources in a way that we ourselves are not aware 
of and that in many ways is is kind of the key question for this whole course i 
think er the evolution of the historical discipline since Ranke in dialogue 
with other disciplines in the social sciences particularly but also literature 
er has created a whole storehouse of strategies for how historians can handle 
that difficult relationship between the historian's mind and the sources out of 
which we construct historical narratives explanations and so on and i think by 
the end of the course you will have been through a whole menu of different 
ways of approaching that problem and be able to locate yourself and your own 
preferred solutions but Carr's a good starting point for all this because he 
lays out very clearly some of the difficulties and the very incoherence of 
Carr's book and as i'll try to show it is i think fundamentally incoherent but 
the very incoherence takes one as it were to to to to to the issue that subtler 
minds than Carr's er er that you will encounter as the course goes along er 
also worry away at the key to approaching that book is to understand its 
rhetorical strategy in chapter one Carr gives you a radical a radically scepta-,
sceptical view of empiricism and of the antitheory claims of traditional 
empirical history he's acutely aware of the difficulty of constructing 
objective accounts of the past rather than just using the past as a screen on 
which you project your own prejudices make up any stories you please but having 
laid that subjectivist trap he 
proceeds to argue his way out of it he believed that subjectivism simply er er 
the er er a view in which the state of his-, of historical knowledge is no 
greater than the state of th-, the its status as objective truth about the past 
doesn't exist it's simply a projection of one's own prejudices he believes that 
subjectivism could be avoided to the extent that one deconstructed outdated 
assumptions and grasped realistically how the world was changing around you the 
most objective historian he ends up by saying is the one who understands the 
trend of history Carr essentially clings to er an enlightenment faith in reason 
and progress ultimately it's progress he argues that makes history intelligible 
now i'll talk about all this i'm just laying out the agenda as it were Carr's 
certainty about progress and what it looks like may now seem very dated but at 
the end of the lecture i'm going to suggest that maybe he has a point about 
the inextricability of the idea of progress and the practice of history now 
what i want to do is to look in turn at Carr's analysis of what i've called the 
subjectivist trap and then at how he seeks to mobilize the idea of progress to 
spring that trap the main burden of chapter one is that there is no hard core 
of historical facts existing independently of the historian interpretive 
frameworks are at work right from the start of the process of constructing 
knowledge about the past as Carr puts it an element of interpretation enters 
into every fact of history or it's an interpretation here and fact there 
they're inextricably mixed up i think it's important to understand what Carr is 
saying and what he isn't saying here he doesn't make it easy 'cause his 
terminology is rather confusing and i'm going to suggest substituting a 
terminology that makes it easier he's not in fact denying that information 
about the past exists independently of the insh-, of the historian what 
he's trying to do is to make a distinction between two kinds of facts about the 
past and he does this if you've read that chapter using rather strangely upper 
class male metaphor about clubs and you'll remember his er there are run of the 
mill plebeian facts which no one pays any attention to and then there are 
important facts which have been nominated for membership of this club of 
professional historians er those are facts mobilized as evidence for some 
argument or another about the past and once they're mobilized by a properly 
accredited professional historian to support some argument he's making they 
become properly historical facts now this is very confusing 'cause he's using 
the word fact to apply to two quite different kinds of thing or concepts Keith 
Jenkins in his little book on rethinking history er which er i think we're all 
going to be talking about to some extent in the first seminar of this course er 
v-, very much providing a er er er a simple 
guide to post-modernist ideas about er er about history whatever one one may 
think of Keith Jenkins' approach overall i think he provides an extremely 
useful er way of sorting out this fact fact problem in Carr the key distinction 
he points out is between the past and history the past was real no doubt about 
that it all happened whatever it was that happened but it doesn't exist any 
longer it was real but it no longer exists history is what we write about the 
past okay straightforward the reason we can write about the past is 'cause it 
left traces behind and that's a crucial word traces it left traces behind 
buildings field systems but mainly for historians written documents those 
traces of course do exist in the present most of these documents sitting in 
archives here and there and we can consult the traces of the past in search of 
evidence about the past so for Carr's two kinds of facts about the past non-
historical facts inert ones that nobody 
pays any attention to on the one hand and properly historical facts facts which 
