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1WHAT IS HISTORY?
2E. H. Carr
3 
4Edward Hallett Carr was bom in 1892 and educated at the Merchant Taylors' School,
5London, end Trinity College, Cambridge. He joined the Foreign Office in 1916, and, after
6numerous jobs in and connected with the F.O. at home and abroad, he resigned in 1936,
7and became Wilson Professor of International Politics at the University College of Wales,
8Aberystwyth. He was Assistant Editor of The Times from 1941 a, 1946, Tutor In Politics
9at Balliol College, Oxford, from 1953 to 1955, and became a Fellow of Trinity College,
10Cambridge, in 1955. Among his many publications are: The Romantic Exiles, The Twenty
11Year’s Crisis 1919-1939, Conditions of Peace, The Soviet Impact on the Western World,
12The New Society (1951). The first six volumes of his large-scale History of Soviet Russia
13has been published in Pelicans, including the Bolshevik Revolution, The Interregnum, and
14two volumes of Socialism in One Country. Professor Carr's most recent book, a collection
15of essays, is 1917 : Before and After (1968).
16 
17I. The Historian and His Facts
18 
19I OFTEN THINK IT ODD THAT IT SHOULD BE SO DULL, FOR A GREAT DEAL
20OF IT MUST BE INVENTION.
21 
22• -Catherine Morland on History
23 
24WHAT is history ? Lest anyone think the question meaningless or superfluous, I will take
25as my text two passages relating respectively to the first and second incarnations of the
26Cambridge Modern History. Here is Acton in his report of October 1896 to the Syndics of
27the Cambridge University Press on the work which he had undertaken to edit:
28 
29It is a unique opportunity of recording, in the way most useful to the greatest number, the
30fullness of the knowledge which the nineteenth century is about to bequeath.... By the
31judicious division of labour we should be able to do it, and to bring home to every man the
32last document, and the ripest conclusions of international research.
33 
34Ultimate history we cannot have in this generation; but we can dispose of conventional
35history, and show the point we have reached on the road from one to the other, now that
36all information is within reach, and every problem has become capable of solution.' And
37almost exactly sixty years later Professor Sir George Clark, in his general introduction to
38the second Cambridge Modern History , commented on this belief of Acton and his
39collaborators that it would one day be possible to produce 'ultimate history', and went on:
40 
41Historians of a later generation do not look forward to any such prospect. They expect
42their work to be superseded again and again. They consider that knowledge of the past has
43come down through one or more human minds, has been 'processed' by them, and
44therefore cannot consist of elemental and impersonal atoms which nothing can alter.... The
45exploration seems to be endless, and some impatient scholars take refuge in scepticism, or
46at least in the doctrine that, since all historical judgements involve persons and points of
47view, one is as good as another and there is no 'objective' historical truth.
48 
49Where the pundits contradict each other so flagrantly, the held is open to inquiry. I hope
50that J am sufficiently up-to-date to recognize that anything written in the 1890s must be
51nonsense. But I am not yet advanced enough to be committed to the view that anything
52written in the 1950s necessarily makes sense. Indeed, it may already have occurred to you
53that this inquiry is liable to stray into something even broader than the nature of history.
54The clash between Acton and Sir George Clark is a reflection of the change in our total
55outlook on society over the interval between these two pronouncements. Acton speaks out
56of the positive belief, the clear-eyed self-confidence, of the later Victorian age; Sir George
57Clark echoes the bewilderment sad distracted scepticism of the beat generation. When we
58attempt to answer the question 'What is history?’ our answer, consciously or
59unconsciously, reflects our own position in time, and forms part of our answer to the
60broader question what view we take of the society in which we live. I have no fear that my
61subject may, On closer inspection, seem trivial. I am afraid only that I may seem
62presumptuous to have broached a question so vast and so important.
63 
64The nineteenth century was a great age for facts.’ What I want', said Mr. Gradgrind in
65Ward Times, 'is Facts.... Facts alone are wanted in life.' Nineteenth-century historians on
66the whole agreed with him. When Ranke in the 1830s, in legitimate protest against
67moralizing history, remarked that the task of the historian was 'simply to show how it
68really was ( wei es eigentlich gewesen )', this not very profound aphorism had an
69astonishing success. Three generations of German, British, and even French historians
70marched into battle intoning the magic words 'Wieu eigendich gewesen ' like an incantation
71- designed, like most incantations, to save them from the tiresome obligation to think for
72themselves. The Positivists, anxious to stake out their claim for history as a science,
73contributed the weight of their influence to this cult of facts. First ascertain the facts, said
74the Positivists, then draw your conclusions from them. In Great Britain, this view of
75history fitted in perfectly with the empiricist addition which was the dominant strain in
76British philosophy from Locke to Bertrand Russell. The empirical theory of knowledge
77presupposes a complete separation between subject and object. Pacts, like sense-
78impressions, impinge on the observer from outside and are independent of his
79consciousness. The process of reception is passive: having received the data, he then acts
80on them. The Oxford Shorter English Dictionary, a useful but tendentious work of the
81empirical school, clearly marks the separateness of the two processes by defining a fact as
82'a datum of experience as distinct from conclusions'. This is what may be called the
83common-sense view of history. History consists of a corpus of ascertained facts. The facts
84are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions and so on, like fish on the fish
85monger's slab. The historian collects them, takes them home, and cooks and serves them in
86whatever style appeals to him. Acton, whose culinary tastes were austere, wanted them
87served plain. In his letter of instructions to contributors to the first Cambridge Modem
88History he announced the requirement 'that our Waterloo must be one that satisfies French
89and English, German and Dutch alike; that nobody can tell, without examining the list of
90authors, where the Bishop of Oxford laid down the pen and whether Fairbairn or Gasquet,
91Liebermann or Harrison it up'.' Even Sir George Clark critical as he was of Acton’s
92attitude, himself contrasted the 'hard core of facts in history with the 'surrounding pulp of
93disputable interpretation" - forgetting perhaps that the pulpy part of the fruit is more
94rewarding than the hard core. First get your facts straight, then plunge at your peril into the
95shifting sands of interpretation - that is the ultimate wisdom of the empirical, common-
96sense school of history. It recalls the favourite dictum of the great liberal journalist C. P.
97Scott: 'Facts are sacred, opinion is free.'
98 
99Now this clearly will not do. I shall not embark on a philosophical discussion of the nature
100of our knowledge of the past. Let us assume for present purposes that the fact that- Caesar
101crossed the Rubicon and the fact there is a table in the middle of the room are fan of the
102same or of a comparable order, that both these facts enter our consciousness in the same or
103in a comparable manner, and that both have the same objective character in relation to the
104person who knows them. But, even on this bold and not very plausible assumption, our
105argument at mice runs into the difficulty that not all facts about the past are historical
106facts, or are treated as such by the historian. What is the criterion which distinguishes the
107facts of history from other fan about the past?
108What is a historical fact? This is a crucial question into which we must look a little more
109closely. According to the commonsense view, there are certain basic facts which are the
110same for all historians and which form, so to speak, the backbone of history - the fact, for
111example, that the Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066. But this view calls for two
112observations. In the first place, it is not with facts like these that the historian is primarily
113concerned. It is no doubt important to know that the great battle was fought in 1066 and
114not in 1065 or 1067, and that it was fought at Hastings and not at Eastbourne or Brighton.
115The historian must not get these things wrong. But when points of this kind are raised, I
116am reminded of Housman's remark that 'accuracy is a duty, not a virtue'." To praise a
117historian for his accuracy is like praising an architect for using well-seasoned timber or
118properly mixed concrete in his building. It is a necessary condition of his work, but not his
119essential function. It is precisely for matters of this kind that the historian is entitled to rely
120on what have been called the 'auxiliary sciences' of history archaeology, epigraphy,
121numismatics, chronology, and so forth. The historian is not required to have the special
122skills which enable the expert to determine the origin and period of a fragment of pottery
123or marble, to decipher an obscure inscription, or to make the elaborate astronomical
124calculations necessary to establish a precise date. These so-called basic facts, which are
125the same for all historians, commonly belong to the category of the raw materials of the
126historian rather than of history itself. The second observation is that the necessity to
127establish these basic facts rests not on any quality in the facts themselves, but on an a
128priori decision of the historian. In spite of C. P. Scott's motto, every journalist knows
129today that the most effective way to influence opinion is by the selection and arrangement
130of the appropriate facts. It used to be said that facts speak for themselves. This is, of
131course, untrue. The facts, speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides
132to which facts to give the door, and in what order or context. It was, I think, one of
133Pirandello's characters who said that a fact is like a sack - it won't stand up till you've put
134something in it, The only reason why we are interested to know that the battle was fought
135at Hastings in 1066 is that historians regard it as a major historical event. It is the historian
136who has decided for his own reasons that Caesar's crossing of that petty stream, the
137Rubicon, is a fact of history, whereas the crossing of the Rubicon by millions of other
138people before or since interests nobody at all. The fact that you arrived in this building
139half an hour ago on foot, or on a bicycle, or in a car, is just as much a fact about the past as
140the fact that Caesar crossed the Rubicon. But it will probably be ignored by historians.
141Professor Talcott Parsons once called science 'a selective system of cognitive orientations
142to reality'. It might perhaps have been put more simply. But history is, among other things,
143that. The historian is necessarily selective. The belief in a hard core of historical facts
144existing objectively and independently of the interpretation of the historian is a
145preposterous fallacy, but one which it is very hard to eradicate.
146 
147Let us take a look at the process by which a mere fact about the past is transformed into a
148fact of history. At Stalybridge Wakes in 1850, a vendor of gingerbread, as the result of
149some petty dispute, was deliberately kicked to death by an angry mob. Is this a fact of
150history? A year ago I should unhesitatingly have said 'no'. It was recorded by an eye-
151witness in some little- known memoirs"; but I had never seen it judged worthy of mention
152by any historian. A year ago Dr Kitson Clark cited it in his Ford lectures in Oxford. Does
153this make it into a historical fact? Not, I think, yet. Its present status, I suggest, is that it
154has been proposed for membership of the select club of historical facts. It now awaits a
155seconder and sponsors. It may be that in the course of the next few years we shall see this
156fact appearing first in footnotes, then in the text, of articles and books about nineteenth-
157century England, and that in twenty or thirty years' time it may be a well-established
158historical fact. Alternatively, nobody may take it up, in which case it will relapse into the
159limbo of unhistorical facts about the past from which Dr Kitson Clark has gallantly
160attempted to rescue it. What will decide which of these two things will happen? It will
161depend, I think, on whether the thesis or interpretation in support of which Dr Kitson
162Clark cited this incident is accepted by other historians as valid and significant. Its status
163as a historical fact will turn on a question of interpretation. This element of interpretation
164enters into every fact of history.
165 
166May I be allowed a personal reminiscence. When I studied ancient history in this
167university many years ago, I had as a special subject 'Greece in the period of the Persian
168Wars'. I collected fifteen or twenty volumes on my shelves and took it far granted that
169there, recorded in these volumes, I had all the facts relating to my subject. Let us assume -
170it was very nearly true - that those volumes contained all the facts about it that were then
171known, or could be known. It never occurred to me to inquire by what accident or process
172of attrition that minute selection of facts, out of all the myriad facts that must once have
173been known to somebody, had survived to become tire facts of history. I suspect that even
174today one of the fascinations of ancient and medieval history is that it gives us the illusion
175of having all the facts at our disposal within a manageable compass: the nagging
176distinction between the facts of history and other facts about the past vanishes, because the
177few known facts are all facts of history. As Bury, who had worked in both periods, said,
178'the records of ancient and medieval history are starred with lacunae. ' History has been
179called an enormous jig-saw with a lot of missing parts. But the main trouble does not
180consist in the lacunae. Our picture of Greece in the fifth century B.C. is defective not
181primarily because so many of the bits have been accidentally lost, but because it is, by and
182large, the picture formed by a tiny group of people in the city of Athens. We know a lot
183about what fifth-century Greece looked like to an Athenian citizen; but hardly anything
184about what it looked like to a Spartan, a Corinthian, or a Theban - not to mention a
185Persian, or a slave or other non-citizen resident in Athens. Our picture has been
186preselected and predetermined for us, not so much by accident as by people who were
187consciously or unconsciously imbued with a particular view and thought the facts which
188supported that view worth preserving. In the same way, when I read in a modern history of
189the Middle Ages that the people of the Middle Ages were deeply concerned with religion,
190 
191I wonder how we know this, and whether it is true. What we know as the facts of medieval
192history have almost all been selected for us by generations of chroniclers who were
193professionally occupied in the theory and practice of religion, and who therefore thought it
194supremely important, and recorded everything relating to it, and not much else. The
195picture of the Russian peasant as devoutly religious was destroyed by the revolution of
1961917- The picture of medieval man as devoutly religious, whether true or not, is
197indestructible, because nearly all the known facts about him were preselected for us by
198people who believed it, and wanted others to believe it, and a mass of other facts, in which
199we might possibly have found evidence to the contrary, has been lost beyond recall. The
200dead hand of vanished generations of historians, scribes, and chroniclers has determined
201beyond the possibility of appeal the pattern of the past.’ The history we read;' writes
202Professor Barraclough, himself trained as a medievalist, 'though based on facts, is, strictly
203speaking, not factual at all, but a series of accepted judgements."
204 
205But let us turn to the different, but equally grave, plight of the modern historian. The
206ancient or medieval historian may be grateful for the vast winnowing process which, over
207the years, has put at his disposal a manageable corpus of historical facts. As Lytton
208Strachey said, in his mischievous way, 'ignorance is the first requisite of the historian,
209ignorance which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits.'" When I am tempted, as
210I sometimes am, to envy the extreme competence of colleagues engaged in writing ancient
211or medieval history, I find consolation in the reflexion that they are so competent mainly
212because they are so ignorant of their subject. The modern historian enjoys none of the
213advantages of this built-in ignorance. He must cultivate this necessary ignorance for
214himself - the more so the nearer he comes to his own times. He has the dual task of
215discovering the few significant facts and turning them into facts of history, and of
216discarding the many insignificant facts as unhistorical. But this is the very converse of the
217nineteenth- century heresy that history consists of the compilation of a maximum number
218of irrefutable and objective facts. Anyone who succumbs to this heresy will either have to
219give up history as a bad job, and take to stamp -collecting or some other form of
220antiquarianism, or end in a madhouse. It is this heresy which during the past hundred years
221has had such devastating effects on the modern historian, producing in Germany, in Great
222Britain, and in the United States, a vast and growing mass of dry-as-dust factual histories,
223of minutely specialized mono- graphs of would-be historians knowing more and more
224about less and less, sunk without trace in an ocean of facts, It was, I suspect, this heresy -
225rather than the alleged conflict between liberal and Catholic loyalties - which frustrated
226Acton as a historian. In an early essay he said of his teacher Dollinger: 'He would not write
227with imperfect materials, and to him the materials were always imperfect.' Acton was
228surely here pronouncing an anticipatory verdict on himself, on that strange phenomenon of
229a historian whom many would regard as the most distinguished occupant the Regius Chair
230of Modern History in this university has ever had - but who wrote no history. And Acton
231wrote his own epitaph, in the introductory note to the first volume of the Cambridge
232Modern History published just after his death, when he lamented that the requirements
233pressing on the historian 'threaten to turn him from a man of letters into the compiler of an
234encyclopaedia'. Something had gone wrong. What had gone wrong was the belief in this
235untiring and unending accumulation of hard facts as the foundation of history, the belief
236that facts speak for themselves and that we cannot have too many facts, a belief at that
237time so unquestioning that few historians then thought it necessary - and some still think it
238unnecessary today - to ask themselves the question.
239 
240The nineteenth-century fetishism of facts was completed and justified by a fetishism of
241documents. The documents were the Art of the Covenant in the temple of facts. The
242reverent historian approached them with bowed head and spoke of than in awed tones. If
243you find it in the documents, it is so. But what, when we get down to it, do these
244documents - the decrees, the treaties, the rent-rolls, the blue books, the official
245correspondence, the private letters and diaries - tell us. No document am tell us more than
246what the author of the document thought - what he thought had happened, what he thought
247ought to hap- pen or would happen, or perhaps only what he wanted others no think he
248thought, or even only what he himself thought he thought. None of this means anything
249until she historian has got to work on it and deciphered it. The facts, whether found in
250documents or not, have still to be processed by the historian before he can make any use of
251them: the we he makes of them is, if I may put it that way, the processing process.
252 
253Let me illustrate what I am trying to say by an example which I happen to know well.
254When Gustav Stresemann, the Foreign Minister of the Weimar Republic, died in 1929, he
255left behind him an enormous mass - 300 boxes full - of papers, official, semi-official, and
256private, nearly all relating to the six years of his tenure of office as Foreign Minister. His
257friends and relatives naturally thought that a monument should be raised to the memory of
258so great a man. His faithful secretary Bernhard got to work; and within three years there
259appeared three massive volumes, of some 600 pages each, of selected documents from the
260300 boxes, with the impressive title Stresemanns Vermachtnis. In the ordinary way the
261documents themselves would have mouldered away in some cellar or attic and
262disappeared for ever; or perhaps in a hundred years or so some curious scholar would have
263come upon them and set out to compare them with Bernhard's text. What happened was
264far more dramatic. In 1945 the documents fell into the hands of the British and American
265Governments, who photographed the lot and put the photostats at the disposal of scholars
266in the Public Record office in London and in the National Archives in Washington, so
267that, if we have sufficient patience and curiosity, we can discover exactly what Bernhard
268did. What he did was neither very unusual nor very shocking. When Stresemann died, his
269western policy seemed to have been crowned with a series of brilliant successes - Locarno,
270a the admission of Germany to the League of Nations, the Dawes and Young plans and the
271American loans, the withdrawal of allied occupation armies from the Rhineland. This
272seemed the important and rewarding: part of Stresemmn's foreign policy; and it was not
273unnatural that it should have been over-represented in Bernhard's selection of documents.
