Notes on 'What is History'

“That elusive entity ‘human nature’ has varied so much from country to country and from century to century that it is difficult not to regard it as a historical phenomenon shaped by prevailing social conditions and conventions. There are many differences between, say, Americans, Russians, and Indians. But some, and perhaps the most important, of these differences take the form of different attitudes to social relations between individuals, or, in other words, to the way in which society should be constituted, so that the study of differences between American, Russian, and Indian society as a whole may well turn out to be the best way of studying differences between individual Americans, Russians, and Indians. Civilized man, like primitive man, is moulded by society just as effectively as society is moulded by him. You can no more have the egg without the hen than you can have the hen without the egg.”

“It would have been unnecessary to dwell on these very obvious truths but for the fact that they have been obscured for us by the remarkable and exceptional period of history from which the western world is only just emerging. The cult of individual- ism is one of the most pervasive of modern historical myths. According to the familiar account in Burckhardt’s Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, the second part of which is subtitled ‘The Development of the Individual’, the cult of the individual began with the Renaissance, when man, who had hitherto been ‘conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation’, at length ‘became a spiritual individual and recognized himself as such’. Later the cult was connected with the rise of capitalism and of Protestantism, with the beginnings of the industrial revolution, and with the doctrines of laissez-faire. The rights of man and the citizen proclaimed by the French revolution were the rights of the individual. Individualism was the basis of the great nineteenth- century philosophy of utilitarianism, Morley’s essay On Compromise, a characteristic document of Victorian liberalism, called individualism and utilitarianism ’the religion of human happiness and well-being’. ‘Rugged individualism’ was the keynote of human progress. This may be a perfectly sound and valid analysis of the ideology of a particular historical epoch. But what I want to make clear is that the increased individualization which accompanied the rise of the modern world was a ·normal process of advancing civilization. A social revolution brought new social groups to positions of power. It operated, as always, through individuals and by offering fresh opportunities of individual development; and, since in the early stages of capitalism the units of production and distribution were largely in the hands of single individuals, the ideology of the new social order strongly emphasized the role of individual initiative in the social order. But the whole process was a social process representing a specific stage in historical development, and cannot be explained in terms of a revolt of individuals against society or of an emancipation of individuals from social restraints.”

“This truism is not less true when the period treated by the historian is remote from his own time. When I studied ancient history, the classics on the subject were - and probably still are - Grote’s History of Greece and Mommsen’s History of Rome. Grote, an enlightened radical- banker writing in the I840s, embodied the aspirations of the rising and politically progressive British middle class in an idealized picture of Athenian democracy, in which Pericles figured as a Benthanite reformer and Athens acquired an empire in a fit of absence of mind. It may not be fanciful to suggest that Grote’s neglect of the problem of slavery in Athens reflected the failure of the group to which he belonged to face the problem of the new English factory working class. Mommsen was a German liberal, disillusioned by the muddles and humiliations of the German revolution of 1848-9. Writing in the 1850s - the decade which saw the birth of the name and concept of Realpolitik - Mommsen was imbued with the sense of need for a strong man to clear up the mess left by the failure of the German people to realize its political aspirations; and we shall never appreciate his history at its true value unless we realize that his well-known idealization of Caesar is the product of this yearning for the strong man to save Germany from ruin, and that the lawyer-politician Cicero that ineffective chatterbox and slippery procrastinator, has walked straight out of the debates of the Paulikirche in Frankfurt in 1948. Indeed, I should not think it an outrageous paradox if someone were to say that Grote’s History of Greece has quite as much to tell us today about the thought of the English philosophical radicals in the 1840s as about Athenian democracy in the fifth century B.C., or that anyone wishing to understand what 1848 did to the German liberals should take Mommsen’s History of Rome as one of his text-books.”