historians have picked up and run with as it were one can substitute the much 
clearer terms i think the traces from the past unworked on possibly as yet 
undiscovered documents but these are the traces of the past or what the 
archaeologist find as he digs these are the traces of the past on the one hand 
an evidence information about what actually happened distilled from the traces 
by the labour of historians the traces have a purely objective existence 
they're there you can't argue with it yeah the evidence of course is thoroughly 
mixed up with questions of interpretation the complications i think begin when 
you contemplate the process of how you win Carr's historical facts or what i'm 
calling evidence from these inert traces of the past for the more empiricist 
historians like Geoffrey Elton that process is very skilled you need a PhD to 
do it properly mm but it's essentially value free the 
trained historian checks the authenticity of any particular piece any 
particular trace of the past make sure it really is a trace of the past not 
something planted there by a forger er he compares different accounts in the 
sources did it happen as this document says it did is the document likely to be 
misinformation produced at the time to misinform someone else er did the event 
leave traces in several documents independently produced so you can compare 
them with one another and therefore get a bit more than objective view of what 
went on and at the end of such a process one has objective knowledge about past 
events for Elton about what actually happened one has a hard core of historical 
facts existing independently of any particular historian checked out 
authenticated but that's what happened in the past now this is what Carr's 
concerned to deny and perhaps the most convincing er criticism of this idea of 
a hard core of facts is the selection problem as i call it 
the past leaves far more traces than we can handle and the recent past all the 
more all the historical work involves selection and selection of course 
involves having an agenda an interpretive framework even before historians 
start checking out the authenticity of the sources the reliability of the 
evidence inferred from the traces they have to decide what sources to look at 
what kind of evidence to try to infer the evidence doesn't exist independently 
of the historian's agenda it's inferred from the traces of the past in order to 
answer some predetermined set of questions which is why evidence is a more 
helpful term for what Carr means than facts facts you know are the kind of 
empiricist building block they're hard nuggets of things which have sharp and 
well defined edges and you can pile them up into your b-, building bricks to 
make your tower of historical narrative evidence on the other hand only exists 
in relation to a case being made 
it's what's called in evidence in relation to a particular argument and that's 
what Carr means when he says that the facts of history can't be purely 
objective since they become facts of history only in virtue of the significance 
attached to them by the historian he quotes approvingly a description of er the 
historian at work as rummaging in the ragbag er for traces of the past in order 
to select piece and pattern evidence related to the interpretation he's seeking 
to construct so rummaging in this almost limitless ragbag of traces to look for 
the bits of information that will help you construct what it is that you're 
trying to construct is Carr right to dismiss the idea that there's any hard 
core of facts out there should we dismiss the claims of empiricist historians 
to produce objective facts about the past i'm not going to even begin to try to 
offer you any kind of definitive answer to that question because er what from 
one direction or another we'll come back 
to it again and again er but i just want to suggest you give it some thought 
and to help you think about it let's just take one very well attested 
historical fact the Second World War right we can all agree it occurred can we 
whatever differences we might have are going to be about matters of 
interpretation causes effects and so on well at first sight yes obviously you 
know the the the tanks move the bombs drop the ships were sunk and millions of 
people got killed but think again about it the Second World War if it's such an 
indisputable fact when did it begin mm did it begin in nineteen-thirty-nine or 
did it begin in nineteen-forty-one or did it begin in nineteen-thirty-one when 
the Japanese attacked Manchuria was it the Second World War or was it just a 
continuation of the first in a hundred years' time will historians talk about 
The Thirty Years' War of the early twentieth century i'm sure there will be 
great debates among historians as to whether such a concept 
is more useful than talking about a first and a second or you can revise it the 
other way around as the uncertainty over the date suggests is it one war or is 
that the historian imposing a single narrative on a series of events which make 
more sense er looked at discretely a series of discrete squabbles hundreds of 
local wars and civil wars telling the story as that of and it is telling the 
story constructing a narrative of a second world war perhaps privileges you 
know Churchill Roosevelt Stalin you can see them sitting there in the 
photograph directing the course of history but perhaps that's not how history 
was made in that period perhaps it's made much more by a whole series of 