274Stresemann's eastern policy, on the other hand, his relations with the Soviet Union,
275seemed to have led nowhere in particular; and, since masses of documents about
276negotiations which yielded only trivial results were not very interesting and added nothing
277to Stresemann's reputation, the process of selection could be more rigorous. Stresemann in
278fact devoted a far more constant and anxious attention to relations with the Soviet Union,
279and they played a far larger part in his foreign policy as a whole, than the reader of the
280Bernhard selection would surmise. But the Bern- hard volumes compare favourably, I
281suspect, with many published collections of documents on which the ordinary historian
282implicitly relies.
283 
284This is not the end of my story. Shortly after the publication of Bernhard's volumes, Hitler
285came into power. Stresemann's name was consigned to oblivion in Germany, and the
286volumes disappeared from circulation: many, perhaps most, of the copies must have been
287destroyed. Today Stresemanns Vernachtnis is a rather rare book. But in the west
288Stresemann's reputation stood high. In 1935 an English publisher brought out an
289abbreviated translation of Bernhard's work - a selection from Bernhard's selection; perhaps
290one-third of the original was omitted. Sutton, a well-known translator from the German,
291did his job competently and well. The English version, he explained in the preface, was
292'slightly condensed, but only by the omission of a certain amount of what, it was felt, was
293more ephemeral matter ... of little interest to English readers or students'. This again is
294natural enough. But the result is that Stresemann's eastern policy, already under-
295represented in Bernhard, recedes still further from view, and the Soviet Union appears in
296Sutton's volumes merely as an occasional and rather unwelcome intruder in Stresemann's
297predominantly western foreign policy. Yet it is safe to say that, for all except a few
298specialists, Sutton and not Bernhard - and still less the documents themselves - represents
299for the western world the authentic voice of Stresemann. Had the documents perished in
3001945 in the bombing, and had the remaining Bernhard volumes disappeared, the
301authenticity and authority of Sutton would never have been questioned. Many printed
302collections of documents, gratefully accepted by historians in default of the originals, rest
303on no securer basis than this.
304 
305But I want to carry the story one step further. Let us forget about Bernhard and Sutton, and
306be thankful that we can, if we choose, consult the authentic papers of a leading participant
307in some important events of recent European history. What do the papers tell us ? Among
308other things they contain records of some hundreds of Stresemann's conversations with the
309Soviet Ambassador in Berlin and of a score or so with Chicherin. These records have one
310feature in common. They depict Stresemann as having the lion's share of the conversations
311and reveal his arguments as invariably well put and cogent, while those of his partner are
312for the most part scanty, confused, and unconvincing. This is a familiar characteristic of
313all records of diplomatic conversations. The documents do not tell us what happened, but
314only what Streetman thought had happened, or what he wanted others to think, or perhaps
315what he wanted himself to think, had happened. It was not Sutton or Bernhard, but
316Stresemann himself, who started the process of selection. And if we had, say, Chicherin's
317records of these same conversations, we should still learn from them only what Chicherin
318thought, and what really happened would still have to be reconstructed in the mind of the
319historian. Of course, facts and documents are essential to the historian. But do not make a
320fetish of them. They do not by themselves constitute history; they provide in themselves
321no ready-made answer to this tiresome question 'What is history?'
322 
323At this point I should like to say a few words on the question why nineteenth-century
324historians were generally indifferent to the philosophy of history. The term was invented
325by Voltaire, and has since been used in different senses; but I shall take it to mean, if I use
326it at all, our answer to the question,’ What is history-' The nineteenth century was, for the
327intellectuals of western Europe, a comfortable period exuding confidence and optimism.
328The facts were on the whole satisfactory; and the inclination to ask and answer awkward
329questions about them was correspondingly weak. Ranke piously believed that divine
330providence would take care of the meaning of history, if he took care of the facts; and
331Burckhardt, with a more modern touch of cynicism, observed that 'we are not initiated into
332the purposes of the eternal wisdom'. Professor Butterfield as late as 1931 noted with
333apparent satisfaction that 'historians have reflected little upon the nature of things, and
334even the nature of their own subject'.' But my predecessor in these lectures, Dr A. L.
335Rowse, more justly critical, wrote of Sir Winston Churchill's World Crisis - his book
336about the First World War - that, while it matched Trotsky's History of the Russian
337Revolution in personality, vividness, and vitality, it was inferior in one respect: it had 'no
338philosophy of history behind it'.' British historians refused to be drawn, not because they
339believed that history had no meaning, but because they believed that its meaning was
340implicit and self-evident. The liberal nineteenth-century view of history had a close
341affinity with the economic doctrine of laissez-faire - also the product of a serene and self-
342confident outlook on the world. Let everyone get on with his particular job, and the hidden
343hand would take care of the universal harmony. The facts of history were themselves a
344demonstration of the supreme fact of a beneficent and apparently infinite progress towards
345higher things. This was the age of innocence, and historians walked in the Garden of Eden,
346without a scrap of philosophy to cover them, naked and unashamed before the god of
347history. Since then, we have known Sin and experienced a Fall; and those historians who
348today pretend to dispense with a philosophy of history Pre :merely trying, vainly and self-
349consciously, like members of a nudist colony, to recreate the Garden of Eden in their
350garden suburb. Today the awkward question can no longer be evaded.
351 
352During the past fifty years a good deal of serious work has been done on the question
353'What is history?' It was from Germany, the country which was to do so much to upset the
354comfortable reign of nineteenth-century liberalism, that the first challenge came in the
3551880s and 1890s to the doctrine of the primacy and autonomy of facts in history. The
356philosophers who made the challenge are now little more than names: Dilthey is the only
357one of them who has recently received some belated recognition in Great Britain. Before
358the turn of the century, prosperity and confidence were still too great in this country for
359any attention to be paid to heretics who attacked the cult of facts. But early in the new
360century, the torch passed to Italy, where Croce began to propound a philosophy of history
361which obviously owed much to German masters. All history is 'contemporary history',
362declared Croce,' meaning that history consists essentially in seeing the past through the
363eyes of the present and in the light of its problems, and that the main work of the historian
364is not to record, but to evaluate; for, if he does not evaluate, how can he know what is
365worth recording? In 1910 the American historian, Carl Becker, argued in deliberately
366provocative language that 'the facts of history do not exist for any historian till he creates
367them'. These challenges were for the moment little noticed. It was only after 1920 that
368Croce began to have a considerable vogue in France and Great Britain. This was not
369perhaps because Croce was a subtler thinker or a better stylist than his German
370predecessors, but because, after the First World War, the facts seemed to smile on us less
371propitiously than in the years before 1914, and we were therefore more accessible to a
372philosophy which sought to diminish their prestige. Croce was an important influence on
373the Oxford philosopher and historian Collingwood, the only British thinker in the present
374century who has made a serious contribution to the philosophy of history. He did not live
375to write the systematic treatise he had planned; but his published and unpublished papers
376on the subject were collected after his death in a volume entitled The Idea of History,
377which appeared in 1945-
378 
379The views of Collingwood can be summarized as follows. The philosophy of history is
380concerned neither with 'the past by itself nor with 'the historian's thought about it by
381itself, but with 'the two things in their mutual relations'. (This dictum reflects the two
382current meanings of the word 'history' - the inquiry conducted by the historian and the
383series of past events into which he inquires.) 'The past which a historian studies is not a
384dead past, but a past which in some sense is still living in the present.' But a past act is
385dead, i.e. meaningless to the historian, unless he can understand the thought that lay
386behind it. Hence 'all history is the history of thought', and 'history is the re-enactment in
387the historian's mind of the thought whose history he is studying'. The reconstitution of the
388past in the history,', mind is dependent on empirical evidence. But it is not in itself an
389empirical process, and cannot consist in a mere recital of facts. On the contrary, the
390process of reconstitution governs the selection and interpretation of the facts : this, indeed,
391is what makes them historical facts. ' History', says Professor Oakeshott, who on this point
392stands near to Collingwood, ‘is the historian's experience. It is " made " by nobody save
393the historian: to write history is the only way of making'.
394 
395This searching critique, though it may call for some serious reservations, brings to light
396certain neglected truths. In the first place, the faces of history never come to us 'pure',
397since they do not and cannot exist in a pure form: they are always refracted through the
398mind of the recorder. It follows that when we take up a work of history, our first concern
399should be not with the facts which it contains but with the historian who wrote it. Let me
400take as an example the great historian in whose honour and in whose name these lectures
401were founded. G. M. Trevelyan, as he tells us in his autobiography, was 'brought up at
402home on a somewhat exuberantly Whig tradition and he would not, I hope, disclaim the
403title if I described him as the last and not the least of the great English liberal historians of
404the Whig tradition. It is not for nothing that he traces back his family tree, through the
405great Whig historian George Otto Trevelyan, to Macaulay, incomparably the greatest of
406the Whig historians. Trevelyan's finest and maturest work, England under Queen Anne,
407was written against that background, and will yield its full meaning and significance to the
408reader only when read against that background. The author, indeed, leaves the reader with
409no excuse for failing to do so. For, if following the technique of connoisseurs of detective
410novels, you read the end first, you will find on the last few pages of the third volume the
411best summary known to me of what is nowadays called the Whig interpretation of history;
412and you will see that what Trevelyan is trying to do is to investigate the origin and
413development of the Whig tradition, and to root it fairly and squarely in the years after the
414death of its founder, William III. Though this is not, perhaps, the only conceivable
415interpretation of the events of Queen Anne's reign, it is a valid and, in Trevelyan's hands, a
416fruitful interpretation. But, in order to appreciate it at its' full value, you have to
417understand what the historian is doing. For if, as Collingwood says, the historian must re-
418enact in thought what has gone on in the mind of his dramatis personae, so the reader in
419his turn must re-enact what goes on in the mind of the historian. Study the historian before
420you begin to study the facts. This is, after all, not very abstruse. It is what is already done
421by the intelligent undergraduate who, when recommended to read a work by that great
422scholar Jones of St Jude's, goes round to a friend at St Jude's to ask what sort of chap
423Jones is, and what bees he has in his bonnet. When you read a work of history, always
424listen out for the buzzing. If you can detect none, either you are tone deaf or your historian
425is a dull dog. The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger's slab. They are like
426fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian
427catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to
428fish in and what tackle he chooses to use - these two factors being, of course, determined
429by the kind offish he wants to catch. By and lame, the historian will get the kind of facts
430he wants. History means interpretation. Indeed, if, standing Sir George Clark on his head,
431 
432I were to call history 'a hard core of interpretation surrounded by a pulp of disputable facts
433', my statement would, no doubt, be one-sided and misleading, but no more so, I venture to
434think, than the original dictum.
435 
436The second point is the more familiar one of the historian's need of imaginative
437understanding for the minds of the people with whom he is dealing, for the thought behind
438their acts: I say imaginative understanding', not 'sympathy', lest sympathy should be
439supposed to imply agreement. The nineteenth century was weak in medieval history,
440because it was too much repelled by the superstitious beliefs of the Middle Ages, and by
441the barbarities which they inspired, to have any imaginative understanding of medieval
442people. Or take Burckhardt's censorious remark about the Thirty Years War: It is
443scandalous for a creed, no matter whether it is Catholic or Protestant, to place its salvation
444above the integrity of the nation." It was extremely difficult for a nineteenth-century
445liberal historian, brought up to believe that it is right and praiseworthy to kill in defence of
446one's country, but wicked and wrong-headed to kill in defence of one's religion, to enter
447into the state of mind of those who fought the Thirty Years War. This difficulty is
448particularly acute in the held in which I am now working. Much of what has been written
449in English speaking countries in the last ten years about the Soviet Union, and in the
450Soviet Union about the English-speaking countries, has been vitiated by this inability to
451achieve even the most elementary measure of imaginative understanding of what goes on
452in the mind of the other party, so that the words and actions of the other are always made
453to appear malign, senseless, or hypocritical. History cannot be written unless the historian
454can achieve some kind of contact with the mind of those about whom he is writing.
455 
456The third point is that we can view the past, and achieve our understanding of the past,
457only through the eyes of the present. The historian is of his own age, and is bound to it by
458the conditions of human existence. The very words which he uses - words like democracy,
459empire, war, revolution - have current connotations from which he cannot divorce them.
460Ancient historians have taken to using words like polls and plebs in the original, just in
461order to show that they have not fallen into this trap. This does not help them. They, too,
462live in the present, and cannot cheat themselves into the past by using unfamiliar or
463obsolete words, any more than they would become better Greek or Roman historians if
464they delivered their lectures in a chilamys et a toga. The names by which successive
465French historians have described the Parisian crowds which played so prominent a role in
466the French revolution - les sans-vulottes, le peuple, la canaille, les bras-nus - are all, for
467those who know the rules of the game, manifestos of a political affiliation and of a
468particular interpretation. Yet the historian is obliged to choose: the use of language -
469forbids him to be neutral. Nor is it a matter of words alone. Over the past hundred years
470the changed balance of power in Europe has reversed the attitude of British historians to
471Frederick the Great. The changed balance of power within the Christian churches between
472Catholicism and Protestantism has profoundly altered their attitude to such figures as
473Loyola, Luther, ad Cromwell. It requires only a superficial knowledge of the work of
474French historians of the last forty years on the French revolution to recognize how deeply
475it has been affected by the Russian revolution of 1917- The historian belongs not to the
476past but to the present. Professor Trevor-Roper tells us that the historian 'ought to love the
477past'.' This is a dubious injunction. To love the past may easily be an expression of the
478nostalgic romanticism of old men and old societies, a symptom of loss of faith and interest
479in the present or future. Cliche for cliche, I should prefer the one about freeing oneself
480from 'the dead hand of the past'. The function of the historian is neither to love the past nor
481to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the
482understanding of the present.
483 
484If, however, these are some of the insights of what I may call the Collingwood view of
485history, it is time to consider some of the dangers. The emphasis on the role of the
486historian in the making of history tends, if pressed to its logical conclusion, to rule out any
487objective history at all: history is what the historian makes. Collingwood seems indeed, at
488one moment, in an unpublished note quoted by his editor, to have reached this conclusion :
489 
490St Augustine looked at history from the point of view of the early Christian; Tillamont,
491from that of a seventeenth-century Frenchman; Gibbon, from that of an eighteenth- century
492Englishman; Mommsen from that of a nineteenth-century German. There is no point in
493asking which was the right point of view. Each was the only one possible for the man who
494adopted
495 
496This amounts to total scepticism, like Froude's remark that history is 'a child's box of
497letters with which we can spell any word we please'." Collingwood, in his reaction against
498'scissors- and-paste history', against the view of history as a mere compilation of facts,
499comes perilously near to treating history as something spun out of the human brain, and
500leads back to the conclusion referred to by Sir George Clark in the passage which I quoted
501earlier, that there is no "objective" historical truth'. In place of the theory that history has
502no meaning, we are offered here the theory of an infinity of meanings, none any more
503right than any other - which comes to much the same thing. The second theory is surely as
504untenable as the first. It does not follow that, because a mountain appears to take on
505different because interpretation plays a necessary part in establishing the facts of history,
506and because no existing interpretation is wholly objective, one interpretation is as good as
507another, and the facts of history are in principle not amenable to objective interpretation. I
508shall have to consider at a later stage what exactly is meant by objectivity in history.
509 
510But a still greater danger lurks in the Collingwood hypothesis. If the historian necessarily
511looks at his period of history through, the eyes of his own time, and studies the problems
512of the past as a key to those of the present, will he not fall into a purely pragmatic view of
513the facts, and maintain that the criterion of a right interpretation is its suitability to some
514present purpose? On this hypothesis, the facts of history are nothing, interpretation is
515everything. Nietzsche had already enunciated the principle: 'The falseness of an opinion is
516not for us any objection to it. ... The question is how far it is life-furthering, life-
517preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-creating. The American pragmatists
518moved, less explicitly and less wholeheartedly, along the same line. Knowledge is
519knowledge for some purpose. The validity of the knowledge depends on the validity of the
520purpose, But even where no such theory has been professed, practice has often been no
521less disquieting. In my own held of study I have seen too many examples of extravagant
522interpretation riding roughshod over facts not to be impressed with the reality of this
523danger. It is not surprising that perusal of some of the more extreme products of Soviet
524and anti-Soviet schools of historiography should sometimes breed a certain nostalgia for
525that illusory nineteenth-century haven of purely factual history.
526 
527How then, in the middle of the twentieth century, are we to define the obligation of the
528historian to his facts ~ I trust that I have spent a sufficient number of hours in recent years
529chasing and perusing documents, and stuffng my historical narrative with properly
530footnoted facts, to escape the imputation of treating facts and documents too cavalierly.
531The duty of the historian to respect his facts is not exhausted by the obligation to see that
532his facts are accurate. He must seek to bring into the picture all known or knowable facts
533relevant, in one sense or another, to the theme on which he is engaged and to the
534interpretation proposed. If he seeks to depict the Victorian Englishman as a moral and
535rational being, he must not forget what happened at Starybridge Wakes in 1850. But this,
536in turn, does not mean that he can eliminate interpretation, which is the life-blood of
537history. Laymen - that is to say, non-academic friends or friends from other academic
538disciplines - sometimes ask me how the historian goes to work when he writes history.
539 
540The commonest assumption appears to be that the historian divides his work into two
541sharply distinguishable phases or periods. First, he spends a long preliminary period
542reading his sources and filling his notebooks with facts: then, when this is over, he puts
543away his sources, Fakes out his notebooks and writes his book from beginning to end.
