"Great history is written precisely when the historian's
vision is illuminated by insights into the problems of the present."
E.H. Carr, What is History? p. 37
"It used to be said that facts speak for themselves.
This is, of course, untrue. 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."
― Edward Hallett Carr
Facts … are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes
inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on
chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what
tackle he chooses to use – these two factors being, of course, determined by
the kind of fish he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the
kind of facts he wants.
E.H. Carr, What is History?
"every sociological definition is at the bottom a
historical prognosis."
Leon Trotsky
You can never judge a history book by its cover. But you can
judge a book by the blurb on the back cover, especially when the historians praising
the book are broadly conservative ones.
While this new collection of articles contain E.H. Carr's
original title of his world-famous book, I somehow doubt that he would favour
the type of gender, racial or culturally-based historiography presented in this
book.
The central theme of Carr's book was how to connect the
writing of history with contemporary social, political and economic problems. As
the historian, R.G. Collingwood, said: "the historian must re-enact in
thought what has gone on in the mind of his dramatis personae."
While the introduction to this new collection of essays is
adequate, it leaves out the context and point of Carr's book, which was to
answer an attack on him by the writer and philosopher Isaiah Berlin.
As Ann Talbot writes out, "The book was in large measure a reply to
Berlin's essay Historical Inevitability, in which he had criticised those who
believed in the "vast impersonal forces" of history rather than giving
priority to the role of the individual and the accidental. (Berlin 1997) Berlin
maintained that those who regarded history as a determined causal chain, in the
manner of Hegel or Marx, denied the role of free will and the individual
responsibility of history's tyrants for the crimes they committed. Both Carr
and Berlin wrote with sparkling wit.
What was at issue was Britain's attitude to the Soviet Union
and its place in a putative nuclear war. The counterfactuals that Carr had in
mind were those that suggested that some other outcome had been possible in
Russia, that the 1917 Revolution was not inevitable, that the Bolsheviks might
not have come to power and that instead, the Provisional Government might have
succeeded in maintaining its grip on events and managed to establish a
parliamentary system. An ideological dispute of this kind is so very un-British
that there is not even a satisfactory English word for it, so I will use the
German word. What we have here is a very British Historikerstreit.
It was a dispute conducted in the most gentlemanly, oblique
and mediated of terms, and both sides were more likely to appeal to the
commonsense of the average Times reader than high theory, but a
Historikerstreit it was nonetheless. The national peculiarities of the time and
class should not lead us to suppose that theoretical questions were not
involved any more than we should suppose that political questions were not
involved simply because they remained, for the most part, unstated".This
kind of dispute, however gentlemanly, is a very rare occurrence in today's
heavily sanitised academic world.
Despite being called a diverse set of essayists, what these
historians write about has a common thread: they reflect a modern-day
preoccupation with gender, race, and sexuality. Titles such as "Can and
should we queer the past?", "How can we write the history of
empire?" and "Can we recover the lost lives of women?" and a
debate over the removal of statues set the tone for the rest of the book.
If the debate over removing a few reactionary statues were
all there was, then that would be fine. The middle-class layer behind the
removal of revolutionary figures has a far more right-wing and sinister agenda.
In some cases, the demand and removal of progressive and revolutionary figures
such as Abraham Lincoln are deeply reactionary and troubling.
There is nothing progressive in the destruction of statues
and monuments that memorialise the American Revolution and the Civil War
leaders such as Lincoln. As Leon Trotsky wrote, "for argument's sake, let
us grant that all previous revolutionary history and, if you please, all
history, in general, is nothing but a chain of mistakes. But what to do about
present-day reality? What about the colossal army of permanently unemployed,
the pauperised farmers, the general decline of economic levels, the approaching
war? The sceptical wiseacres promise us that sometime in the future, they will
catalogue all the banana peels on which the great revolutionary movements of
the past have slipped. But will these gentlemen tell us what to do today, right
now"?
As Trotsky said, the study of history is important to make
sense of the world. Although Carr was not a Marxist historian, he knew enough
about Marx to know that people do not make history as they please. According to
Marx, "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please;
they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under the
circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The
tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the
living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionising themselves
and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such
epochs of revolutionary crisis, they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the
past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes
in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise
and borrowed language".
The first chapter by Peter Frankopan titled Why global
history matters while not breaking any new ground is hard not to disagree with.
Alex Von Tunzelmann's chapter is a little more contentious, examining history
at the movies. I am afraid I have to disagree with Katrina Gulliver
when she says, "Tunzelmann takes the optimistic view that even inaccurate
history might pique people's interest and lead them to engage with more
meaningful sources".Bad history is what it is and should be opposed in
both movies and academia.