interlocked and interrelating processes which are not grasped by the concept of 
a single second world war in the longer perspective that particular narrative 
device and that's what it is the Second World War might be abandoned in favour 
of a more bottom-up approach that privileges 
local and regional dynamics in understanding that period of a of global 
upheaval perhaps there are some facts so er i ask you just to think about that 
and you i'm sure you could all come up with similar examples of you know 
commonplace historical events which as soon as you start to think of them are 
actually constructed narratives which could be constructed quite differently er 
perhaps there are some facts which exist independently of interpretive 
frameworks they're probably very trivial ones most events are themselves 
already interpretations mental constructions by historians particular ways of 
telling a story to give it a particular kind of a meaning now those who don't 
get beyond the first chapter of Carr er sometimes see Carr himself as embracing 
a sceptical view that basically you can get any interpretive framework you make 
you know there there there's no way out of this trap that you project onto the 
past whatever narrative you want though even in 
chapter one he makes no secret of his contempt for such a view as he puts it 
the past is not a child's box of letters with which we can spell any word we 
please and in fact as i said at the beginning the rhetorical strategy of the 
book is to set that sceptical trap only in order to spring it but before 
turning to the way he springs it ah the glasses came off put them back on again 
quick [laughter] but before turning to the way he springs it er let me probe a 
bit deeper into the sources of Carr's thinking which brings me to a section 
called er the sociology of knowledge now Carr is a middle class boy from a 
business family in north London he grows up with er a conventional Gladstonian 
belief in that great truth of nineteenth century Britain that the universal 
interests of humanity are the same thing as free 
trade especially free trade dominated by the British er First World War his 
experience as a Foreign Office official blows all that apart and in the book i 
mentioned before The Twenty Years' Crisis published in nineteen-thirty-nine 
which is a basically a history of international relations between nineteen-
eighteen and nineteen-thirty-nine well no it's not basically that it's the the 
that's its its ostensible subject matter er Carr performs a quite brilliant 
deconstruction of the role of ideology in masking power in masking raison 
d'état in international politics he shows how the apparently utopian ideals of 
peaceful international relations built around free trade Adam Smith Richard 
Cobden and then the Americans Woodrow Wilson and the idea of the League of 
Nations the ut-, whole utopian strand of er er thinking er built around the 
idea that free trade free commercial intercourse among nations will bring peace 
and prosperity to the world that all this in fact served 
to promote the interests of the most powerful economies high-minded free trade 
pacifism didn't express any genuine harmony of interests it expressed the 
interest of whoever was the current economic superpower the British in the 
nineteenth century the Americans in the twentieth century free trade was a 
weapon designed to subordinate weaker economies wisdom Carr concludes in 
foreign affairs comes not out of the pursuit of er utopian moral goals in 
foreign policy but in adapting to the realities of power as he saw them for 
example er it's er central to that book on the Thirty Years' Crisis the er in 
Eastern Europe er there could only be one of two dominant powers it either had 
to be Germany or Russia and it was daft to think that you could construct any 
kind of society in Eastern Europe that wasn't dominated by one of these great 
powers or the other and therefore Carr was an appeaser in the nineteen-thirties 
and an opponent of the 
Cold War after nineteen-forty-five before the war it was Germany's area after 
the war it was Russia's area and it was simply stupid to try to er resist this 
the argument he mobilizes in The Twenty Years' Crisis is foundational as i said 
earlier for the realist school in international relations Carr is really 
founding another academic discipline or playing an important part in it er the 
the social scientific discipline of international relations and he's doing to 
pitch him at a high claim he's doing for international politics what 
Machiavelli had done for domestic politics getting behind the moralizing er 
rhetoric to the understanding that unless the Prince er for Machiavelli or the 
Kissinger for Carr who would be one outcome of this kind of thinking i suppose 
er and and and unless they can get behind er the i suppose its moral goals of 
foreign policy and understand the realities of power they'll make a mess of 
things now in formulating his ideas 
about the relationship between ideology and power in international relations he 
draws heavily on the ideas of a Hungarian sociologist who came to live in 
Britain in the mid-thirties er at at er L-S-E and s-, had a job at London 
School of Economics Karl Mannheim and Mannheim's most distinctive contribution 
that Carr picked up was this idea of a sociology of knowledge the key idea 
there was that all values all truths in quotation mark are rooted in a specific 
time and place and the key to understanding the universalizing claims that 