544 
545This is to me an unconvincing and implausible picture. For myself, as soon as I have got
546going on a few of what I take to be the capital sources, the itch becomes too strong and I
547begin to write - not necessarily at the beginning, but somewhere, anywhere. Thereafter,
548reading and writing go on simultaneously. The writing is added to, subtracted from, re-
549shaped, cancelled, as I go on reading. The reading is guided and directed and made fruitful
550by the writing: the more I write, the more I know what I am looking for, the better I
551understand the significance and relevance of what I find. Some historians probably do all
552this preliminary writing in their head without using pen, paper, or typewriter, just as some
553people play chess in their heads without recourse to board and chessmen: this is a talent
554which I envy, but cannot emulate. But I am convinced that, for any historian worth the
555name, the two processes of what economists call 'input' and 'output' go on simultaneously
556and are, in practice, parts of a single process. If you try to separate them, or to give one
557priority over the other, you fall into one of two heresies. Either you write scissors-and-
558paste history without meaning or significance; or you write propaganda or historical
559fiction, and merely use facts of the past to embroider a kind of writing which has nothing
560to do with history.
561 
562Our examination of the relation of the historian to the facts of history finds us, therefore,
563in an apparently precarious situation, navigating delicately between the Scylla of an
564untenable theory of history as an objective compilation of facts, of the unqualified primacy
565of fact over interpretation, and the Charybdis of an equally untenable theory of history as
566the subjective product of the mind of the historian who establishes the facts of history and
567masters them through the process of interpretation, between a view of history having the
568centre of gravity in the past and a view having the centre of gravity in the present. But our
569situation is less precarious than it seems. We shall encounter the same dichotomy of fact
570and interpretation again in these lectures in other guises - the particular and the general,
571the empirical and the theoretical, the objective and the subjective. The predicament of the
572historian is a reflexion of the nature of man. Man, except perhaps in earliest infancy and in
573extreme old age, is not totally involved in his environment and unconditionally subject to
574it. On the other hand, he is never totally independent of it and its unconditional master.
575 
576The relation of man to his environment is the relation of the historian to his theme. The
577historian is neither the humble slave nor the tyrannical master of Ids facts. The relation
578between the historian and his facts is one of equality, of give-and-take. As any working
579historian knows, if he stops to reflect what he is doing as he thinks and writes, the
580historian is engaged on a continuous process of moulding his facts to his interpretation and
581his interpretation to his facts. It is impossible to assign primacy to one over the other.
582 
583The historian starts with a provisional selection of facts, and a provisional interpretation in
584the light of which that selection has been made - by others as well as by himself. As he
585works, both the interpretation and the selection and ordering of facts undergo subtle and
586perhaps partly unconscious changes, through the reciprocal action of one or the other. And
587this reciprocal action also involves reciprocity between present and past, since the
588historian is part of the present and the facts belong to the past. The historian and the facts
589of history are necessary to one another. The historian without his facts is rootless and
590futile; the facts without their historian are dead and meaningless. My first answer therefore
591to the question 'What is history?' is that it is a continuous process of interaction between
592the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past.
5932. Society and the individual
594 
595THE question which comes first - society or the individual - is like the question about the
596hen and the egg. Whether you treat it as a logical or as a historical question, you can make
597no statement about it, one way or the other, which does not have to be corrected by an
598opposite, and equally one-sided, statement. Society and the individual are inseparable;
599they are necessary and complementary to each other, not opposites. 'No man is an island,
600entire of itself;' in Dome's famous words: 'every man is a piece of the continent, a part of
601the main.' That is an aspect of the truth. On the other hand, take the dictum of J. S. Mill,
602the classical individualist: 'Men are not, when brought together, converted into another
603kind of substance. ‘Of course not. But the fallacy is to suppose that they existed, or had
604any kind of substance, before being 'brought together'. As soon as we are born, the world
605gets to work on us and transforms us from merely biological into social units. Every
606human being at every stage of history or pre-history is born into a society and from his
607earliest years is moulded by that society. The language which he speaks is not an
608individual inheritance, but a social acquisition from the group in which he grows up. Both
609language and environment help to determine the character of his thought; his earliest ideas
610come to him from others. As has been well said, thee individual apart from society would
611be both speechless and mindless. The lasting fascination of the Robinson Crusoe myth is
612due to its attempt to imagine an individual independent of society. The attempt breaks
613down. Robinson is not an abstract individual, but an Englishman from York; he carries his
614Bible with him and prays to his tribal God. The myth quickly bestows on him his Man
615Friday; and the building of a new society begins. The other relevant myth is that of Kirilov
616in Dostoyevsky's Devils who kills himself in order to demonstrate his perfect freedom.
617Suicide is the only perfectly free act open to individual man; every other act involves in
618one way or another his membership of society.
619 
620It is commonly said by anthropologists that primitive man is less individual and more
621completely moulded by his society than civilized man. This contains an element of truth.
622Simpler societies are more uniform, in the sense that they call for, and provide
623opportunities for, a far smaller diversity of individual skills and occupations than the more
624complex and advanced societies. Increasing individualization in this sense is a necessary
625product of modern advanced society, and runs through all its activities from top to bottom.
626But it would be a serious error to set up an antithesis between this process of
627individualization and the growing strength and cohesion of society. The development of
628society and the development of the individual go hand in hand and condition each other.
629Indeed what we mean by a complex or advanced society is a society in which the
630interdependence of individuals on one another has assumed advanced and complex forms.
631It would be dangerous to assume that the power of a modern national community to mould
632the character and thought of its individual members, and to produce a certain degree of
633conformity and uniformity among them, is any less than that of a primitive tribal
634community. The old conception of national character based on biological differences has
635long been exploded; but differences of national character arising out of different national
636backgrounds of society and education are difficult to deny. That elusive entity 'human
637nature' has varied so much from country to country and from century to century that it is
638difficult not to regard it as a historical phenomenon shaped by prevailing social conditions
639and conventions. There are many differences between, say, Americans, Russians, and
640Indians. But some, and perhaps the most important, of these differences take the form of
641different attitudes to social relations between individuals, or, in other words, to the way in
642which society should be constituted, so that the study of differences between American,
643Russian, and Indian society as a whole may well turn out to be the best way of studying
644differences between individual Americans, Russians, and Indians. Civilized man, like
645primitive man, is moulded by society just as effectively as society is moulded by him. You
646can no more have the egg without the hen than you can have the hen without the egg.
647 
648It would have been unnecessary to dwell on these very obvious truths but for the fact that
649they have been obscured for us by the remarkable and exceptional period of history from
650which the western world is only just emerging. The cult of individual- ism is one of the
651most pervasive of modern historical myths. According to the familiar account in
652Burckhardt's Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, the second part of which is subtitled
653'The Development of the Individual', the cult of the individual began with the Renaissance,
654when man, who had hitherto been 'conscious of himself only as a member of a race,
655people, party, family, or corporation', at length 'became a spiritual individual and
656recognized himself as such'. Later the cult was connected with the rise of capitalism and of
657Protestantism, with the beginnings of the industrial revolution, and with the doctrines of
658laissez-faire. The rights of man and the citizen proclaimed by the French revolution were
659the rights of the individual. Individualism was the basis of the great nineteenth- century
660philosophy of utilitarianism, Morley's essay On Compromise, a characteristic document of
661Victorian liberalism, called individualism and utilitarianism 'the religion of human
662happiness and well-being'. 'Rugged individualism' was the keynote of human progress.
663 
664This may be a perfectly sound and valid analysis of the ideology of a particular historical
665epoch. But what I want to make clear is that the increased individualization which
666accompanied the rise of the modern world was a -normal process of advancing
667civilization. A social revolution brought new social groups to positions of power. It
668operated, as always, through individuals and by offering fresh opportunities of individual
669development; and, since in the early stages of capitalism the units of production and
670distribution were largely in the hands of single individuals, the ideology of the new social
671order strongly emphasized the role of individual initiative in the social order. But the
672whole process was a social process representing a specific stage in historical development,
673and cannot be explained in terms of a revolt of individuals against society or of an
674emancipation of individuals from social restraints.
675 
676Many signs suggest that, even in the western world, which was the focus of this
677development and of this ideology, this period of history has reached its end: I need not
678insist here on the rise of what is called mass democracy, or on the gradual replacement of
679predominantly individual by predominantly collective forms of economic production and
680organization. But the ideology generated by this long and fruitful period is still a dominant
681force in western Europe and throughout the English- speaking countries. When we speak
682in abstract terms of the tension between liberty and equality, or between individual liberty
683and social justice, we are apt to forget that fights do not occur between abstract ideas.
684These are not struggles between individuals as such and society as such, but between
685groups of individuals in society, each group striving to promote social policies favourable
686to it and to frustrate social policies inimical to it. Individualism, in the sense no longer of a
687great social movement but of false opposition between individual and society, has become
688today the slogan of an interested group and, because of its controversial character, a
689barrier to our understanding of what goes on in the world. I have nothing to say against the
690cult of the individual as a protest against the perversion which treats the individual as a
691means and society or the state as the end. But we shall arrive at no real understanding
692either of the past or of the present if we attempt to operate with the concept of an abstract
693individual standing outside society.
694 
695And this brings me at last to the point of my long digression. The common-sense view of
696history treats it as something written by individuals about individuals. This view was
697certainly taken and encouraged by nineteenth-century liberal historians, and is not in
698substance incorrect. But it now seems over-simplified and inadequate, and we need to
699probe deeper. The knowledge of the historian is not his excusive individual possession:
700men, probably, of many generations and of many different countries have participated in
701accumulating it. The men whose actions the historian studies were not isolated individuals
702acting in a vacuum: they acted in the context, and under the impulse, of a past society. In
703my last lecture I described history as a process of interaction, a dialogue between the
704historian in the present and the facts of the past. I now want to inquire into the relative
705weight of the individual and social elements on both sides' of the equation. How far are
706historians single individuals, and how far products of their society and their period? How
707far are the facts of history facts about single individuals and how far social facts?
708 
709The historian, then, is an individual human being. Like other individuals, he is also a
710social phenomenon, both the product and the conscious or unconscious spokesman of the
711society to which he belongs; it is in this capacity that he approaches the facts of the
712historical past. We sometimes speak of the course of history as a 'moving procession'. The
713metaphor is fair enough, provided it does not tempt the historian to think of himself as an
714eagle surveying the scene from a lonely crag or as a V.I.P. at the saluting base. Nothing of
715the kind ! The historian is just another dim figure trudging along in another part of the
716procession. And as the procession winds along, swerving now to the right and now to the
717left, and sometimes doubling back on itself, the relative positions of different parts of the
718procession are constantly changing, so that it may make perfectly good sense to say, for
719example, that we are nearer today to the Middle Ages than were our great-grandfathers a
720century ago, or that the age of Caesar is nearer to us than the age of Dante. New vistas,
721new angles of vision, constantly appear as the procession - and the historian with it -
722moves along. The historian is part of history. The point in the procession at which he finds
723himself determines his angle of vision over the past.
724 
725This truism is not less true when the period treated by the historian is remote from his own
726time. When I studied ancient history, the classics on the subject were - and probably still
727are - Grote's History of Greece and Mommsen's History of Rome. Grote, an enlightened
728radical- banker writing in the 1840s, embodied the aspirations of the rising and politically
729progressive British middle class in an idealized picture of Athenian democracy, in which
730Pericles figured as a Benthanite reformer and Athens acquired an empire in a fit of
731absence of mind. It may not be fanciful to suggest that Grote's neglect of the problem of
732slavery in Athens reflected the failure of the group to which he belonged to face the
733problem of the new English factory working class. Mommsen was a German liberal,
734disillusioned by the muddles and humiliations of the German revolution of 1848-9.
735 
736Writing in the 1850s - the decade which saw the birth of the name and concept of
737Realpolitik - Mommsen was imbued with the sense of need for a strong man to clear up
738the mess left by the failure of the German people to realize its political aspirations; and we
739shall never appreciate his history at its true value unless we realize that his well-known
740idealization of Caesar is the product of this yearning for the strong man to save Germany
741from ruin, and that the lawyer-politician Cicero that ineffective chatterbox and slippery
742procrastinator, has walked straight out of the debates of the Paulikirche in Frankfurt in
7431948. Indeed, I should not think it an outrageous paradox if someone were to say that
744Grote's History of Greece has quite as much to tell us today about the thought of the
745English philosophical radicals in the 1840s as about Athenian democracy in the fifth
746century B.C., or that anyone wishing to understand what 1848 did to the German liberals
747should take Mommsen's History of Rome as one of his text-books. Nor does this diminish
748their stature as great historical works. I have no patience with the fashion, set by Bury in
749his inaugural lecture, of pretending that Mommsen's greatness rests not on his History of
750Rome but on his corpus of inscriptions and his work on Roman constitutional law: this is
751to reduce history to the level of compilation. Great history is written precisely when the
752historian's vision of the past is illuminated by insights into the problems of the present.
753Surprise has often been expressed that Mommsen failed to continue his history beyond the
754fall of the republic. He lacked neither time, nor opportunity, nor knowledge. But, when
755Mommsen wrote his history, the strong man had not yet arisen in Germany. During his
756active career, the problem of what happened once the strong man had taken over was not
757yet actual. Nothing inspired Mommsen to project this problem back on to the Roman
758scene; and the history of the empire remained unwritten.
759 
760It would be easy to multiply examples of this phenomenon among modern historians. In
761my last lecture I paid tribute to G. M. Trevelyan's England under Queen Anne as a
762monument to the Whig tradition in which he had been reared. Let us now consider the
763imposing and significant achievement of one whom most of us would regard as the
764greatest British historian to emerge on the academic scene since the First World War: Sir
765Lewis Namier. Namier was a true conservative - not a typical English conservative who
766when scratched turns out to be 75 per cent a liberal, but a conservative such as we have
767not seen among British historians for more than a hundred years. Between the middle of
768the last century and 1914 it was scarcely possible for a British historian to conceive of
769historical change except as change for the better. In the 1920s, we moved into a period in
770which change was beginning to be associated with fear for the future, and could be
771thought of as change for the worse - a period of the rebirth of conservative thinking. Like
772Acton's liberalism, Namier's conservatism derived both strength and profundity from
773being rooted in a continental background. Unlike Fisher or Toynbee, Namier had no roots
774in the nineteenth-century liberalism, and suffered from no nostalgic regrets for it. After the
775First World War and the abortive peace had revealed the bankruptcy of liberalism, the
776reaction could come only in one of two forms - socialism or conservatism. Namier
777appeared as the conservative historian. He worked in two chosen fields, and the choice of
778both was significant. In English history he went back to the last period in which the ruling
779class had been able to engage in the rational pursuit of position and power in an orderly
780and mainly static society. Somebody has accused Namier of taking mind out of history." It
781is not perhaps a very fortunate phrase, but one can see the point which the critic was trying
782to make. Politics at the accession of George III were still immune from the fanaticism of
783ideas, and of that passionate belief in progress, which was to break on the world with the
784French revolution and usher in the century of triumphant liberalism. No ideas, no
785revolution, no liberalism: Namier chose to give us a brilliant portrait of an age still safe -
786though not to d remain safe for long - from all these dangers.
787 
788But Namier's choice of a second subject was equally significant. Namier by-passed the
789great modern revolutions, English, French, and Russian - he wrote nothing of substance on
790any of them - and elected to give us a penetrating study of the European revolution of
7911 848 - a revolution that failed, a set-back all over Europe for the rising hopes of
792liberalism, a demonstration of the hollowness of ideas in face of armed force, of democrats
793when confronted with soldiers. The intrusion of ideas into the serious business of politics
794is futile and dangerous: Namier rubbed in the moral by calling this humiliating failure 'the
795revolution of the intellectuals'. Nor is our conclusion a matter of inference alone; for,
796though Namier wrote nothing systematic on the philosophy of history, he expressed
797himself in an essay published a few years ago with his usual clarity and incisiveness. 'The
798less, therefore,' he wrote, ‘man clogs the free play of his mind with political doctrine and
799dogma, the better for his thinking.' And, after mentioning, and not rejecting, the charge
800that he had taken the mind out of history, he went on:
801 
802Some political philosophers complain of a 'tired lull' and the absence at present of
803argument on general politics in this country; practical solutions are sought for concrete
804problems, while programmes and ideals are forgotten by both parties. But to me this
805attitude seems to betoken a greater national maturity, and I can only wish that it may long
806continue undisturbed by the workings of political philosophy.
807 
808I do not want at the moment to join issue with this view: I will reserve that for a later
809lecture. My purpose here is merely to ; understand or appreciate the work of the historian
810unless you have first grasped the standpoint from which he himself approached it;
811secondly, that that standpoint is itself rooted in a social and historical background. Do not
812forget that, as Marx once said, the educator himself has to be educated; in modern jargon,
813the brain of the brain-washer has itself been washed. The historian, before he begins to
814write history, is the product of history.
815 
816The historians of whom I have just spoken - Grote and Mommsen, Trevelyan and Namier
817- were each of them cast, so to speak, in a single social and political mould; no marked
818change of outlook occurs between their earlier and later work. But some historians in
819periods of rapid change have reflected in their writings not one society and one social
820order, but a succession of different orders. The best example known to me of this is the
821great German historian Meinecke, whose span of life and work was unusually long, and
822covered a series of revolutionary and catastrophic changes in the fortunes of his country.
