What is History? E.H.Carr

THE HISTORIAN AND HIS FACTS

The fundamental question that E.H.Carr arises in his fascinating book is the  title itself, that is What is History? As a first answer to this question, in his first chapter titled " The Historians and His Facts" He argues that history is a continues process of Interaction between the historians and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and past.

He points out various  approach in doing history, like When Ranke  in the 1830s, in legitimate protest against moralising history, remarked the task of the  historians was simply to show it really was. Later, the positivist anxious to stake out heir claim for history as a science, contributed the weight of their influence to this cult of facts. As the approach in positivism was to collect your facts and then draw a conclusion from those facts. Carr points out that, this view of history fitted in perfectly with the empiricist tradition which was dominant strain in British philosophy from locke and Bertrand Russel. In his understanding, historian consists of a corpus of ascertained facts and decide the destiny of facts.

Another important question that he addresses in this chapter is, what is the criterion which distinguishes the facts of history from other facts about the past? in Essence, What is a Historical Fact? He argues that, it is not the facts that any historian is primarily concerned  and remarks that "accuracy is a duty, not a virtue". We do not need to praise historian for his accuracy as accuracy is a necessary condition of his work but not his essential functions. While answering, why certain facts becomes history? He quotes Talcot Parsons who called  "science a selective system of cognitive orientations to reality". He points that Historian is necessarily is selective and if any belief that historical facts exist objectively and independently of the interpretation of the historian is a preposterous fallacy. He also bring your attention to the fact that not all facts becomes history which is matter of question.  We know a lot about what fifth century Greece looked like to an Athenian citizen; but hardly anything about what it looked like to a spartan, a corinthian, or a Theban- not to mention a persian or a slave or other non citizens residents in Athens.  What we know about the past is only that has been preselected and predetermined for us and this does not happened accidentally. This happends to us because people who were consciously or unconsciously imbued with a particular view and thought the facts which supported that view worth preserving.



This not only happends to the case of Greece, but much of the modern history of middle ages which says that the people of the middle ages were deeply concerned with religion is also one perspective which has been selected for us by generation of chroniclers who were professionally occupied in theory and practice of religion and preserved everything related to these facts. E.H. Carr explains the case of Russian peasant as devoutly religious was destroyed by the revolution in 1917.  The belief that people of middle ages are religious whether true or not , is indestructable,  because nearly all the known facts ab