particular groups make the claim that their er er their ideas represent the 
universal human interest er the key to understanding these is to unmask them to 
unmask the social basis of ideas to do a sociology of knowledge you always ask 
whose purposes are served by this political doctrine that religion this utopian 
project the job of the social scientist or the historian is to unmask the 
unacknowledged function of assertions of universal 
values in sustaining or advancing particular interests but of course if 
knowledge production has a sociology then this is true of the production of 
historical knowledge as well and in that spirit Carr attacks attempts to erect 
any as he puts it suprahistorical standard by which to judge historical events 
and you should all have a sheet with quotations on it er on the first of which 
is er or the second of which is that the serious historian is the one who 
recognizes the historically conditioned character of all values not the one who 
claims for his own values an objectivity beyond history but if there are no 
values which have objectivity beyond history where can you find objectivity 
which brings me to er the final section of the lecture er Carr and the idea of 
progress he tries to mobilize the idea of progress to spring the subjectivist 
trap the key proposition is really very simple and almost 
commonsensical the test of the objectivity of any particular historical 
interpretation lies in its ability to predict the future the most objective 
historian that's to say is the one who has the deepest grasp of the tide of 
history the most as Carr puts it profound and lasting vision of the future you 
know the quotes on your sheet only the future can provide the key to the 
interpretation of the past it's only in this sense that we can speak of an 
ultimate objectivity in history that doesn't mean of course that you can ever 
quite reach it because you don't actually know what's going to happen in the 
future but those historians who have understood the trend of history are going 
to be the ones who last Carr's saying and time will tell which they are now for 
Carr the tide of the twentieth cent-, er sorry Carr has this very firm 
conviction that there are tides in history that history has a direction that 
these tides are knowable though never of course 
absolutely time tells who had understood better the objectivity of any 
particular informing vision for Carr the tide of the twentieth century was 
above all towards and a key word in all Carr's thinking planning the First 
World War seemed to demonstrate pretty clearly that liberal capitalism was over 
the future lay with the planned economy the First World War had shown how to do 
it particularly in the German war economy but also to some degree in the 
British war economy the stark contrast between capitalist crisis nineteen-
twenty-nine and Soviet five year planning was an inescapable demonstration it 
seemed er of er where the future lay as Carr himself wrote in nineteen-thirty-
one the new religion of the kilowatt and the machine may well prove to be the 
creed for which modern civilization is waiting this new religion is growing up 
on the fringes of a Europe that's lost faith in her-, in herself contemporary 
Europe is aimlessly drifting and that view of 
things was of course triumphantly vindicated it seemed by the stupendous 
achievements of the Red Army in the Second World War Hitler being defeated by 
in Carr's view the triumphs of Soviet planning essentially none of that means 
that Carr was a Stalinist or believed that Soviet style planning was 
appropriate for Western societies but this mids-, ni-, twentieth century belief 
in planning was more or less universal among reformist intellectuals it was 
rooted in the experience as i indicated of Western war economies and er 
thinking about what on earth do we do about the slump as much as it was 
anything to do with the U-S-S-R and whole notions of planning in the mid-twist 
twentieth century are responding as much to the needs of big capital big 
business as they are to any aspirations of socialists but planning becomes a 
point of convergence if you like between the revolutionary drama in the Soviet 
Union on the one hand and Western social democratic reformism 
which Carr the Times leader writer is a central figure in in Britain on the 
other now Carr no less than Geoffrey entlo-, Elton [laugh] er there there it 
goes again Carr no less than Geoffrey Elton er opposed er present mindedness 
but in the name not of the study of the past for its own sake but in the name 
of as he put it a long term vision of a past and future so if you like he's 
substituting future mindedness for present mindedness and he cites his own 
approach to the history of the Soviet Union as an example Western views of the 
Soviet Union he says in a preface to some of the later volumes of er the the 
the history of Russia er Western views have fluctuated drastically as 
international relations shifted from the kind of pro-Soviet ethos of the 
wartime years to the Cold War years Carr says he stands aloof from the 
transient fluctuations of opinion to document a deeper story which he 
summarizes late on in writing 
this history as the determination the dedication the organization the sheer 
hard work which in the last sixty years have transformed Russia into a major 
industrial country and one of the superpowers for those who accused him of 
being an apologist for Stalin's crimes lacking the proper perspectives he said 