823Here we have in effect three different Meineckes, each the spokesman; of a different
824historical epoch, and each speaking through one of his three major works. The Meinecke
825of Weltburgetthum and Nationalstaat, published in 1907, confidently sees the realization
826of German national ideals in the Bismarckian Reich and - like many nineteenth-century
827thinkers, from Mazzini onwards - identities nationalism with the highest form of
828universalism: this is the product of the baroque Wilhelmine sequel to the age of Bismarck.
829The Meinecke of Die idee der Staatsrason, published in 1925 speaks with the divided and
830bewildered mind of the Weimar Republic: the world of politics has become an arena of
831unresolved conflict between raison d'etat and a morality which is external to politics, but
832which cannot in the last resort override the life and security of the state. Finally the
833Meinecke of Die Entstehung des Historismus, published in 1936 when he had been swept
834from his academic honours by the Nazi flood, utters a cry of despair, rejecting a
835historicism which appears to recognize that 'Whatever is, is right' and tossing uneasily
836between the historical relative and a super-rational absolute. Last of all, when Meinecke in
837his old age had seen his country succumb to a military defeat more crushing than that of
8381918, he relapsed helplessly in Die Deutsche Katastrophe of 1946 into the belief in a
839history at the mercy ofblind, inexorable chance.' The psychologist or the biographer would
840be interested here in Meinecke's development as an individual: what interests the historian
841is the way in which Meinecke reflects back three - or even four - successive, and sharply
842contrasted, periods of present time into the historical past.
843 
844Or let us take a distinguished example nearer home. In the iconoclastic 1930s, when the
845Liberal Party had just been snuffed out as an effective force in British politics, Professor
846Butterfield wrote a book called The Whig Interpretation of History, which enjoyed a great
847and deserved success. It was a remarkable book in many ways - not least because, though
848it denounced the Whig Interpretation over some 130 pages, it did not (so far as I can
849discover without the help of an index) name a single Whig except Fox, who was no
850historian, or a single historian save Acton, who was no Whig But anything that the book
851lacked in detail and precision it made up for in sparkling invective. The reader was left in
852no doubt that the Whig interpretation was a bad thing; and one of the charges brought
853against it was that it 'studies the past with reference to the present'. On this point Professor
854Butterfield was categorical and severe:
855 
856The study of the past with one eye, so to speak, upon the present is the source of all sins
857and sophistries in history, is the essence of what we mean by the word 'unhistorical’ .
858 
859Twelve years elapsed. The fashion for iconoclasm went out. Professor Butterfield's
860country was engaged in a war often said to be fought in defence of the constitutional
861liberties embodied in the Whig tradition, under a great leader who constantly invoked the
862past 'with one eye, so to speak, upon the present'. In a small book called The Englishman
863and His History published in 1944, Professor Butterfield not only decided that the Whig
864interpretation of history was the 'English' interpretation, but spoke enthusiastically of ‘the
865Englishman's alliance with his history' and of the 'marriage between the present and the
866past'. To draw attention to these reversals of outlook is not an unfriendly criticism. It is not
867my purpose to refute the proto-Butterfield with the deutero-Butterfield, or to confront
868Professor Butterfield drunk with Professor Butterfield sober. I am fully aware that, if
869anyone took the trouble to peruse some of the things I wrote before, during, and after the
870war, he would have no difficulty at all in convincing me of contradictions and
871inconsistencies at least as glaring as any I have detected in others. Indeed, I am not sure
872that I should envy any historian who could honestly claim to have lived through the earth-
873shaking events of the past fifty years without some radical modifications of his outlook.
874My purpose is merely to show how closely the work of the historian mirrors the society in
875which he works. It is not merely the events that are in flux. The historian himself is in
876flux. When you take up a historical work, it is not enough to look for the author's name on
877the title-page: look also for the date of publication or writing - it is sometimes even more
878revealing. If the philosopher is right in telling us that we cannot step into the same river
879twice, it is perhaps equally true, and for the same reason, that two books cannot be written
880by the same historian.
881 
882And, if we move for a moment from the individual historian to what may be called broad
883trends in historical writing, the extent to which the historian is the product of his society
884becomes all the more apparent. In the nineteenth century, British historians with scarcely
885an exception regarded the course of history as a demonstration of the principle of progress:
886they expressed the ideology of a society in a condition of remarkably rapid progress.
887History was full of meaning for British historians, so long as it seemed to be going our
888way; now that it has taken a wrong turning, belief in the meaning of history has become a
889heresy. After the First World War, Toynbee made a desperate attempt to replace a linear
890view of history by a cyclical theory - the characteristic ideology of a society in decline.
891Since Toynbee's failure, British historians have for the most part been content to throw in
892their hands and declare that there is no general pattern in history at all. A banal remark by
893Fisher to that: effect has achieved almost as wide a popularity as Ranke's aphorism in the
894last century. If anyone tells me that the British historians of the last thirty years
895experienced this change of heart as the result of profound individual reflexion and of the
896burning of midnight oil in their separate garrets, I shall not think it necessary to contest the
897fact. But I shall continue to regard all this individual thinking and oil-burning as a social
898phenomenon, the product and expression of a fundamental change in the character and
899outlook of our society since 1914. There is no more significant pointer to the character of
900a society than the kind of history it writes or fails to write. Geyl, the Dutch historian, in his
901fascinating monograph translated into English under the title Napoleon For and Against,
902shows how the successive judgements of French nineteenth-century historians on
903Napoleon reflected the changing and conflicting patterns of French political life and
904thought throughout the century. The thought of historians, as of other human beings, is
905moulded by the environment of the time and place. Acton, who fully recognized this truth,
906sought for an escape from it in history itself:
907 
908History [he wrote] must be our deliverer not only from the undue influence of other times,
909but from the undue influence of our own, from the tyranny of environment and the
910pressure of the air we breathe.
911 
912This may sound too optimistic an assessment of the role of history. But I shall venture to
913believe that the historian who is most conscious of his own situation is also more capable
914of transcending it, and more capable of appreciating the essential nature of the differences
915between his own society and outlook and those of other periods and other countries, than
916the historian who loudly protests that he is an individual and not a social phenomenon.
917Man's capacity to rise above his social and historical situation seems to be conditioned by
918the sensitivity with which he recognizes the extent of his involvement in it.
919 
920In my first lecture I said: Before you study the history study the historian. Now I would
921add: Before you study the historian, study his historical and social environment. The
922historian, being an individual, is also a product of history and of society; and it is in this
923twofold light that the student of history must learn to regard him.
924 
925Fet us now leave the historian and consider the other side of my equation - the facts of
926history - in the light of the same problem. Is the object of the historian's inquiry the
927behaviour of individuals or the action of social forces? Here I am moving on to well-
928trodden ground. When Sir Isaiah Berlin published a few years ago a sparkling and popular
929essay entitled Historical Inevitability - to the main thesis of which I shall return later in
930these lectures - he headed it with a motto, culled from the works of Mr T. S. Eliot, 'Vast
931impersonal forces'; and throughout the essay he pokes fun at people who believe in 'vast
932impersonal forces' rather than individuals as the decisive factor in history. What I will call
933the Bad King John theory of history - the view that what matters in history is the character
934and behaviour of individuals - has a long pedigree. The desire to postulate individual
935genius as the creative force in history is characteristic of the primitive stages of historical
936consciousness. The ancient Greeks liked to label the achievements of the past with the
937names of eponymous heroes supposedly responsible for them, to attribute their epics to a
938bard called Homer, and their laws and institutions to a Lycurgus or a Solon. The same
939inclination reappears at the Renaissance, when Plutarch, the biographer- moralist, was
940much more popular and influential a figure in the classical revival than the historians of
941antiquity. In this country, in particular, we all learned this theory, so to speak, at our
942mother's knee; and today we should probably recognize that there is something childish, or
943at any rate childlike, about it. It had some plausibility in days when society was simpler,
944and public affairs appeared to be run by a handful of known individuals. It clearly does not
945fit the more complex society of our times; and the birth in the nineteenth century of the
946new science of sociology was a response to this growing complexity. Yet the old tradition
947dies hard. At the beginning of this century, 'history Is the biography of great men' was still
948a reputable dictum. Only ten years ago a distinguished American historian accused his
949colleagues, perhaps not too seriously, of the 'mass murder of historical characters) by
950treating them as 'puppets of social and economic forces'. Addicts of this theory tend
951nowadays to be shy about it; but, after some searching, I found an excellent contemporary
952statement of it in the introduction to one of Miss Wedgwood's books.
953 
954The behaviour of men as individuals [she writes] is more interesting to me than their
955behaviour as groups or classes. History can be written with this bias as well as another; it
956is neither more, nor less, misleading.... This book.., is an attempt to understand how these
957men felt and why, in their own estimation, they acted as they did.'
958 
959This statement is precise; and, since Miss Wedgwood is a popular writer, many people, I
960am sure, think as she does. Dr Rowse tells us, for instance, that the Elizabethan system
961broke down because James I was incapable of understanding it, and that the English
962revolution of the seventeenth century was an 'accidental' event due to the stupidity of the
963two first Stuart kings. Even Sir James Neale, a more austere historian than Dr Rowse,
964sometimes seems more eager to express his admiration for Queen Elizabeth than to
965explain what the Tudor monarchy stood for; and Sir Isaiah Berlin, in the essay which I
966have just quoted, is terribly worried by the prospect that historians may fail to denounce
967Genghis Khan and Hitler as bad men. The Bad King John and Good Queen Bess theory is
968especially rife when we come to more recent times. It is easier to call communism 'the
969brain-child of Karl Marx' (I pluck this flower from a recent stockbrokers' circular) than to
970analyse its origin and character, to attribute the Bolshevik Revolution to the stupidity of
971Nicholas II or to German gold than to study its profound social causes, and to see in the
972two world wars of this century the result of the individual wickedness of Wilhelm II and
973Hitler rather than of some deep-seated breakdown in the system of international relations.
974 
975Miss Wedgwood's statement, then, combines two propositions. The first is that the
976behaviour of men as individuals is distinct from their behaviour as members of groups or
977classes, and that the historian may legitimately choose to dwell on the one rather than on
978the other. The second is that the study of the behaviour of men as individuals consists of
979the study of the conscious motives of their actions.
980 
981After what I have already said, I need not labour the first point. It is not that the view of
982man as an individual is more or less misleading than the view of him as a member of the
983group; it is the attempt to draw a distinction between the two which is misleading. The
984individual is by definition a member of a society, or probably of more than one society -
985call it group, class, tribe, nation, or what you will. Early biologists were content to classify
986species of birds, beasts, and fishes in cages, aquariums, and showcases, and did not seek to
987study the living creature in relation to its environment. Perhaps the social sciences today
988have not yet fully emerged from that primitive stage. Some people distinguish between
989psychology as the science of the individual and sociology as the science of society; and
990the name 'psychologism' has been given to the view that all social problems are ultimately
991reducible to the analysis of individual human behaviour. But the psychologist who failed
992to study the social environment of the individual would not get very far. It is tempting to
993make a distinction between biography, which treats man as an individual, and history,
994which treats man as part of a whole, and to suggest that good biography makes bad
995history.’ Nothing causes more error and unfairness in man's view of history', Acton once
996wrote, 'than the interest which is inspired by individual characters.’ But this distinction,
997too, is unreal. Nor do I want to take shelter behind the Victorian proverb placed by G. 1M.
998Young on the title-page of his book Victorian England:’ Servants talk about people,
999gentlefolk discuss things.' Some biographies are serious contributions to history: in my
1000own field, Isaac Deutscher's biographies of Stalin and Trotsky are outstanding examples.
1001Others belong to literature, like the historical novel. ‘To Lytton Strachey', writes Professor
1002Trevor-Roper, 'historical problems were always, and only, problems -of individual
1003behaviour and individual eccentricity. ... Historical problems, the problems of politics and
1004society, he never sought to answer, or even to ask.'" Nobody is obliged to write or read
1005history; and excellent books can be written about the past which are not history. But I
1006think we are entitled by convention - as I propose to do in these lectures - to reserve the
1007word 'history' for the process of inquiry into the past of man in society.
1008 
1009The second point, i.e. that history is concerned to inquire why individuals 'in their own
1010estimation, acted as they did', seems at first sight extremely odd; and I suspect that Miss
1011Wedgwood like other sensible people, does not practise what she preaches. If she does,
1012she must write some very queer history. Everyone knows today that human beings do not
1013always, or perhaps even habitually, act from motives of which they are fully conscious or
1014which they are willing to avow; and to exclude insight into unconscious or unavowed
1015motives is surely a way of going about one's work with one eye wilfully shut. This ~s,
1016however, what, according to some people, historians ought to do. The point is this. So long
1017as you are content to say that the badness of King John consisted in his greed or stupidity
1018or ambition to play the tyrant, you are speaking in terms of individual qualities which are
1019comprehensible even at the level of nursery history. But, once you begin to say that Ring
1020John was the unconscious tool of vested interests opposed to the rise to power of the
1021feudal barons, you not only introduce a more complicated and sophisticated view of Ring
1022John's badness, but you appear to suggest that historical events are determined not by the
1023conscious actions of individuals, but by some extraneous and all-powerful forces guiding
1024their unconscious will. This is, of course, nonsense. So far as I am concerned, I have no
1025belief in Divine Providence, World Spirit, Manifest Destiny, History with a capital H, or
1026any other of the abstractions which have sometimes been sup- posed to guide the course of
1027events; and I should endorse without qualification the comment of Marx:
1028 
1029History does nothing, it possesses no immense wealth, fights no battles. It is rather man,
1030real living man who does everything, who possesses and fights.
1031 
1032The two remarks which I have to make on this question have nothing to do with any
1033abstract view of history, and are based on purely empirical observation.
1034 
1035The first is that history is to a considerable extent a matter of numbers. Carlyle was
1036responsible for the unfortunate assertion that 'history is the biography of great men'. But
1037listen to him at his most eloquent and in his greatest historical work:
1038Hunger and nakedness and nightmare oppression lying heavy on twenty-five million
1039hearts: this, not the wounded vanities or contradicted philosophies of philosophical
1040advocates, rich shopkeepers, rural noblesse, was the prime mover in the French revolution;
1041as the like will be in all such revolutions, in all countries."
1042 
1043Or, as Lenin said:’ Politics begin where the masses are; not where there are thousands, but
1044where there are millions, that is where serious politics begin." Carlyle's and Lenin's
1045millions were millions of individuals: there was nothing impersonal about them.
1046Discussions of this question sometimes confuse anonymity with impersonality. People do
1047not cease to be people, or individuals - individuals, because we do not know their names.
1048Mr Eliot's 'vast, impersonal forces' were the individuals whom Clarendon, a bolder and
1049franker conservative, calls 'dirty people of no name'. These nameless millions were
1050individuals acting more or less unconsciously, together, and constituting a social force.
1051 
1052The historian will not in ordinary circumstances need to take cognizance of a single
1053discontented peasant or discontented village. But millions of discontented peasants in
1054thousands of villages are a factor which no historian will ignore. The reasons which deter
1055Jones from getting married do not interest the historian unless the same reasons also deter
1056thousands of other individuals of Jones's generation, and bring about a substantial fall in a
1057marriage-rate: in that event, they may well be historically significant. Nor need we be
1058perturbed by the platitude that movements are started by minorities. All effective
1059movements have few leaders and a multitude of followers; but this does not mean that the
1060multitude is not essential to their success. Numbers count in history.
1061 
1062My second observation is even better attested. Writers of many different schools of
1063thought have concurred in remarking that the actions of individual human beings often
1064have results which were not intended or desired by the actors or indeed by any other
1065individual. The Christian believes that the individual, acting consciously for his own often
1066selfish ends, is the unconscious agent of God's purpose. Mandeville's 'private vices -
1067public benefits' was an early and deliberately paradoxical expression of this discovery.
1068Adam Smith's hidden hand and Hegel's 'cunning of reason', which sets individuals to work
1069for it and to serve its purposes, though the individuals believe themselves to be fulfilling
1070their own personal desires, are too familiar to require quotation. 'In the social production
1071of their means of production,' wrote IMarx in the preface to his Critique of Political
1072Economy , ‘human beings enter into definite and necessary relations which are independent
1073of their will.' 'Man lives consciously for himself,' wrote Tolstoy in War and Peace,
1074echoing Adam Smith, ‘but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic
1075universal aims of humanity.' And here, to round off this anthology, which is already long
1076enough, is Professor Butterfield: 'There is something in the nature of historical events
1077which twists the course of history in a direction that no man ever intended.’ Since 1914,
1078after a hundred years of only minor local wars, we have had two major world wars. It
1079would not be a plausible explanation of this phenomenon to maintain that more
1080individuals wanted war, or fewer wanted peace, in the first half of the twentieth century
1081than in the last three quarters of the nineteenth. It is difficult to believe that any individual
1082willed or desired the great economic depression of the 1930s. Yet it was indubitably
1083brought about by the actions of individuals, each consciously pursuing some totally
1084different aim. Nor does the diagnosis of a discrepancy between the intentions of the
1085individual and the results of his action always have to wait for the retrospective historian.
1086'He does not mean to go to war,' wrote Lodge of Woodrow Wilson in March 1917, 'but I
1087think he will be carried away by events.' It defies all the evidence, to suggest that history
1088can be written on the basis of 'explanations in terms of human intentions" or of accounts of
1089their motives given by the actors themselves, of why 'in their own estimation, they acted
1090as they did'. The facts of history are indeed facts about individuals, but not about actions
1091of individuals performed in isolation, and not about the motives, real or imaginary, from
1092which individuals suppose themselves to have acted. They are facts about the relations of
1093individuals to one another in society and about the social forces which produce from the
1094actions of individuals results often at variance with, and sometimes opposite to, the results
1095which they themselves intended.