It should be said upfront that I love historical movies. It
would be hard to find a person that does not. It must also be said that most
historical movies are simply misleading, lazy and, in many cases, an outright and
deliberate falsification of history. Many historical dramas today are made by
a self-obsessed middle-class layer who,
instead of wanting to change the social conditions for the bulk of the
population, want to change the historical facts to suit their ideological prejudices.
The result, in many cases, is dreadful movies that make them a pile of money.
One film mentioned by Tunzelmann is James Cameron's Titanic.
By any stretch of the imagination, this is an extremely bad film. Titanic made close
to one billion dollars and was lauded as a great film. As David Walsh wrote, "The
response to Titanic is so great and so out of proportion to the quality of the
film itself that one is forced to view its success as a social phenomenon
worthy of analysis. This is not simply a film—it is virtually a cause. Its
admirers defend it with fervour and admit no challenges and no criticisms—it is
not simply a 'good' film or a 'wonderful' film. It must be acknowledged as 'the
greatest film of all time.'
It is hard to know where to start with Justin Bengry's essay,
Can and should we queer the past?. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, there is either
bad history or good history but no queer history. If only Bengry were talking
about the study of homosexuality through the ages, this would be a legitimate
field of study, but unfortunately, there is an agenda here. The promotion of so-called
gender, race and sexuality is being pushed out not by the working class but by
a self-obsessed section of the middle class. This is not about social equality
or democratic rights. It is about money and power.
This modern-day campaign for want of a better word has
nothing to do with left-wing politics and certainly has nothing to do with Marxism.
It is the product of decades of ideological and political reaction. It has more
to do with the politics of envy than it does with socialism.
Helen Carr's piece on the history of emotions promotes the "Cultural
Turn" genre. Carr's use of this genre has more in common with writer and
historian Stuart Hall than with her great grandfather. As Paul Bond perceptively
writes in his obituary of Hall," Stuart Hall, who died in London February
10 at the age of 82, was the academic figure most closely identified with the
growth of Cultural Studies in British universities. His obituaries have been
fulsome. Cultural Studies originated as part of an attack on revolutionary
Marxism, directed above all against its contemporary expression, Trotskyism.
The academic field sought to shift the focus of social criticism away from
class and onto other social formations, thus promoting the development of
identity politics. Its establishment, in the final analysis, was a hostile
response to the gains made by the Trotskyist movement in Britain from the 1950s
onwards.
Another genre covered in the book is 'history from below' –popularised
by E. P Thompson and other leading historians in the Communist Party Historians
Group. Lucien Febvre originally used the phrase in 1932, 'Histoire vue d'en bas
et non d'en haut' roughly translated by Google as 'history seen from below and
not from above. Perhaps the most famous book produced by this genre was E. P.
Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. Despite containing some
valuable insights, Thompson saw the development of the English working class
from a purely nationalist perspective.
He also played down the deeply right-wing nature of the
History from Below genre. As Ann Talbot writes, "The Communist Party
sponsored a form of "People's History", which is typified by A.L.
Morton's People's History of England in which the class character of earlier
rebels, revolutionaries and popular leaders was obscured by regarding them all
as representatives of a national revolutionary tradition. This historical
approach reflected the nationalism of the bureaucracy, their hostility to
internationalism and their attempts to form an unprincipled alliance with the
supposedly democratic capitalists against the fascist Axis countries. People's
history was an attempt to give some historical foundation to the policies of
Popular Front—the subordination of the working class to supposedly progressive
sections of the bourgeoisie and the limiting of political action to the defence
of bourgeois democracy—which provided a democratic facade to the systematic
murder of thousands of genuine revolutionaries, including Trotsky. It was the
approach that Christopher Hill was trained in, along with E.P. Thompson, Rodney
Hilton and Eric Hobsbawm, who were part of the Marxist Historians Group and
came under the influence of Maurice Dobb and Dona Torr".
When there are many essays in a book, there is usually a
conclusion where the editors usually sum up what has been written by all the
essayists. For some reason, this has not been done by these editors. Maybe
there is confusion over what the hell to do with a rather large number of very
conservative pieces of history.
So what is the general reader to make of this book. It is
clear that it is a very conservative piece of work and that the essayists were
carefully chosen to put forward complacent and largely reactionary
historiography. If this is Edward Hallett Carr's legacy, I am not sure he would
be too happy about it. Perhaps we should leave the last word to the great
historian "the facts of history never come to us "pure", since
they do not and cannot exist in a pure form: they are always refracted through
the mind of the recorder. It follows that when we take up a work of history,
our first concern should not be with the facts which it contains but with the
historian who wrote it."