after all with a sideswipe at Geoffrey Elton nobody er er an English historian 
can praise the achievements of Henry the Eighth without being a supporter of er 
b-, being supposed to condone the beheading of wives now Carr was confident 
that in the long historical perspective the achievements of Soviet 
industrialization would outweigh would appear to be of greater historical 
significance than the brutalities of the Stalinist terror whatever the 
peculiarities of his vision and i'll come back to those it was built on the 
fundamental proposition that human history embodies the expansion of reason 
widening application of the power of reason to 
place human beings in control of the natural environment and of social 
relations seemed to Carr to be at the core of the twentieth century revolution 
the transition from laissez-faire to planning from the unconscious to the 
conscious from a belief in objective economic law somehow operating r-, 
remotely from human control to a belief that man can master his own action that 
man can be the master of his own destiny man can plan his society now it's 
difficult not to conclude that Carr's contradicting himself how on earth can 
you combine a statement of faith in the expansion of human reason with his 
earlier insistence that there's no absolute values outside history that no 
serious historian can claim objectivity for his values beyond history Carr's 
values are very clearly the values of the Enlightenment and of the expansion of 
human reason and he admits as much actually in an essay he wrote on Mannheim i 
won't read it out the quote's there er o-, er er er this is er quite late 
in his life er he says that after all at the end of it all you have to admit 
there is a supratemporal reason lurking somewhere and he says you know i'm 
really just an old Victorian i can't get out of my head this notion of progress 
er i don't think you should judge Carr harshly for admitting to self-
contradiction on this crucial and central issue when it comes to the really big 
philosophical questions my suspicion is you have to be slightly lunatic not to 
contradict yourself er perhaps some of you can find ways out of this that don't 
involve a measure of self-contradiction i don't know but this isn't a 
philosophy course and we don't have to solve these big philosophical questions 
though we should note them but there are some particular aspects of Carr's idea 
of progress which are more troubling at the centre of his historical 
imagination planning the capacity of twentieth century man to move beyond the 
anarchy of the marketplace beyond that kind of 
nineteenth century condition of life which as Carr sees it is much the same as 
the primitive savage in the jungle who doesn't understand anything and that 
language of primitive sava-, savages in jungles is very much part of Carr's 
rhetoric er you move from that into the sunlit uplands of the conscious control 
over our social and economic destiny that planning gives you sometimes Carr's 
presented as a Marxist and thought of as a Marxist and his thinking certainly 
owes something to Marxism but he's more accurately located among that group of 
non-Marxist European intellectuals who concluded from the early from the events 
of the early twentieth century that some kind of socialism was inevitable they 
might not want it whether they liked it or not so the sensible thing was not to 
resist the tide of history they knew what the tide was that's h-, where it was 
going planning was the future but to cooperate with the tide of history with a 
view to controlling it 
freedom in Hegel's famous phrase was the recognition of necessity you ride the 
tides of history if sociali-, was socialism was inevitable then the point was 
to make sure that rational educated people like themselves control it not to 
leave it to the dangerous whims of the oppressed the case against that kind of 
reasoning was made very forcibly by another Cambridge intellectual with whom 
Carr jousts in What is History Isaiah Berlin and i've given you quite a long 
quote from Isaiah Berlin in nineteen-fifty er which in view of the time i won't 
read out but you've got it there to look at let's just pick out a couple of 
bits of it though Carr is deeply affected by the contempt for liberalism made 
fashionable in the last century by Hegel history is a procession of events 
ruled by inexorable laws and it's childish to resist them now Carr er arguably 
is much too ready to identify progress and the expansion of reason with the 
wielding of 
unprecedented power by intellectuals and bureaucrats in control of massive 
state apparatuses the history of Soviet planning which he wrote privileges the 
point of view of the planners privileges the view debated within the Bolshevik 
project of the nineteen-twenties of how do you turn a society round by a 
powerful state machine from the top how do you transform a society from above 
he's not very interested in focusing on the costs of progress or in looking at 
history from below as Isaac Deutscher there are his dates the biographer of 
Trotsky among others and one of Carr's few academic friends actually but if 
this is what your friends said imagine what your enemies said er was w-, as 
Deutscher said of Carr er his passion is for statecraft not for subversive 
ideas Deutscher was rather more interested in subversive ideas at least some of 
the time some of Carr's formulations show a surprinding 