1096 
1097One of the serious errors of Colling wood's view of history which I discussed in my low
1098lecture was to assume that the thought behind the act, which the historian was called on to
1099investigate, was the thought of the individual actor. This is a false assumption. What the
1100historian is called on to investigate is what lies behind the act; and to this the conscious
1101thought or motive of the individual actor may be quite irrelevant.
1102 
1103Here I should say something about the role of the rebel or dissident in history. To set up
1104the popular picture of the individual in revolt against society is to reintroduce the false
1105anti- thesis between society and the individual. No society is fully homogeneous. Every
1106society is an arena of social conflicts, and those individuals who range themselves against
1107existing authority are no less products and reflexions of the society than those who uphold
1108it. Richard II and Catherine the Great represented powerful social forces in the England of
1109the fourteenth century and in the Russia of the eighteenth century: but so also did Wat
1110Tyler and Pugachev, the leader of the great serf rebellion. Monarchs and rebels alike were
1111the product of the specific conditions of their age and country. To describe Wat Tyler and
1112Pugachev as individuals in revolt against society is a misleading simplification. If they had
1113been merely that, the historian would never have heard of them. They owe their role in
1114history to the mass of their followers, and are significant as social phenomena, or not at
1115all. Or let us take an outstanding rebel and individualist at a more sophisticated level. Few
1116people have reacted more violently and more radically against the society of their day and
1117country than Nietzsche. Yet Nietzsche was a direct product of European, and more
1118specifically of German, society - a phenomenon which could not have occurred in China
1119or Peru. A generation after Nietzsche's death it became clearer than it had been to his
1120contemporaries how strong were the European, and specifically German, social forces of
1121which this individual had been the expression; and Nietzsche became a more significant
1122figure for posterity than for his own generation.
1123 
1124The role of the rebel in history has some analogies with that of the great man. The great-
1125man theory of history - a particular example of the Good Queen Bess school - has gone
1126out of fashion in recent years, though it still occasionally rears its ungainly bead. The
1127editor of a series of popular history text-books, started after the Second World War,
1128invited his authors 'to open up a significant historical theme by way of a biography of a
1129great: man'; and Mr A. J. P. Taylor told us in one of his minor essays that 'the history of
1130modern Europe can be written in terms of three titans: Napoleon, Bismarck, and Lenin',
1131though in his more serious writings he has undertaken no such rash project. What is the
1132role of the great man in history? The great man is an individual, and, being an outstanding
1133individual, is also a social phenomenon of outstanding importance. 'It is an obvious truth',
1134observed Gibbon, 'that the times must be suited to extraordinary characters, and that the
1135genius of Cromwell or Retz might now expire in obscurity.' Marx, in The Eighteenth
1136Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, diagnosed the converse phenomenon: 'The class war in
1137France created circumstances and relations which enabled a gross mediocrity to strut about
1138in a hero's garb.' Had Bismarck been born in the eighteenth century - an absurd hypothesis,
1139since he would not then have been Bismarck - he would not have united Germany and
1140might not have been a great man at all. But one need not, I think, as Tolstoy does, deny
1141great men as no more than 'labels giving names to events'. Sometimes of course the cult of
1142the great man may have sinister implications. Nietzsche's superman is a repellent figure. It
1143is not necessary for me to recall the case of Hitler, or the grim consequences of the 'cult of
1144personality' in the Soviet Union. But it is not my purpose to deflate the greatness of great
1145men: nor do I want to subscribe to the thesis that 'great men are almost always bad men'.
1146The view which I would hope to discourage is the view which places great men outside
1147history and sees them as imposing themselves on history in virtue of their greatness, as
1148'lack-in-the-boxes who emerge miraculously from the unknown to interrupt the real
1149continuity of history'.' Even today I do not know that we can better Hegel's classic
1150description:
1151 
1152The great man of the age is the one who can put into words the will of his age, tell his age
1153what its will is, and accomplish it. What he does is the heart and essence of his age; he
1154actualizes his age.
1155 
1156Dr Leavis means something like this when he says that great writers are 'significant in
1157terms of the human awareness they promote'. The great man is always representative
1158either of existing forces or of forces which he helps to create by way of challenge to
1159existing authority. But the higher degree of creativity may perhaps be assigned to those
1160great men who, like Cromwell or Lenin, helped to mould the forces which carried them to
1161greatness, rather than to those who, like Napoleon or Bismarck, rode to greatness on the
1162back of already existing forces. Nor should we forget those great men who stood so far in
1163advance of their own time that their greatness was recognized only by succeeding
1164generations. What seems to me essential is to recognize in the great man an outstanding
1165individual who is at once a product and an agent of the historical process, at once the
1166representative and the creator of social forces which change the shape of the world and the
1167thoughts of men.
1168 
1169History, then, in both senses of the word - meaning both the inquiry conducted by the
1170historian and the facts of the past into which he inquires - is a social process, in which
1171individuals are engaged as social beings; and the imaginary antithesis between society and
1172the individual is no more than a red herring drawn across our path to confuse our thinking.
1173The reciprocal process of interaction between-the historian and his facts, what I have
1174called the dialogue between present and past, is a dialogue not between abstract and
1175isolated individuals, but between the society of today and the society of yesterday.
1176 
1177History, in Burckhardt's words, is 'the record of what one age finds worthy of note in
1178another'.' The past is intelligible to us only in the light of the present; and we can fully
1179understand the present only in the light of the past. To enable man to understand the
1180society of the past, and to increase his mastery over the society of the present, is the dual
1181function of history.
11823. History, Science, and Morality
1183 
1184WHEN I was very young, I was suitably impressed to learn that, appearances
1185notwithstanding, the whale is not a fish. Nowadays these questions of classification move
1186me less; and it does not worry me unduly when I am assured that history is not a science.
1187This terminological question is an eccentricity of the English language. In every other
1188European language, the equivalent word to 'science' includes history without hesitation.
1189But in the English-speaking world this question has a long past behind it, and the issues
1190raised by it are a convenient introduction to the problems of method in history.
1191 
1192At the end of the eighteenth century, when science had contributed so triumphantly both to
1193man's knowledge of the world and to man's knowledge of his own physical attributes, it
1194began to be asked whether science could not also further man's knowledge of society. The
1195conception of the social sciences, and of history among them, gradually developed
1196throughout the nineteenth century; and the method by which science studied the world of
1197nature was applied to the study of human affairs. In the first part of this period the
1198Newtonian tradition prevailed. Society, like the world of nature, was thought of as a
1199mechanism; the title of a work by Herbert Spencer, Social Statics , published in 1951, is
1200still remembered. Bertrand Russell, reared in this tradition, later recalled the period when
1201he hoped that in time there would be 'a mathematics of human behaviour as precise as the
1202mathematics of machines'.' Then Darwin made another scientific revolution; and social
1203scientists, taking their cue from biology, began to think of society as an organism. But the
1204real importance of the Darwinian revolution was that Darwin, completing what Lyell had
1205already begun in geology, brought history into science. Science was concerned no longer
1206with some- thing static and timeless, but with a process of change and development.
1207Evolution in science confirmed and complemented progress in history. Nothing, however,
1208occurred to alter the inductive view of historical method which I described in my first
1209lecture: First collect your facts, then interpret them. It was assumed without question that
1210this was also the method of science. This was the view which Bury evidently had in mind
1211when, in the closing words of his inaugural lecture of January 1903, he described history
1212as 'a science, no more and no less'. The fifty years after Bury's inaugural lecture witnessed
1213a strong reaction against this view of history. Collingwood, when he wrote in the 1930s,
1214was particularly anxious to draw a sharp line between the world of nature, which was the
1215object of scientific inquiry, and the world of history; and during this period Bury's dictum
1216was rarely quoted except in terms of derision. But what historians failed to notice at the
1217time was that science itself had undergone a profound revolution, which makes it seem
1218that Bury may have been more nearly right than we had supposed, though for the wrong
1219reason. What Lyell did for geology and Darwin for biology has now been done for
1220astronomy, which has become a science of how the universe came to be what it is; and
1221modern physicists constantly tell us that what they investigate are not facts, but events.
1222 
1223The historian has some excuse for feeling him- self more at home in the world of science
1224today than he could have done a hundred years ago.
1225Let us look first at the concept of laws. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth
1226centuries, scientists assumed that laws of nature - Newton's laws of motion, the law of
1227gravitation, Boyle's law, the law of evolution, and so forth - had been discovered and
1228definitely established, and that the business of the scientist was to discover and establish
1229more such laws by process of induction from observed facts. The word 'law' came down
1230trailing clouds of glory from Galileo and Newton. Students of society, consciously or
1231unconsciously desiring to assert the scientific status of their studies, adopted the same
1232language and believed themselves to be following the same procedure. The political
1233economists seem to have been first in the held with Gresham's law, and Adam Smith's
1234laws of the market. Burke appealed to 'the laws of commerce, which are the laws of
1235nature, and consequently the Laws of God'. Malthus propounded a law of population;
1236Lassalle an iron law of wages; and Marx in the preface to Capital claimed to have
1237discovered 'the economic law of motion of modern society'. Buckle in the concluding
1238words of his History of Civilization expressed the conviction that the course of human
1239affairs was 'permeated by one glorious principle of universal and undeviating regularity'.
1240Today this terminology sounds as old-fashioned as it is presumptuous; but it sounds
1241almost as old-fashioned to the physical scientist as it does to the social scientist. In the
1242year before Bury delivered his inaugural lecture, the French mathematician Henri Poincare
1243published a small volume called La Science et I'hypothese which started a revolution in
1244scientific thinking. Poincare's main thesis was that the general propositions enunciated by
1245scientists, where they were not mere definitions or disguised conventions about the use of
1246language, were hypotheses designed to crystallize and organize further thinking, and were
1247subject to verification, modification, or refutation. All this has now become something of a
1248commonplace. Newton's boast 'Hypotheses non fingo' rings hollow today; and though
1249scientists, and even social scientists, still sometimes speak of laws, so to speak, for old
1250time's sake, they no longer believe in their existence in the sense in which scientists of the
1251eighteenth and nineteenth century universally believed in them. It is recognized that
1252scientists make discoveries and acquire fresh knowledge, not by establishing precise and
1253comprehensive laws, but by enunciating hypotheses which open the way to flesh inquiry.
1254 
1255A standard text-book on scientific method by two American philosophers describes the
1256method of science as 'essentially circular':
1257 
1258We obtain evidence for principles by appealing to empirical material, to what is alleged to
1259be 'fact'; and we select, analyse, and interpret empirical material on the basis of principles.'
1260The word 'reciprocal' would perhaps have been preferable to 'circular'; for the result is not
1261to return to the same place, but to move forward to fresh discoveries through this process
1262of interaction between principles and facts, between theory and practice. Ah thinking
1263requires acceptance of certain presuppositions based on observation, which make
1264scientific thinking possible but are subject to revision in the light of that thinking. These
1265hypotheses may well be valid in some contexts or for some purposes, though they turn out
1266to be invalid in others. The test in all cases is the empirical one whether they are in fact
1267effective in promoting fresh insights and adding to our knowledge. The methods of
1268Rutherford were recently described by one of his most distinguished pupils and fellow-
1269workers :
1270 
1271He had a driving urge to know how nuclear phenomena worked, in the sense in which one
1272could speak of knowing what went on in the kitchen. I do not believe that he searched for
1273an explanation in the classical manner of a theory using certain basic laws; as long as he
1274knew what was happening he was content."
1275 
1276This description equally fits the historian, who has abandoned the search for basic laws,
1277and is content to inquire how things work.
1278 
1279The status of the hypotheses used by the historian in the process of his inquiry seems
1280remarkably similar to that of the hypotheses used by the scientist. Take, for example, Mm
1281Weber's famous diagnosis of a relation between Protestantism and capitalism. Nobody
1282today would call this a law, though it might have been hailed as such in an earlier period.
1283It is a hypothesis which, though modified to some extent in the course of the inquiries
1284which it inspired, has beyond doubt enlarged our understanding of both these movements.
1285Or take a statement like that of Marx: 'The hand-mill gives us a society with a feudal lord;
1286the steam-mill gives us a society with an industrial capitalist." This is not in modern
1287terminology a law, though Marx would probably have claimed it as such, but a fruitful
1288hypothesis pointing the way to further inquiry and fresh understanding. Such hypotheses
1289are indispensable tools of thought. The well-known German economist of the early 1900s,
1290Werner ; Sombart, confessed to a 'troubled feeling' which overtook those who had
1291abandoned Marxism.
1292 
1293When [he wrote] we lose the comfortable formulas that have hitherto been our guides
1294amid the complexities of existence ... we feel like drowning in the ocean of facts until we
1295find a new foothold or learn to swim."
1296 
1297The controversy about periodization in history falls into this category. The division of
1298history into periods is not a fact, but 8 necessary hypothesis or tool of thought, valid in so
1299far as it is illuminating, and dependent for its validity on interpretation. Historians who
1300differ on the question when the Middle Ages ended differ in their interpretation of certain
1301events. The question is not a question of fact; but it is also not meaningless. The division
1302of history into geographical sectors is equally not a fact, but a hypothesis: to speak of
1303European history may be a valid and fruitful hypothesis in some contexts, misleading and
1304mischievous in others. Most historians assume that Russia is part of Europe; some
1305passionately deny it. The bias of the historian can be judged by the hypothesis which he
1306adopts. I must quote one general pronouncement on the methods of social science, since it
1307comes from a great social scientist who was trained as a physical scientist. Georges Sorel,
1308who practised as an engineer before he began in his forties to write about the problems of
1309society, emphasized the need to isolate particular elements in a situation even at the risk of
1310over-simplifying :
1311 
1312One should proceed [he wrote] by feeling one's way; one should try out probable and
1313partial hypotheses, and be satisfied with provisional approximations so as always to leave
1314the door open to progressive correction.'
1315 
1316This is a far cry from the nineteenth century, when scientists, and historians like Acton,
1317looked forward to one day establishing, through the accumulation of well-attested facts, a
1318comprehensive body of knowledge which would settle all disputed issues once for all.
1319Nowadays both scientists and historians entertain the more modest hope of advancing
1320progressively from one fragmentary hypothesis to another, isolating their facts through the
1321medium of their interpretations, and testing their interpretations by the facts; and ways in
1322which they go about it do not seem to me essentially different. In my first lecture I quoted
1323a remark of Professor Barraclough that history was 'not factual at all, but a series of
1324accepted judgements'. While I was preparing these lectures, a physicist from this
1325university, in a B.B.C. broadcast, defined a scientific truth as 'a statement which has been
1326publicly accepted by the experts'." Neither of these formulas is entirely satisfactory - for
1327reasons which will appear when I come to discuss the question of objectivity. But it was
1328striking to find a historian and a physicist independently formulating the same problem in
1329almost exactly the same words.
1330 
1331Analogies are, however, a notorious trap for the unwary: and I want to consider
1332respectfully the arguments for believing that, great as are the differences between the
1333mathematical and the natural sciences, or between different sciences within these
1334categories, a fundamental distinction can be drawn between these sciences and history,
1335and that this distinction makes it misleading to call history - and perhaps also the other so-
1336called social sciences - by the name of science. These objections - some of them more
1337convincing than others - are in brief: (r) that history deals exclusively with the unique,
1338science with the general; (2) that history teaches no lessons; (3) that history is unable to
1339predict; (4) that history is necessarily subjective, since man is observing himself; and (5)
1340that history, unlike science, involves issues of religion and morality. I will try to examine
1341each of these points in turn.
1342 
1343First, it is alleged that history deals with the unique and particular, and science with the
1344general and universal. This view may be said to start with Aristotle, who declared that
1345poetry was 'more philosophical' and 'more serious' than history, since poetry was
1346concerned with general truth and history with particular.' A host of later writers, down to
1347Collingwood inclusive, made a similar distinction between science and history. This
1348seems to rest on a misunderstanding. Hobbes's famous dictum still stands: ‘Nothing in the
1349world is universal but names, for the things named are every one of them individual and
1350singular.' This is certainly true of the physical sciences: no two geological formations, no
1351two animals of the same species, and no two atoms, are identical. Similarly, no two
1352historical events are identical. But insistence on the uniqueness of historical events has the
1353same paralysing effect as the platitude taken over by Moore from Bishop Butler and at one
1354time especially beloved by linguistic philosophers: 'Everything is what it is and not
1355another thing.' Embarked on this course, you soon attain a sort of philosophical nirvana, in
1356which nothing that matters can be said about anything.
1357 
1358The very use of language commits the historian, like the scientist, to generalization. The
1359Peloponnesian War and the Second World War were very different, and both were unique.
1360But the historian calls them both wars, and only the pedant will protest. When Gibbon
1361wrote of both the establishment of Christianity by Constantine and the rise of Islam as
1362revolutions, he was generalizing two unique events. Modern historians do the same when
1363they write of the English, French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions. The historian is not
1364really interested in the unique, but in what is general in the unique. In the 1930s
1365discussions by historians of the causes of the war of 1914 usually proceeded on the
1366assumption that it was due either to the mismanagement of diplomats, working in secret
1367and uncontrolled by public opinion, or to the unfortunate division of the world into
1368territorial sovereign states. In the 1930s discussions proceeded on the assumption that it
1369was due to rivalries between imperialist powers driven by the stresses of capitalism in
1370decline to partition the world between them. These discussions all involved generalization
1371about the causes of war, or at any rate of war in ninetieth-century conditions. The historian
1372constantly uses generalization to test his evidence. If the evidence is not clear whether
1373Richard murdered the princes in the Tower, the historian will ask himself - perhaps
1374unconsciously rather than consciously - whether it was a habit of rulers of the period to
1375liquidate potential rivals to their throne; and his judgement will, quite rightly, be
1376influenced by this generalization.
