Searching for the Archimedean Point

...for example, the topic of free will vs...

...He shall be called a real historian, while those who fail to discover this point are doomed to wallow in relativism, subjectivism and cynicism...

...Yet, while one can applaud Carr for striking blows against Philistinism and irrationalism, and for being courageous and thoughtful enough to ask philosophically interesting questions about historical knowledge, one cannot applaud all of his answers...

...Here the terrain is much more familiar to Carr and so he is able to move about on it in a livelier and more graceful manner—despite the fact that he comes to extremely dubious conclusions...

...There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of questions that Carr takes up...

...History is a vast and varied discipline, and surely historians do not forfeit their titles or abandon their offices when they concentrate on the politically and economically powerless or on the defeated...

...In discussing historical objectivity, Carr begins with the familiar observation that every historian must decide what facts to incorporate into his narrative...

...Carr correctly points out that historical selection is always dictated by a value judgment made by the historian...

...Carr's search for one stable standard of selection finally leads him to the view that the real historical facts and causes must somehow be linked with the future of society...

...And if he is merely recommending that history turn itself into the discipline he describes, there is no objective reason in his pages, or out of them, for supposing that the only facts worth recording are those that presage the powers that be or will be...

...Nor do they become idle cynics when they write the history of thought rather than the story of how force triumphed...

...His mistake—a classic one in the history of philosophy—is to suppose that his own judgment can be shown to be the objective one and all others shown subjective by appealing to the essence of history, properly so-called...

...author, "Social Thought in America" E. H. Carr is an unusual historian...

...It is absurd to hold that only such future-directed and powerdominated history is "history properly so-called...

...And in making casual statements he must select from among the many factors that play a part in the production of historical events...

...When he knows how things will progress he can say what was significant in what went before...

...He feels a need to examine the foundations of his discipline and does not avoid philosophical reflection as if it were a debilitating disease that might permanently impair his capacity to write history...

...Upon what rational basis does he do so...

...He who finds this Archimedean point and mounts his lever on it will lift out of the ocean of past facts all those that are really and truly historical...

...Carr's conception of history is surely not borne out by an examination of what all historians do, nor by a study of the use of the word "history...

...Carr insists that the historian should know what he is doing, and is oldfashioned enough to think that if a historian says something causes something else, he ought to have some glimmering of what causation is...

...On the contrary, it seems to me that only by eschewing Carr's view can the historian escape cynicism, properly so-called...

...It is certainly idle to argue in a purely logical way with a historian who is so impressed by success that he wishes to make it the hero of his history...

...But Carr's own focussing on future power is also dictated by a value judgment...

...For venturing into the turbulent waters of philosophy Carr deserves the highest praise...

...Apparently Carr is in search of a standard which will allow the historian to justify his selection of certain facts and causes as "real," and this search he virtually identifies with the effort to answer the question "What is History...

...On the other hand, one may easily argue with—and refute—Carr if he claims to have a foolproof argument demonstrating that historical objectivity consists simply in telling the story of the past with an eye on the successes of the future...

...Moreover, he rightly thinks that historians should be prepared to talk coherently about the grounds on which they select some facts for inclusion in their narratives and exclude others...

...determinism...

...Some are very general and are discussed without special attention to the language and thought of the historian...

...But Carr's views on such matters are far less stimulating than those he advances on a second class of problems that are of particular interest to the historian, problems such as those having to do with objectivity and selection...

...A historian in search of an objective standpoint must first discern the road of progress and then paint his picture of the past accordingly...

...In these more concrete, more lucid, but more Hegelian moments, Carr regards the historian as obliged, on pain of forfeiting his claim to objectivity, to depict the past in conformity with a prediction about who the successful will be...

...One may persuade him to enlarge his vision, but one ought not try to prove theorems to him...

...His distrust of obscurantism is also refreshing, and his optimism bracing...

...Carr seems to think of the discipline of history as having an essence that may be discerned by locating an objective basis for the historian's selections...

...Although Carr sometimes writes as though we can never know what specific form progress will take because we are locked in our own culture and imprisoned by our parochial values, at other times he suggests that if we wish to know what the progressive aspects of the future will be, we must ask ourselves who will have power then, for power is objectively measurable...

...I cannot share Carr's view that the historian should attend to the career of the victorious in order to escape cynicism...