blindness to the dangers to human freedom involved in this project of conscious 
control you may have felt i don't know there was some disproportion in his quip 
at Elton comparing Henry the Eighth's treatment of his wives with Stalin's 
treatment of er large sections of the Russian population more fundamentally 
there's an impatient dismissal of the concerns of nineteenth century liberalism 
as nothing other than the selfish ideology of the bourgeoisie the sociology of 
knowledge tells you this huh there's a rather facile dismission er dismissal in 
the second chapter of Carr of the tension between individual liberty and the 
pursuit of social equality which is perhaps an abiding problem of liberalism 
and there's a bland assertion by Carr that the modern preoccupation with social 
and economic ends represents a broader and more advanced stage of human 
development tides of history again than the nineteenth century liberal 
preoccupation with 
political and constitutional ends we've moved on political questions 
constitutional questions anxieties about freedom that's behind us we're on to 
economic and social planning now Carr's history of reason triumphantly 
manifesting itself in the planning state is worlds away from those path 
breaking historians who from the nineteen-sixties were launching a new social 
history as a history from below a history concerned with losers as well as with 
winners a history concerned with the costs of progress a history concerned with 
recovering the mental world of the oppressed as well as with reconstructing the 
reasoning of the rulers already by the nineteen-sixties there are plenty of 
historians challenging Carr's rather outrageous and deeply Hegelian dismissal 
of er did i put the quote here as of the history of the medieval poor as not 
existing the medieval poor have no history they had no rational life of their 
own he writes the mass of the people belonged like 
prehistoric peoples to nature rather than to history again they were savages in 
the jungle you didn't have to share Isaiah Berlin's liberal standpoint which 
makes the same point to find remarks like that deeply offensive er indeed as 
we'll see when we get to E P Thompson in this course the most effective rescue 
of the history of the defeated was mounted precisely by Marxist historians of a 
very different er tenor than Carr's Marxist historians for whom subversive 
ideas rather than statecraft was at the centre of their vision so let's er try 
and draw this together er i think reading Carr now the particular idea of 
progress that er Carr places at the centre of his strategy for rescuing history 
from subjectivism i th-, the his idea his particular idea of what the trend of 
history is er seems very dated neither the Soviet Union of course nor planning 
more generally look like the future though a cautionary note i think you know 
one should never forget every historian 
should have inscribed on their hearts really the er the famous saying of Mao 
Tse Tung's when asked er what were the effects of the French Revolution it's 
too early to tell mm er well perhaps that's not true about seventeen-eighty-
nine er but it's certainly true about nineteen-eighty-nine er that's only ten 
years [laughter] er but can the link between historical objectivity and 
progress survive Carr's particular formulation of it and these are really the 
questions i want to send you away thinking about hopefully how convincing is 
his argument that some idea of progress of the advance of human reason of that 
kind of widening sphere of understanding and therefore conscious control of 
one's destiny er how convincing is the argument this is really a precondition 
for any kind of historical thinking can one distinguish between Carr's 
particular conception of progress and any conception of progress Carr himself 
may not have 
understood the trend of the twentieth century though it may be too early to 
tell er but does this mean it has no trend and might Carr have been right in 
thinking that the search for a trend for some meaningful narrative some in in 
some something unfolding the unfolding of reason in Hegel's term was 
fundamental to the practice of history i think one of the more appealing 
passages in in in in Carr's book i put on here er has Carr writing in rather 
more modest vein than he sometimes does modern man he says is to an 
unprecedented degree self-conscious and therefore conscious of history he peers 
eagerly back into the twilight out of which he's come in the hope that its 
faint beams will illuminate the obscurity into which he's going and conversely 
his aspirations and anxieties about the path that lies ahead quicken his 
insight into what lies behind unsatisfactory though 
peering is can we do history without it er is Carr for all his inadequacies 
right in linking the very idea of history to some kind of enlightenment belief 
in progress and if history is not in some way a record of the expansion of 
human reason does it have any meaning purpose or function my own hunch is that 
if the answer to that question is is negative that it isn't in any sense a 
record of the expansion of human reason i think we'll disappear from the 
culture myself historical study i i think it belongs to the idea of progress 
and that if you get rid in some level of the idea of progress what you'll you 
history simply becomes fiction and why not have fiction novelists do it much 
better mm much more readable [laugh] er shall i just leave you with that er 
extremely er un-, er worked out thought okay