1377 
1378The reader, as well as the writer, of history, is a chronic generalizer, applying the
1379observation of the historian to other historical contexts with which he is familiar - or
1380perhaps to his own time. When I read Carlyle's French Revolution, I find myself again and
1381again generalizing his comments by applying them to my own special interest in the
1382Russian revolution. Take this on the terror:
1383 
1384Horrible, in lands that had known equal justice - not so unnatural in lands that had never
1385known it. Or, more significantly, this:
1386 
1387It is unfortunate, though very natural, that the history of this period has so generally been
1388written in hysterics. Exaggeration abounds, execration, wailing; and on the whole,
1389darkness.' Or another, this time from Burckhardt on the growth of the modern state in the
1390sixteenth century:
1391 
1392The more recently power has originated, the less it can remain stationary - first because
1393those who created it have become accustomed to rapid further movement and because they
1394are and will remain innovators per se; secondly, because the forces aroused or subdued by
1395them can be employed only through further acts of violence."
1396 
1397It is nonsense to say that generalization is foreign to history; history thrives on
1398generalizations. As Mr Elton neatly puts it in a volume of the new Cambridge Modern
1399History , 'what distinguishes the historian from the collector of historical facts is
1400generalization';" he might have added that the same thing distinguishes the natural
1401scientist from the naturalist or collector of specimens. But do not suppose that
1402generalization permits us to construct some vast scheme of history into which specific
1403events must be fitted. And, since Marx is one of those who is often accused of
1404constructing, or believing in, such a scheme, I will quote by way of summing-up a passage
1405from one of his letters which puts the matter in its right perspective:
1406 
1407Events strikingly similar, but occurring in a different historical milieu, lead to completely
1408dissimilar results. By studying each of these evolutions separately and then comparing
1409them, it is easy to find the key to the understanding of this phenomenon; but it is never
1410possible to arrive at this understanding by using the passe-partout of some historical-
1411philosophical theory whose great virtue is to stand above history. History is concerned
1412with the relation between the unique and the general. As a historian, you can no more
1413separate them, or give precedence to one over the other, than you can separate fact and
1414interpretation.
1415 
1416This is perhaps the place for a brief remark on the relations between history and sociology.
1417Sociology at present faces two apposite dangers - the danger of becoming ultra-theoretical
1418and the danger of becoming ultra-empirical. The first is the danger of losing itself in
1419abstract and meaningless generalizations about society in general. Society with a big S is
1420as misleading a fallacy as History with a big H. This danger is brought nearer by those
1421who assign to sociology the exclusive task of generalizing from the unique events
1422recorded by history: it has even been suggested that sociology is distinguished from
1423history by having 'laws'." The other danger is that foreseen by Karl Mannheim almost a
1424generation ago, and very much present today, of a sociology 'split into a series of discrete
1425technical problems of social readjustment'. Sociology is concerned with historical
1426societies, every one of which is unique and moulded by specific historical antecedents and
1427conditions. But to attempt to avoid generalization and interpretation by confining oneself
1428to so- called 'technical' problems of enumeration and analysis is merely to become the
1429unconscious apologist of a static society. Sociology, if it is to become- a fruitful field of
1430study, must, like history, concern itself with the relation between the unique and the
1431general. But it must also become dynamic - a study not of society at rest (for no such
1432society exists), but of social change and development. For the rest, I would only say that
1433the more sociological history becomes, and the more historical sociology becomes, the
1434better for both. Let the frontier between them be kept wide open for two-way traffic.
1435 
1436The question of generalization is closely connected with my second question: the lessons
1437of history. The real point about generalization is that through it we attempt to learn from
1438history, to apply the lesson drawn from one set of events to another set of events: when we
1439generalize, we are consciously or unconsciously trying to do this. Those who reject
1440generalization and insist that history is concerned exclusively with the unique are,
1441logically enough, those who deny that anything can be learned from history. But the
1442assertion that men learn nothing from history is contradicted by a multitude of observable
1443facts. No experience is more common. In 1919 I was present at the Paris Peace
1444Conference as a junior member of the British delegation. Everyone in the delegation
1445believed that we could learn from the lessons of the Vienna Congress, the last great
1446European peace congress a hundred years earlier. A certain Captain Webster, then
1447employed in the War office, now Sir Charles Webster and an eminent historian, wrote an
1448essay telling us what those lessons were. Two of them have remained in my memory. One
1449was that it was dangerous, when re-drawing the map of Europe, to neglect the principle of
1450self-determination. The other was that it was dangerous to throw secret documents into
1451your waste-paper basket, the contents of which would certainly be bought by the secret
1452service of some other delegation. These lessons of history were taken for gospel and
1453influenced our behaviour. This example is recent and trivial. But it would be easy to trace
1454in comparatively remote history the influence of the lessons of a still remoter past.
1455Everyone knows about the impact of ancient Greece upon Rome. But I am not sure
1456whether any historian has attempted to make a precise analysis of the lessons which the
1457Romans learned, or believed themselves to have learned, from the history of Hellas. An
1458examination of the lessons drawn in western Europe in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and
1459nineteenth centuries from Old Testament history might yield rewarding results. The
1460English Puritan revolution cannot be fully understood without it; and the conception of the
1461chosen people was an important factor in the rise of modern nationalism. The stamp of a
1462classical education was heavily imprinted in the nineteenth century on the new ruling class
1463in Great Britain. Grote, as I have already noted, painted to Athena as an exemplar for the
1464new democracy; and I should like to see a study of the extensive and important lessons
1465consciously or unconsciously imparted to British empire-builders by the history of the
1466Roman Empire. In my own particular field, the makers of the Russian revolution were
1467profoundly impressed - one might almost say, obsessed -by the lessons of the French
1468revolution, of the revolutions of 1848, and of the Paris commune of 1871. But I shall
1469recall here the qualification imposed by the dual character of history. Learning from
1470history is never simply a one-way process. To learn about the present in the light of the
1471past means also to learn about the past in the light of the present. The function of history is
1472to promote a profounder understanding of both past and present through the interrelation
1473between them.
1474 
1475My third point is the role of prediction in history: no lessons, it is said, can be learned
1476from history because history, unlike science, cannot predict the future. This question is
1477involved in a tissue of misunderstandings. As we have seen, scientists are no longer so
1478eager as they used to be to talk about the laws of nature. The so-called laws of sciences
1479which affect our ordinary life are in fact statements of tendency, statements of what will
1480happen other things being equal or in laboratory conditions. They do not claim to predict
1481what will happen in concrete cases. The law of gravity does not prove that that particular
1482apple will fall to the ground: somebody may catch it in a basket. The law of optics that
1483light travels in a straight line does not prove that a particular ray of light may not be
1484refracted or scattered by some intervening object. But this does not mean that these laws
1485are worthless, or not in principle valid. Modern physical theories, we are told, deal only
1486with the probabilities of events taking place. Today science is more inclined to remember
1487that induction can logically lead only to probabilities or to reasonable belief, and is more
1488anxious to treat its pronouncements as general rules or guides, the validity of which can be
1489tested only in specific action. 'Science, d'ou prevoyance; preyance, d'ou action as Comte
1490puts it. The clue to the question of prediction in history lies in this distinction between the
1491general and the specific, between the universal and the unique. The historian, as we have
1492seen, is bound to generalize; and, in so doing, he provides general guides for future action
1493which, though not specific predictions, are both valid and useful. But he cannot predict
1494specific events, because the specific is unique and because the element of accident enters
1495into it. This distinction, which worries philosophers, is perfectly clear to the ordinary man.
1496If two or three children in a school develop measles, you will conclude that the epidemic
1497will spread; and this prediction, if you care to call it such, is based on a generalization
1498from past experience and is a valid and useful guide to action. But you cannot make the
1499specific prediction that Charles or Mary will catch measles. The historian proceeds in the
1500same way. People do not expect the historian to predict that revolution will break out in
1501Ruritania next month. The kind of conclusion which they will seek to draw, partly from
1502specific knowledge of Ruritanian affairs and partly from a study of history, is that
1503conditions in Ruritania are such that a revolution is likely to occur in the near future if
1504somebody touches it off, or unless somebody on the government side does something to
1505stop it; and this conclusion might be accompanied by estimates, based partly on the
1506analogy of other revolutions, of the attitude which different sectors of the population may
1507be expected to adopt. The prediction, if such it can be called, can be realized only through
1508the occurrence of unique events, which cannot themselves be predicted. But this does not
1509mean that inferences drawn from history about the future are worthless, or that they do not
1510possess a conditional validity which serves both as a guide to action and a key to our
1511understanding of how things happen. I do not wish to suggest that the inferences of the
1512social scientist or of the historian can match those of the physical scientist in precision, or
1513that their inferiority in this respect is due merely to the greater backwardness of the social
1514sciences. The human being is on any view the most complex natural entity known to us,
1515and the study of his behaviour may well involve difficulties different in kind from those
1516confronting the physical scientist. All I wish to establish is that their aims and methods are
1517not fundamentally dissimilar.
1518 
1519My fourth point introduces a far more cogent argument for drawing a line of demarcation
1520between the social sciences, including history, and the physical sciences. This is the
1521argument that in the social sciences subject and object belong to the same category and
1522interact reciprocally on each other. Human beings are not only the most complex and
1523variable of natural entities, but they have to be studied by other human beings, not. by
1524independent observers of another species. Here man is no longer content, as in the
1525biological sciences, to study his own physical make-up and physical reactions. The
1526sociologist, the economist, or the historian needs to penetrate into forms of human
1527behaviour in which the will is active, to ascertain why the human beings who are the
1528object of his study willed to act as they did. This sets up a relation, which is peculiar to
1529history and the social sciences, between the observer and what is observed. The point of
1530view of the historian enters irrevocably into every observation which he makes ;history is
1531shot through and through with relativity. In Karl Mannheim's words, ‘even the categories
1532in which experiences are subsumed, collected, and ordered vary according to the social
1533position of the observer'. But it is not merely true that the bias of the social scientist
1534necessarily enters into all his observations. It is also true that the process of observation
1535affects and modifies what is being observed. And this can happen in two opposite ways.
1536The human beings whose behaviour is made the object of analysis and prediction may be
1537warned in advance, by the prediction of consequences unwelcome to them, and be induced
1538by it to modify their action, so that the prediction, however correctly based on the analysis,
1539proves self-frustrating. One reason why history rarely repeats itself among historically
1540conscious people is that the dramatis personae are aware at the second performance of the
1541denouement of the first, and their action is affected by that knowledge.'
1542 
1543The Bolsheviks knew that the French revolution had ended in a Napoleon, and feared that
1544their own revolution might end in the same way. They therefore mistrusted Trotsky, who
1545among their leaders looked most like a Napoleon, and trusted Stalin, who looked least like
1546a Napoleon. But this process may work in a converse direction. The economist who, by a
1547scientific analysis of existing economic conditions, predicts an approaching boom or
1548slump may, if his authority is great and his arguments cogent, contribute by the very fact
1549of his prediction to the occurrence of the phenomenon predicted. The political scientist
1550who, on the strength of historical observations, nourishes the conviction that despotism is
1551short-lived, may contribute to the downfall of the despot. Everyone is familiar with the
1552behaviour of candidates at elections, who predict their own victory for the conscious
1553purpose of rendering the fulfilment of the prediction more likely; and one suspects that
1554economists, political scientists, and historians, when they venture on prediction, are
1555sometimes inspired by the unconscious hope of hastening the realization of the prediction.
1556All that one can perhaps safely say about these complex relations is that interaction
1557between the observer and what is observed, between the social scientist and his data,
1558between the historian and his facts, is continuous, and continuously varies; and that this
1559appears to be a distinctive feature of history and of the social sciences.
1560 
1561I should perhaps note here that some physicists in recent years have spoken of their
1562science in terms which appear to suggest more striking analogies between the physical
1563universe and the world of the historian. In the first place, their results are said to involve a
1564principle of uncertainty or indeterminacy. I shall speak in my next lecture of the nature
1565and limits of so- called determinism in history. But whether the indeterminacy of modern
1566physics resides in the nature of the universe, or is merely an index of our own hitherto
1567imperfect understanding of it (this point is still in debate), I should have the same doubts
1568about finding in it significant analogies with our ability to make historical predictions as
1569one had a few years ago about the attempts of some enthusiasts to find proof in it of the
1570operation of free will in the universe. Secondly, we are told that in modern physics
1571distances in space and lapses of time have measures depending on the motion of the
1572'observer'. In modern physics all measurements are subject to inherent variations due to
1573the impossibility of establishing a constant relation between the 'observer' and the object
1574under observation; both the 'observer' and the thing observed - both subject and object -
1575enter into the final result of the observation. But, while these descriptions would apply
1576with a minimum of change to the relations between the historian and the objects of his
1577observations, I am not satisfied that the essence of these relations is in any real sense
1578comparable with the nature of relations between the physicist and his universe; and though
1579I am in principle concerned to reduce rather than to inflate the differences which separate
1580the approach of the historian from that of the scientist, it will not help to attempt to spirit
1581these differences away by relying on imperfect analogies.
1582 
1583But, while it is, I think, fair to say that the involvement of the social scientist or historian
1584in the object of his study is of a different kind from that of the physical scientist, and the
1585issues raised by the relation between subject and object infinitely more complicated, this is
1586not the end of the matter. Classical theories of knowledge, which prevailed throughout the
1587seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, all assumed a sharp dichotomy between
1588the knowing subject and the object known. However the process was conceived, the model
1589constructed by the philosophers showed subject and object, man and the external world,
1590divided and apart. This was the great age of the birth and development of science; and
1591theories of knowledge were strongly influenced by the outlook of the pioneers of science.
1592Man was set sharply against the external world. He grappled with it as with something
1593intractable and potentially hostile - intractable because it was difficult to understand,
1594potentially hostile because it was difficult to master. With the successes of modern
1595science, this outlook has been radically modified. The scientist nowadays is far less likely
1596to think of the forces of nature as something to fight against than as something to co-
1597operate with and to harness to his purposes. Classical theories of knowledge no longer fit
1598the newer science, and least of all the science of physics. It is not surprising that during the
1599past fifty years philosophers have begun to call them in question, and to recognise that the
1600process of knowledge, far from setting subject and object sharply apart, involves a
1601measure of interrelation and interdependence between them. This is, however, extremely
1602significant for the social sciences. In my first lecture, I suggested that the study of history
1603was difficult to reconcile with the traditional empiricist theory of knowledge. I should now
1604like to argue that the social sciences as a whole, since they involve man as both subject
1605and object, both investigator and thing investigated, are incompatible with any theory of
1606knowledge which pronounces a rigid divorce between subject and object. Sociology, in its
1607attempts to establish itself as a coherent body of doctrine, has quite rightly set up a branch
1608called the sociology of knowledge. This has, however, not yet got very far mainly, I
1609suspect, because it has been content to go round and round inside the cage of a traditional
1610theory of knowledge. If philosophers, under the impact first of modern physical science,
1611and now of modern social science, are beginning to break out from this cage, and
1612construct some more up-to-date model for the processes of knowledge than the old billiard-
1613ball model of the impact of data on a passive consciousness, this is a good omen for the
1614social sciences and for history in particular. This is a point of some importance, to which I
1615shall return later when I come to consider what we mean by objectivity in history.
1616 
1617Last but not least, I have to discuss the view that history, being intimately involved in
1618questions of religion and morality, is thereby distinguished from science in general and
1619perhaps even from the other social sciences. Of the relation of history to religion I shall
1620say only the little that is necessary to make my own position clear. To be a serious
1621astronomer is compatible with belief in a God who created and ordered the universe. But it
1622is not compatible with belief in a God who intervenes at will to change the course of a
1623planet, to postpone an eclipse, or to alter the rules of the cosmic game. In the same way, it
1624is some- times suggested, a serious historian may believe in a God who has ordered, and
1625given meaning to, the course of history as a whole, though he cannot believe in the Old
1626Testament kind of God who intervenes to slaughter the Amalekites, or cheats on the
1627calendar by extending the hours of daylight for the benefit of Joshua's army. Nor can he
1628invoke God as an explanation of particular historical events. Father D'Arcy in a recent
1629book attempted to make this distinction:
1630 
1631It would not do for a student to answer every question in history by saying that it was the
1632finger of God. Not until we have gone as far as most in tidying up mundane events and the
1633human drama ate we permitted to bring in wider considerations.
1634 
1635The awkwardness of this view is that it appears to treat religion like the joker in the pack
1636of cards, to be reserved for really important tricks that cannot be taken in any other way.
1637Karl Barth, the Lutheran theologian, did better when he pronounced a total separation
1638between divine and secular history, and handed over the latter to the secular arm.
1639 
1640Professor Butterfield, if I understand him, means the same thing when he speaks of
1641technical history. Technical history is the only kind of history you or I are ever likely to
1642write, or he himself has ever written. But by the use of this odd epithet, he reserves the
1643right to believe in an esoteric or providential history with which the rest of us need not
1644concern ourselves. Writers like Berdyaev, Niebarhr, and Maritain purport to maintain the
1645autonomous status of history, but insist that the end or goal of history lies outside history.
1646Personally, I find it hard to reconcile the integrity of history with belief in some super-
1647historical force on which its meaning and significance depend - whether that force be the
1648God of a Chosen People, a Christian God, the Hidden Hand of the deist, or Hegel's World
1649Spirit. For the purposes of these lectures, I shall assume that the historian must solve his
1650problems without recourse to any such deus ex machina, that history is a game played, so
1651to speak, without a joker in the pack.