“The Bolsheviks knew that the French revolution had ended in a Napoleon, and feared that their own revolution might end in the same way. They therefore mistrusted Trotsky, who among their leaders looked most like a Napoleon, and trusted Stalin, who looked least like a Napoleon. But this process may work in a converse direction. The economist who, by a scientific analysis of existing economic conditions, predicts an approaching boom or slump may, if his authority is great and his arguments cogent, contribute by the very fact of his prediction to the occurrence of the phenomenon predicted. The political scientist who, on the strength of historical observations, nourishes the conviction that despotism is short-lived, may contribute to the downfall of the despot. Everyone is familiar with the behaviour of candidates at elections, who predict their own victory for the conscious purpose of rendering the fulfilment of the prediction more likely; and one suspects that economists, political scientists, and historians, when they venture on prediction, are sometimes inspired by the unconscious hope of hastening the realization of the prediction. All that one can perhaps safely say about these complex relations is that interaction between the observer and what is observed, between the social scientist and his data, between the historian and his facts, is continuous, and continuously varies; and that this appears to be a distinctive feature of history and of the social sciences.”

“Historians condone the nineteenth-century colonisation of Asia and Africa by the western nations on the ground not only of its immediate effects on the world economy, but of its long-term consequences for the backward peoples of these continents. After all, it is said, modern India is the child of British rule; and modern China is the product of nineteenth-century western imperialism, crossed with the influence of the Russian revolution. Unfortunately it was not the Chinese workers who laboured in the western-owned factories in the treaty ports, or in the South African mines, or on the western front in the First World War, who have survived to enjoy whatever glory or profit may have accrued from the Chinese revolution. Those who pay the cost are rarely those who reap the benefits. The well-known purple passage from Engels is uncomfortably apt:

History is about the most cruel of all goddesses, and she leads her triumphal car over heaps of corpses, not only in war, but also in ‘peaceful’ economic development. And we men and women are unfortunately so stupid that we never pluck up courage for real progress unless urged to it by sufferings that seem almost out of proportion.’

Ivan Karamazov’s famous gesture of defiance is a heroic fallacy. We are born into society, we are born into history. No moment: occurs when we are offered a ticket of admission with the option to accept or reject it. The historian has no more conclusive answer than the theologian to the problem of suffering.”

“Antony’s infatuation with Cleopatra, or Bajazet’s attack of gout, or Trotsky’s feverish chill, were just as much causally determined as anything else that happens. It is unnecessarily discourteous to Cleopatra’s beauty to suggest that Antony’s infatuation had no cause. The connexion between female beauty and male infatuation is one of the most regular sequences of cause and effect observable in everyday life. These so-called accidents in history represent a sequence of cause and effect interrupting - and, so to speak, clashing with - the sequence which the historian is primarily concerned to investigate. Bury, quite rightly, speaks of a ‘collision of two independent causal chains’.’ Sir Isaiah Berlin, who opens his essay on Historical Inevitability by citing with praise an article of Bernard Berenson on ‘The Accidental View of History, is one of those who confuse accident in this sense with an absence of causal determination. But, this confusion apart, we have a real problem on our hands. How can one discover in history a coherent sequence of cause and effect, how can we find any meaning in history, when our sequence is liable to be broken or deflected at any moment by some other, and from our point of view irrelevant, sequence?

We may pause here for a moment to notice the origin of this recent widespread insistence on the role of chance in history. Polybius appears to have been the first historian to occupy himself with it in any systematic way; and Gibbon was quick to unmask the reason. ‘The Greeks’, observed Gibbon, ‘after their country had been reduced to a province, imputed the triumphs of Rome not to the merit, but to the fortune, of the republic.’ Tacitus, also a historian of the decay of his country, was another ancient historian to indulge in extensive reflexions on chance. The renewed insistence by British writers on the importance of accident in history dates from the growth of a mood of uncertainty and apprehension which set in with the present century and became marked after 1914. The first British historian to sound this note after a long interval appears to have been Bury, who, in an article of 1909 on ‘Darwinism in History’, drew attention to ’the element of chance coincidence’ which in large measure ‘helps to determine events in social evolution’; and a separate article was devoted to this theme in 1916 under the title ‘Cleopatra’s Nose’.’ H. A. L. Fisher, in the passage already quoted, which reflects his disillusionment over the failure of liberal dreams after the First World War, begs his readers to recognise ’the play of the contingent and the unforeseen’ in history.”

“The craving for an interpretation of history is so deep-rooted that, unless we have a constructive outlook over the past, we are drawn either to mysticism or to cynicism.”