1652 
1653The relation of history to morality is more complicated, and discussions of it in the past
1654have suffered from several ambiguities. It is scarcely necessary today to argue that the
1655historian is not required to pass moral judgements on the private life of the characters in
1656his story. The standpoints of the historian and of the moralist are not identical. Henry VIII
1657may have been a husband and a good king. But the historian is interested in him in the
1658former capacity only in so far as it affected historical repents. If his moral delinquencies
1659had had as little apparent effect on public affairs as those of Henry II, the historian would
1660not need to bother about them. This goes for virtues as well as vices. Pasteur and Einstein
1661were, one is told, men of exemplary, even saintly, private lives. But, suppose they had
1662been unfaithful husbands, cruel fathers, and unscrupulous colleagues, would their
1663historical achievements have been any the less? And it is these which preoccupy the
1664historian. Stalin is said to have behaved cruelly and callously to his second wife; but, as a
1665historian of Soviet affairs, I do not feel myself much concerned. This does not mean that
1666private morality is not important, or that the history of morals is not a legitimate part of
1667history. But the historian does not nun aside to pronounce moral judgements on the private
1668lives of individuals who appear in his pages. He has other things to do.
1669 
1670The more serious ambiguity arises over the question of moral judgements on public
1671actions. Belief in the duty of the historian to pronounce moral judgements on his dramatis
1672personae has a long pedigree. But it was never more powerful than in nineteenth-century
1673Britain, when it was reinforced both by the moralizing tendencies of the age and by the
1674uninhibited cult of individualism. Rosebery remarked that what English people wanted to
1675know about Napoleon was whether he was 'a good man'. Acton in his correspondence with
1676Creighton declared that 'the inflexibility of the moral code is the secret of the authority, the
1677dignity, and the utility of History', and claimed to make history 'an arbiter of controversy,
1678a guide of the wanderer, the upholder of that moral standard which the powers of earth and
1679of religion itself tend constantly to depress'" - a view based on Acton's almost mystical
1680belief in the objectivity and supremacy of historical facts, which apparently requires and
1681entitles the historian, in the name of History as a sort of super- historical power, to pass
1682moral judgements on individuals participating in historical events. This attitude still
1683sometimes reappears in unexpected forms. Professor Toynbee described Mussolini's
1684invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 as a 'deliberate personal sin';" and Sir Isaiah Berlin, in the
1685essay already quoted, insists with great vehemence that it is the duty of the historian 'to
1686judge Charlemagne or Napoleon or Genghis Khan or Hitler or Stalin for their massacres'
1687This view has been sufficiently castigated by Professor Knowles, who in his inaugural
1688lecture quoted Motley's denunciation of Philip II (' if there are vices ... from which he was
1689exempt, it is because it is not permitted by human nature to attain perfection even in evil')
1690and Stubbs's description of Ring John (' polluted with every crime that could disgrace a
1691man') as instances of moral judgements on individuals which it is not within the
1692competence of the historian to pronounce:’ The historian is not a judge, still less a hanging
1693judge.' But Croce also has a fine passage on this point, which I should like to quote:
1694 
1695The accusation forgets the great difference that our tribunals (whether juridical or moral)
1696are present-day tribunals designed for living, active and dangerous men, while those other
1697men have already appeared before the tribunal of their day, and cannot be condemned or
1698absolved twice. They cannot be held responsible before any tribunal whatsoever, just
1699because they are men of the past who belong to the peace of the past and as such can only
1700be subjects of history, and can suffer no other judgement than that which penetrates and
1701understands the spirit of their work. ... Those who, on the plea of narrating history, bustle
1702about as judges, condemning here and giving absolution there, because they think that this
1703is the office of history ... are generally recognised as devoid of historical sense.
1704 
1705And if anyone cavils at the statement that it is not our business to pass moral judgement on
1706Hitler or Stalin - or, if you like, on Senator McCarthy - this is because they were the
1707contemporaries of many of us, because hundreds of thousands of those who suffered
1708directly or indirectly from their actions are still alive, and because, precisely for these
1709reasons, it is difficult for us to approach them as historians and to divest ourselves of other
1710capacities which might justify us in passing judgement on their deeds: this is one of the
1711embarrassments - 1 should say, the principal embarrassment - of the contemporary
1712historian. But what profit does anyone find today in denouncing the sins of Charlemagne
1713or of Napoleon !
1714 
1715Let us therefore reject the notion of the historian as a hanging judge, and turn to the more
1716difficult but more profitable question of the passing of moral judgements not on
1717individuals, but on events, institutions, or policies of the past. These are the important
1718judgements of the historian; and those who insist so fervently on the moral condemnation
1719of the individual some- times unconsciously provide an alibi for whole groups and
1720societies. The French historian Lefebvre, seeking to exonerate the French revolution from
1721responsibility for the disasters and bloodshed of the Napoleonic wars, attributed them to
1722'the dictatorship of a general ... whose temperament ... could not easily acquiesce in peace
1723and moderation'. Germans today welcome the denunciation of Hitler's individual
1724wickedness as a satisfactory alternative to the moral judgement of the historian on the
1725society which produced him. Russians, Englishmen, and Americans readily join in
1726personal attacks on Stalin, Neville Chamberlain, or McCarthy as scapegoats for their
1727collective misdeeds. Moreover, laudatory moral judgements on individuals can be just as
1728misleading and mischievous as the moral denunciation of individuals. Recognition that
1729some individual slave- owners were high-minded was constantly used as an excuse for not
1730condemning slavery as immoral, ruler Weber refers to 'the masterless slavery in which
1731capitalism emmeshes the worker or the debtor', and rightly argues that the historian should
1732pass moral judgement on the institution, but not on the individuals who created it. The
1733historian does not sit in judgement on an individual oriental despot. But he is not required
1734to remain indifferent and impartial between, say, oriental despotism and the institutions of
1735Periclean Athens. He will not pass judgement on the individual slave-owner. But this does
1736not prevent him from condemning a slave-owning society. Historical facts, as we saw,
1737presuppose some measure of interpretation; and historical interpretations always involve
1738moral judgements - or, if you prefer a more neutral- sounding term, value judgements.
1739 
1740This is, however, only the beginning of our difficulties. History is a process of struggle, in
1741which results, whether we judge them good or bad, are achieved by some groups directly
1742or indirectly - and more often directly than indirectly - at the expense of others. The losers
1743pay. Suffering is indigenous in history. Every great period of history has its casualties as
1744well as its victories. This is an exceedingly complicated question, because we have no
1745measure which enables us to balance the greater good of some against the sacrifices of
1746others: yet some such balance must be struck. It is not exclusively a problem of history. In
1747ordinary life we are more often involved than we sometimes care to admit in the necessity
1748of preferring the lesser evil, or of doing evil that good may come. In history the question is
1749sometimes discussed under the rubric 'the cost of progress' or 'the price of revolution'. This
1750is misleading. As Bacon says in the essay On Innovations , 'the forward retention of
1751custom is as turbulent a thing as an innovation'. The cost of conservation falls just as
1752heavily on the underprivileged as the cost of innovation on those who are deprived of their
1753privileges. The thesis that the good of some justifies the sufferings of others is implicit in
1754all government, and is just as much a conservative as a radical doctrine. Dr Johnson
1755robustly invoked the argument of the lesser evil to justify the maintenance of existing
1756inequalities.
1757 
1758It is better that some should be unhappy than that none should be happy, which would be
1759the case in a general state of equality.'
1760 
1761But it is in periods of radical change that the issue appears in its most dramatic form; and
1762it is here that we find it easiest to study the attitude of the historian towards it.
1763 
1764Let us take the story of the industrialisation of Great Britain between, say, about 1780 and
17651870. Virtually every historian will treat the industrial revolution, probably without
1766discussion, as a great and progressive achievement. He will also describe the driving of the
1767peasantry off the land, the herding of workers in unhealthy factories and unsanitary
1768dwellings, the exploitation of child labour. He will probably say that abuses occurred in
1769the working of the system, and that some employers were more ruthless than others, and
1770will dwell with some unction on the gradual growth of a humanitarian conscience once the
1771system has become established. But he will assume, again probably without saying it, that
1772measures of coercion and exploitation, at any rate in the first stages, were an unavoidable
1773part of the cast of industrialisation. Nor have I ever heard of a historian who said that, in
1774view of the cost, it would have been better to stay the hand of progress and not
1775industrialise; if any such exists, he doubtless belongs to the school of Chesterton and
1776Belloc, and will - quite properly - not be taken seriously by serious historians. This
1777example is of particular interest to me, because I hope soon in my history of Soviet Russia
1778to approach the problem of the collectivisation of the peasant as a part of the cost of
1779industrialisation; and I know well that if, following the example of historians of the British
1780industrial revolution, I deplore the brutalities and abuses of collectivisation, but treat the
1781process as an unavoidable part of the cost of a desirable and necessary policy of
1782industrialisation, I shall incur charges of cynicism and of condoning evil things. Historians
1783condone the nineteenth-century colonisation of Asia and Africa by the western nations on
1784the ground not only of its immediate effects on the world economy, but of its long-term
1785consequences for the backward peoples of these continents. After all, it is said, modern
1786India is the child of British rule; and modern China is the product of nineteenth-century
1787western imperialism, crossed with the influence of the Russian revolution. Unfortunately it
1788was not the Chinese workers who laboured in the western-owned factories in the treaty
1789ports, or in the South African mines, or on the western front in the First World War, who
1790have survived to enjoy whatever glory or profit may have accrued from the Chinese
1791revolution. Those who pay the cost are rarely those who reap the benefits. The well-known
1792purple passage from Engels is uncomfortably apt:
1793 
1794History is about the most cruel of all goddesses, and she leads her triumphal car over
1795heaps of corpses, not only in war, but also in 'peaceful' economic development. And we
1796men and women are unfortunately so stupid that we never pluck up courage for real
1797progress unless urged to it by sufferings that seem almost out of proportion.'
1798 
1799Ivan Karamazov's famous gesture of defiance is a heroic fallacy. We are born into society,
1800we are born into history. No moment: occurs when we are offered a ticket of admission
1801with the option to accept or reject it. The historian has no more conclusive answer than the
1802theologian to the problem of suffering. He, too, falls back on the thesis of the lesser evil
1803and the greater good.
1804 
1805But does not the fact that the historian, unlike the scientist, becomes involved by the
1806nature of his material in these issues of moral judgement imply the submission of history
1807to a super- historical standard of value. I do not think that it does. Let us assume that
1808abstract conceptions like 'good' and 'bad', and more sophisticated developments of them,
1809lie beyond the confines of history. But, even so, these abstractions play in the study of
1810historical morality much the same role as mathematical and logical formulas in physical
1811science. They are indispensable categories of thought; but they are devoid of meaning or
1812application till specific content is put into them. If you prefer a different metaphor, the
1813moral precepts which we apply in history or in everyday life are like cheques on a bank:
1814they have a printed and a written part. The printed part consists of abstract words like
1815liberty and equality, justice and democracy. These are essential categories. But the cheque
1816is valueless until we fill in the other part, which states how much liberty we propose to
1817allocate to whom, whom we recognise as our equals, and up to what amount. The way in
1818which we fill in the cheque from time to time is a matter of history. The process by which
1819specific historical content is given to abstract moral conceptions is a historical process;
1820indeed, our moral judgements are made within a conceptual framework which is itself the
1821creation of history. The favourite form of contemporary international controversy on
1822moral issues is a debate on rival claims to freedom and democracy. The conceptions are
1823abstract and universal. But the content put into them has varied throughout history, from
1824time to time and from place to place; any practical issue of their application can be
1825understood and debated only in historical terms. To take a slightly less popular example,
1826the attempt has been made to use the conception of 'economic rationality' as an objective
1827and non-controversial criterion by which the desirability of economic policies can be
1828tested and judged. The attempt at once breaks down. Theorists brought up on the laws of
1829classical economics condemn planning in principle as an irrational intrusion into rational
1830economic processes; for example, planners refuse in their price policy to be bound by the
1831law of supply and demand, and prices under planning can have no rational basis. It may,
1832of course, be true that planners often behave irrationally, and therefore foolishly. But the
1833criterion by which they must be judged is not the old 'economic rationality' of classical
1834economy. Personally, I have more sympathy with the converse argument that it was the
1835uncontrolled unorganised laissez-faire economy which was essentially irrational, and that
1836planning is an attempt to introduce 'economic rationality' into the process. But the only
1837point which I wish to make at the moment is the impossibility of erecting an abstract and
1838super-historical standard by which historical actions can be judged. Bath sides inevitably
1839read into such a standard the specific content appropriate to their own historical conditions
1840and aspirations.
1841 
1842This is the real indictment of those who seek to erect a super- historical standard or
1843criterion in the light of which judgement is passed on historical events or situations -
1844whether that standard derives from some divine authority postulated by the theologians, or
1845from a static Reason or Nature postulated by the philosophers of the Enlightenment. It is
1846not that short- coming occur in the application of the standard, or defects in the standard
1847itself. It is that the attempt to erect such a standard is unhistorical and contradicts the very
1848essence of history. It provides a dogmatic answer to questions which the historian is bound
1849by his vocation incessantly to ask: the historian who accepts answers in advance to these
1850questions goes to work with his eyes blindfolded and renounces his vocation. History is
1851movement; and movement implies comparison. That is why historians tend to express
1852their moral judgements in words of a comparative nature like ‘progressive' and
1853'reactionary' rather than in uncompromising absolutes like ‘good' and 'bad’; these are
1854attempts to define different societies or historical phenomena not in relation to some
1855absolute standard, but in their relation to one another. Moreover, when we examine these
1856supposedly absolute and extra-historical values, we find that they too are in fact rooted to
1857history. The emergence of a particular value or ideal at a given time or place is explained
1858by historical conditions of place and time. The practical content of hypothetical absolutes
1859like equality, liberty, justice, or natural law varies from period to period, or from continent
1860to continent. Every group has its own values, which are rooted in history. Every group
1861protects itself against the intrusion of alien and inconvenient values, which it brands by
1862opprobrious epithets as bourgeois and capitalist, or undemocratic and totalitarian, or, more
1863crudely still, as un-English and un-American. The abstract standard or value, divorced
1864from society and divorced from history, is as much an illusion as the abstract individual.
1865The serious historian is the one who recognises the historically- conditioned character of
1866all values, not the one who claims for his own values an objectivity beyond history. The
1867beliefs which we hold and the standards of judgement which we set up are part of history,
1868and are as much subject to historical investigation as any other aspect of human behaviour.
1869Few sciences today - least of all the social sciences - would lay claim to total
1870independence. But history has no fundamental dependence on something outside itself
1871which would differentiate it from any other science.
1872 
1873Let me sum up what I have tried to say about the claim of history to be included among
1874the sciences. The word science already covers so many different branches of knowledge,
1875employing so many different methods and techniques, that the onus seems to rest on those
1876who seek to exclude history rather than on those who seek to include it. It is significant
1877that the arguments for exclusion come not from scientists anxious to exclude historians
1878from their select company, but from historians and philosophers anxious to vindicate the
1879status of history as a branch of humane letters. The dispute reflects the prejudice of the old
1880division between the humanities and science, in which the humanities were supposed to
1881represent the broad culture of the ruling class, and science the skills of the technicians who
1882served it. The words 'humanities' and 'humane' are themselves in this context a survival of
1883this time-honoured prejudice; and the fact that the antithesis between science and history
1884will not make sense in any language but English suggests the peculiarly insular character
1885of the prejudice. My principal objection to the refusal to call history a science is that it
1886justifies and perpetuates the rift between the so-called 'two cultures'. The rift itself is a
1887product of this ancient prejudice, based on a class structure of English society which itself
1888belongs to the past ; and I am myself not convinced that the chasm which separates the
1889historian from the geologist is any deeper or more unbridgeable than the chasm which
1890separates the geologist from the physicist. But the way to mend the rift is not, in my view,
1891to teach elementary science to historians or elementary history to scientists. This is a blind
1892alley into which we have been led by muddled thinking. After all, scientists themselves do
1893not behave in this way. I have never heard of engineers being advised to attend elementary
1894classes in botany.
1895 
1896One remedy I would suggest is to improve the standard of our history, to make it - if I may
1897dare to say so - more scientific, to make our demands on those who pursue it more
1898rigorous. History as an academic discipline in this university is sometimes thought of as a
1899catch-all for those who find classics too difficult and science too serious. One impression
1900which I hope to convey in these lectures is that history is a far more difficult subject than
1901classics, and quite as serious as any science. But this remedy would imply a stronger faith
1902among historians themselves in what they are doing. Sir Charles Snow, in a recent lecture
1903on this theme, had a point when he contrasted the 'brash' optimism of the scientist with the
1904' subdued voice ' and ' anti-social feeling' of what he called the 'literary intellectual'. Some
1905historians - and more of those who write about history without being historians - belong to
1906this category of ‘literary intellectuals'. They are so busy telling us that history is not a
1907science, and explaining what it cannot and should not be or do, that they have no time for
1908its achievements and its potentialities.
1909 
1910The other way to heal the rift is to promote a profounder understanding of the identity of
1911aim between scientists and historians; and this is the main value of the new and growing
1912interest in the history and philosophy of science. Scientists, social scientists, and historians
1913are all engaged in different branches of the same study: the study of man and his
1914environment, of the effects of man on his environment and of his environment on man.
1915 
1916The object of the study is the same: to increase man's understanding of, and mastery over,
1917his environment. The presuppositions and the methods of the physicist, the geologist, the
1918psychologist, and the historian differ widely in detail; nor do I wish to commit myself to
1919the proposition that, in order to be more scientific, the historian must follow more closely
1920the methods of physical science. But historian and physical scientist are united in the
1921fundamental purpose of seeking to explain, and in the fundamental procedure of question
1922and answer. The historian, like any other scientist, is an animal who incessantly asks the
1923question 'Why ?' In my next lecture I shall examine the ways in which he puts the question
1924and in which he attempts to answer it.