“Consider how that past ages of eternal time before our birth were no concern of ours. This is a mirror which nature holds up to us of future time after our death.’ Poetic visions of a brighter future took the form of visions of a return to a golden age of the past - a cyclical view which assimilated the processes of history to the processes of nature. History was not going anywhere: because there was no sense of the past, there was equally no sense of the future. Only Virgil, who in his fourth eclogue had given the classical picture of a return to the golden age, was inspired in the Aeneid momentarily to break through the cyclical conception: ‘Imperium sine fine dedi’ was a most unclassical thought, which later earned Virgil recognition as a quasi-Christian prophet.

It was the Jews, and after them the Christians, who introduced an entirely new element by postulating a goal towards which the historical process is moving - the teleological view of history. History thus acquired a meaning and purpose, but at the expense of losing its secular character. The attainment of the goal of history would automatically mean the end of history : history itself became a theocracy. This was the medieval view of history. The Renaissance restored the classical view of an anthropocentric world and of the primacy of reason, but for the pessimistic classical view of the future substituted an optimistic view derived from the Jewish-Christian tradition. Time, which had once been hostile and corroding, now became friendly and creative: contrast Horace’s ‘Damnosa quid non imminuit dies? with Bacon’s ‘Veritas temporis filia’. The rationalists of the Enlightenment, who were the founders of modern historiography, retained the Jewish-Christian teleological view, but secularized the goal; they were thus enabled to restore the rational character of the historical process itself.”

“I am more attracted by one of those fascinating glimpses which Mr A. J. P. Taylor sometimes gives us into Oxford academic life. All this talk about the decline of civilisation, he writes, ‘means only that university professors used to have domestic servants and now do their own washing- up’.”

“It is significant that almost all our latter-day prophets of decline, our sceptics who see no meaning in history and assume that progress is dead, belong to that sector of the world and to that class of society which have triumphantly played a leading and predominant part in the advance of civilisation for several generations.”

“The people who struggle, say, to extend civil rights to all, or to reform penal practice, or to remove inequalities of race or wealth, are consciously seeking to do just those things: they are not consciously seeking to ‘progress’, to realise some historical ’law’ or ‘hypothesis’ or progress. It is the historian who applies to their actions his hypothesis of progress, and interprets their actions as progress. But this does not invalidate the concept of progress.”

“The status of reason in Professor Popper’s scheme of things is, in fact, rather like that of a British civil servant, qualified to administer the policies of the government in power and even to suggest practical improvements to make them work better, but not to question their fundamental presuppositions or ultimate purposes. This is useful work: I, too, have been a civil servant in my day. But this subordination of reason to the assumptions of the existing order seems to me in the long run wholly unacceptable. This is not how Acton thought of reason when he propounded his equation revolution = liberalism = reign of ideas. Progress in human affairs, whether in science or in history or in society, has come mainly through the bold readiness of human beings not to confine themselves to seeking piecemeal improvements in the way things are done, but to present fundamental challenges in the name of reason to the current way of doing things and to the avowed or hidden assumptions on which it rests. I look forward to a time when the historians and sociologists and political thinkers of the English-speaking world will regain their courage for that task.

It is, however, not the waning of faith in reason among the intellectuals and the political thinkers of the English-speaking world which perturbs me most, but the loss of the pervading sense of a world in perpetual motion. This seems at first sight paradoxical for rarely has so much superficial talk been heard changes going on around us. But the significant thing is that change is no longer thought of as achievement, as opportunity, as progress, but as an object of fear. When our political and economic pundits prescribe, they have nothing to offer us but the warning to mistrust radical and far-reaching ideas, to shun anything that savours of revolution, and to advance - if advance we must - as slowly and cautiously as we can. At a moment when the world is changing its shape more rapidly and more radically than at any time in the last 400 years, this seems to me a singular blindness, which gives ground for apprehension not that the world-wide movement will be stayed, but that this country - and perhaps other English-speaking countries - may lag behind the general advance, and relapse helplessly and uncomplainingly into some nostalgic backwater. For myself, I remain an optimist; and when Sir Lewis Namier warns me to eschew programmes and ideals, and Professor Oakeshott tells me that we are going nowhere in particular and that all that matters is to see that nobody rocks the boat, and Professor Popper wants to keep that dear old T-model on the road by dint of a little piecemeal engineering, and Professor Trevor-Roper knocks screaming radicals on the nose, and Professor Morison pleads for history written in a sane conservative spirit, I shall look out on a world in tumult and a world in travail, and shall answer in the well worn words of a great scientist: ‘And yet - it moves.’”