1925 
19264 Causation in History
1927 
1928IF milk is set to boil in a saucepan, it boils over. I do not know, and have never wanted to
1929know, why this happens; if pressed, I should probably attribute it to a propensity in milk to
1930boil over, which is true enough but explains nothing. But then I am not a natural scientist.
1931In the same way, one can read, or even write, about the events of the past without wanting
1932to know why they happened, or be content to say that the Second World War occurred
1933because Hitler wanted war, which is true enough but explains nothing. But one should not
1934then commit the solecism of calling oneself a student of history or a historian. The study
1935of history is a study of causes. The historian, as I said at the end of my last lecture,
1936continuously asks the question 'Why?'; and so long as he hopes for an answer, he cannot
1937rest. The great historian - or perhaps I should say more broadly, the great thinker - is the
1938man who asks the question 'Why?' about new things or in new contexts.
1939 
1940Herodotus, the father of history, defined his purpose in the opening of his work: to
1941preserve a memory of the deeds of the Greeks and the barbarians, ‘and in particular,
1942beyond everything else, to give the cause of their fighting one another'. He found few
1943disciples in the ancient world: even Thucydides has been accused of having no clear
1944conception of causation. But when in the eighteenth century the foundations of modern
1945historiography began to be laid, Montesquieu, in his Considerations on the Causes of the
1946Greatness of the Romans and a their Rise and Decline, took as his starting-point the
1947principles that 'there are general causes, moral or physical, which operate in every
1948monarchy, raise it, maintain it, or overthrow if, and that 'all that occurs is subject to these
1949causes'. A few years later in the Esprit des lois he developed and generalised this idea. It
1950was absurd to suppose that 'blind fate has produced all the effects which we see in the
1951world'. Men were 'not governed uniquely by their fantasies'; their behaviour followed
1952certain laws or principles derived from 'the nature of things'.' For nearly zoo years after
1953that, historians and philosophers of history were busily engaged in an attempt to organise
1954the past experience of mankind by discovering the causes of historical events and the laws
1955which governed them. Sometimes the causes and the laws were thought of in mechanical,
1956sometimes in biological, terms, sometimes as metaphysical, sometimes as economic,
1957sometimes as psychological. But it was accepted doctrine that history consisted in
1958marshalling the events of the past in an orderly sequence of cause and effect. 'If you have
1959nothing to tell us', wrote Voltaire in his article on history for the Encyclopaedia, 'except
1960that one barbarian succeeded another on the banks of the Oxus and Jaxartes, what is that to
1961us?' In the last years the picture has been somewhat modified. Nowadays, for reasons
1962discussed in my last lecture, we no longer speak of historical 'laws'; and even the word
1963'cause' has gone out of fashion, partly owing to certain philosophical ambiguities into
1964which I need not enter, and partly owing to its supposed association with determinism, to
1965which I will come presently. Some people therefore speak not of ‘cause' in history, but of
1966‘explanation' or 'interpretation', or of ‘the logic of the situation', or of ‘the inner logic of
1967events' (this comes from Dicey), or reject the causal approach (why it happened) in favour
1968of the functional approach (how it happened), though this seems inevitably to involve the
1969question how it came to happen, and so leads us back to the question 'Why?' Other people
1970distinguish between different kinds of cause - mechanical, biological, psychological, and
1971so forth - and regard historical cause as a category of its own. Though some of these
1972distinctions are in some degree valid, it may be more profitable for present purposes to
1973stress what is common to all kinds of cause rather than what separates them. For myself, I
1974shall be content to use the word 'cause' in the popular sense and neglect these particular
1975refinements.
1976 
1977Let us begin by asking what the historian in practice does when he is confronted by the
1978necessity of assigning causes to events. The first characteristic of the historian's approach
1979to the problem of cause is that he will commonly assign several to the same event.
1980Marshall the economist once wrote that 'people must be warned off by every possible
1981means from considering the action of any one cause ... without taking account of the
1982others whose effects are commingled with it'. The examination candidate who, in
1983answering the question 'Why did revolution break out in Russia in 1917?', offered only
1984one cause, would be lucky to get a third class. The historian deals in a multiplicity of
1985causes. If he were required to consider the causes of the Bolshevik revolution, he might
1986name Russia's successive military defeats, the collapse of the Russian economy under
1987pressure of war, the effective propaganda of the Bolsheviks, the failure of the Tsarist
1988government to solve the agrarian problem, the concentration of an impoverished and
1989exploited proletariat in the factories of Petrograd, the fact that Lenin knew his own mind
1990and nobody on the other side did - in short, a random jumble of economic, political,
1991ideological, and personal causes, of long-term and short-term causes.
1992 
1993But this brings us at once to the second characteristic of the historian's approach. The
1994candidate who, in reply to our question, was content to set out one after the other a dozen
1995causes of - the Russian revolution and leave it at that, might get a second class, but
1996scarcely a first; 'well-informed, but unimaginative' would probably be the verdict of the
1997examiners. The true historian, confronted with this list of causes of his own com- piling,
1998would feel a professional compulsion to reduce it; to order, to establish some hierarchy of
1999causes which would fix their relation to one another, perhaps to decide which cause, or
2000which category of causes, should be regarded 'in the last resort' or 'hi the final
2001analysis' (favourite phrases of historians) as the ultimate cause, the cause of all causes.
2002This is his interpretation of his theme; the historian is known by the causes which he
2003invokes. Gibbon attributed the decline and fall of the Roman empire to the triumph of
2004barbarism and religion. The English Whig historians of the nineteenth century attributed
2005the rise of British power and prosperity to the development of political institutions
2006embodying the principles of constitutional liberty. Gibbon and the English nineteenth-
2007century historians have an old-fashioned look today, because they ignore the economic
2008causes which modern historians have moved into the forefront. Every historical argument
2009revolves round the question of the priority of causes.
2010 
2011Henri Poincare, in the work which I quoted in my last lecture, noted that science was
2012advancing simultaneously 'towards variety complexity' and ‘towards unity and simplicity',
2013and that this dual and apparently contradictory process-was a necessary condition of
2014knowledge. This is no less true of history. The historian, by expanding and deepening his
2015research, constantly accumulates more and more answers to the question, 'Why?' The
2016proliferation in recent years of economic, social, cultural, and legal history - not to
2017mention fresh insights into the complexities of political history, and the new techniques of
2018psychology and statistics - have enormously increased the number and range of our
2019answers. When Bertrand Russell observed that 'every advance in a science takes us further
2020away from the crude uniformities which are first observed into a greater differentiation of
2021antecedent and consequent, and into a continually wider circle of antecedents recognised
2022as relevant'," he accurately described the situation in history. But the historian, in virtue of
2023his urge to understand the past, is simultaneously compelled, like the scientist, to simplify
2024the multiplicity of his answers, to subordinate one answer to another, and to introduce
2025some order and unity into the chaos of happenings and the chaos of specific causes. 'One
2026God, one Law, one Element, and one far-off Divine Event'; or Henry Adams's quest for
2027'some great generalisation which would finish one's clamour to be educated" - these read
2028nowadays like old-fashioned jokes. But the fact remains that the historian must work
2029through the simplification, as well as through the multiplication, of causes. History, like
2030science, advances through this dual and apparently contradictory process.
2031 
2032At this point I must reluctantly turn aside to deal with two savoury red herrings which
2033have been drawn across our path - one labelled 'Determinism in History; or the
2034Wickedness of Hegel', the other 'Chance in History; or Cleopatra's Nose'. First I must say
2035a word or two about how they come to be here. Professor Karl Popper, who in the 1930s in
2036Vienna wrote a weighty work on the new look in science (recently translated into English
2037under the title The Logic of Scientific Enquiry), published in English during the war two
2038books of a more popular character: The Open Society and Its Enemies and The Poverty of
2039Historicism. They were written under the strong emotional influence of the reaction
2040against Hegel, who was, treated, together with Plato, as the spiritual ancestor of Nazism,
2041and against the rather shallow Marxism which was the intellectual climate of the British
2042Left in the 1930s. The principal targets were the allegedly determinist philosophies of
2043history of Hegel and Marx grouped together under the opprobrious name of 'Historicism'.
2044In 1954 Sir Isaiah Berlin published his essay on Historical Inevitability. He dropped the
2045attack on Plate, perhaps out of some lingering respect for that ancient pillar of the Oxford
2046Establishment'; and he added to the indictment the argument, not found in Popper, that the
2047'historicism' of Hegel and Marx is objectionable because, by explaining human actions in
2048causal terms, it implies a denial of human free will, and encourages historians to evade
2049their supposed obligation (of which I spoke in my last lecture) to pronounce moral
2050condemnation on the Charlemagnes, Napoleons, and Stalins of history. Otherwise not
2051much has changed. But Sir Isaiah Berlin is a deservedly popular and widely-read writer.
2052During the past five or six years, almost everyone in this country or in the United States
2053who has written an article about history, or even a serious review of a historical work, has
2054cocked a knowing snook at Hegel and Marx and determinism, and pointed out the
2055absurdity of failing to recognise the role of accident in history. It is perhaps unfair to hold
2056Sir Isaiah responsible for his disciples. Even when he talks nonsense, he earns our
2057indulgence by talking it in an engaging and attractive way. The disciples repeat the
2058nonsense, and fail to make it attractive. In any case, there is nothing new in all this.
2059 
2060Charles Kingsley, not the most distinguished of our Regius Professors of Modern History,
2061who had probably never read Hegel or heard of Marx, spoke in his inaugural lecture in
2062I860 of man's 'mysterious power of breaking the laws of his own being' as proof that no
2063'inevitable sequence' could exist in history. But fortunately we have forgotten Kingsley. It
2064is Professor Popper and Sir Isaiah Berlin who between them have dogged this very dead
2065horse back into a semblance of life; and some patience will be required to clear up the
2066muddle.
2067 
2068First then let me take determinism, which I will define - 1 hope, uncontroversial - as the
2069belief that everything that happened has a cause or causes, and could not have happened
2070differently unless something in the cause or causes had also been different. Determinism is
2071a problem not of history, but of all human behaviour. The human being whose actions
2072have no cause and are therefore undetermined is as much an abstraction as the individual
2073outside society whom we discussed in a previous lecture. Professor Popper's assertion that
2074'everything- is possible in human affairs is either meaningless or false. Nobody in ordinary
2075life believes or can believe this. The axiom that everything has a cause is a condition of
2076our capacity to understand what is going on around us. The nightmare quality of Kafka's
2077novels lies in the fact that nothing that happens has any apparent cause, or any cause that
2078can be ascertained: this leads to the total disintegration of the human personality, which is
2079based on the assumption that events have causes, and that enough of these causes are
2080ascertainable to build up in the human mind a pattern of past and present sufficiently
2081coherent to serve as a guide to action. Everyday life would be impossible unless one
2082assumed that human behaviour was determined by causes which are in principle
2083ascertainable. Once upon a time some people thought it blasphemous to inquire into the
2084causes of natural phenomena, since these were obviously governed by the divine will. Sir
2085Isaiah Berlin's objection to our explaining why human beings acted as they did, on the
2086ground that these actions ate governed by the human will, belongs to the same order of
2087ideas, and perhaps indicates that the social sciences are in the same stage of development
2088today as were the natural sciences when this kind of argument was directed against them.
2089 
2090Let us see how we handle this problem in everyday life. As you go about your daily
2091affairs, you are in the habit of meeting Smith. You greet him with an amiable, but
2092pointless, remark about the weather, or about the state of college or university business; he
2093replies with an equally amiable and pointless remark about the weather or the state of
2094business. But supposing that one morning Smith, instead of answering your remark in his
2095usual way, were to break into a violent diatribe against your personal appearance or
2096character. Would you shrug your shoulders, and treat this as a convincing demonstration
2097of the freedom of Smith's will and of the fact that everything is possible in human affairs ?
2098I suspect that you would not. On the contrary, you would probably say something like:’
2099Poor Smith! You know, of course, his father died in a mental hospital,' or 'Poor Smith! He
2100must have been having more trouble with his wife.' In other words, you would attempt to
2101diagnose the cause of Smith's apparently causeless behaviour, in the conviction that some
2102cause there must be. By so doing you would, I fear, incur the wrath of Sir Isaiah Berlin,
2103who would bitterly complain that, by providing a causal explanation of Smith's behaviour,
2104you had swallowed Hegel's and Marx's deterministic assumption, and shirked your
2105obligation to denounce Smith as a cad. But nobody in ordinary life takes this view, or
2106supposes that either determinism or moral responsibility is at stake. The logical dilemma
2107about free will and determinism does not arise in real life. It is not that some human
2108actions are free and others determined. The fact is that all human actions are both free and
2109determined, according to the point of view from which one considers them. The practical
2110question is different again. Smith's action had a cause, or a number of causes; but in so far
2111as it was caused not by some external compulsion but by the compulsion of his own
2112personality, he was morally responsible, since it is a condition of social life that normal
2113adult human beings are morally responsible for their own personality. Whether to hold
2114him responsible in this particular case is a matter for your practical judgement. But, if you
2115do, this does not mean that you regard his action as having no cause: cause and moral
2116responsibility are different categories. An Institute and Chair of Criminology have recently
2117been established in this university. It would not, I feel sure, occur to any of those engaged
2118in investigating the causes of crime to suppose that this committed them to a denial of the
2119moral responsibility of the criminal. Now let us look at the historian. Like the ordinary
2120man, he believes that human actions have causes which are in principle ascertainable.
2121History, like everyday life, would be impossible if this assumption were not made. It is the
2122special function of the historian to investigate these causes. This may be thought to give
2123him a special interest in the determined aspect of human behaviour: but he does not reject
2124free will - except on the untenable hypothesis that voluntary actions have no cause. Nor is
2125he troubled by the question of inevitability. Historians, like other people, sometimes fall
2126into rhetorical language and speak of an occurrence as 'inevitable' when they mean merely
2127that the conjunction of factors leading one to expect it was overwhelmingly strong.
2128Recently I searched my own history for the offending word, and cannot give myself an
2129entirely clean bill of health: in one passage I wrote that, after the revolution of 1917, a
2130dash between the Bolsheviks and the Orthodox Church was 'inevitable'. No doubt it would
2131have been wiser to say 'extremely probable'. But may I be excused for finding the
2132correction a shade pedantic? In practice, historians do not assume that events are
2133inevitable before they have taken place. They frequently discuss alternative courses
2134available to the actors in the story, on the assumption that the option was open, though
2135they go on quite correctly to explain why one course was eventually chosen rather than the
2136other. Nothing in history is inevitable, except in the formal sense that, for it to have
2137happened otherwise, the antecedent causes would have had to be different. As a historian,
2138 
2139I am perfectly prepared to do without 'inevitable', 'unavoidable', 'inescapable', and even
2140'ineluctable'. Life will be drabber. But let us leave them to poets and metaphysicians.
2141 
2142So barren and pointless does this charge of inevitability appear, and so great the
2143vehemence with which it has been pursued in recent years, that I think we must look for
2144the hidden motives behind it. Its principal source is, I suspect, what I may call the 'might-
2145have-been' school of thought - or rather of emotion. It attaches itself almost exclusively to
2146contemporary history. Last term here in Cambridge I saw a talk to some society advertised
2147under the title 'Was the Russian Revolution Inevitable ?' I am sure it was intended as a
2148perfectly serious talk. But if you had seen a talk advertised on 'Were the Wars of the Roses
2149Inevitable?' you would at once have suspected some joke. The historian writes of the
2150Norman Conquest or the American War of Independence as if what happened was in fact
2151bound to happen, and as if it was his business simply to explain what happened and why;
2152and nobody accuses him of being a determinist and of failing to discuss the alternative
2153possibility that William the Conqueror or the American insurgents might have been
2154defeated. When, however, I write about the Russian revolution of 1917 in precisely this
2155way - the only proper way to the historian I find myself under attack from my critics for
2156having by implication depicted what happened as something that was bound to happen,
2157and failed to examine all the other things that might have happened. Suppose, it is said,
2158that Stolypin had had time to complete his agrarian reform, or that Russia had not gone to
2159war, perhaps the revolution would not have occurred; or suppose that the Kerensky
2160government had made good, and that the leadership of the revolution had been assumed by
2161the Mensheviks or the Social Revolutionaries instead of by the Bolsheviks. These
2162suppositions are theoretically conceivable; and one can always play a parlour game with
2163the might-have-beens of history. But they have nothing to do with determinism; for the
2164determinist will only reply that, for these things to have happened, the causes would also
2165have had to be different. Nor have they anything to do with history. The point is that today
2166nobody seriously wishes to reverse the results of the Norman Conquest or of American
2167independence, or to express a passionate protest against these events; and nobody objects
2168when the - historian treats them as a closed chapter. But plenty of people, who have
2169suffered directly or vicariously from the results of the Bolshevik victory, or still fear its
2170remoter consequences, desire To register their protest against it; and this takes the form,
2171when they read history, of letting their imagination run riot on all the more agreeable
2172things that might have happened, and of being indignant with the historian who goes on
2173quietly with his job of explaining what did happen and why their agreeable wish-dreams
2174remain unfulfilled. The trouble about contemporary history is that people remember the
2175time when all the options were still open, and find it difficult to adopt the attitude of the
2176historian for whom they have been closed by the fait accompli. This is a purely emotional
2177and unhistorical reaction. But it has furnished most of the fuel for the recent campaign
2178against the supposed doctrine of ‘historical inevitability'. Let us get rid of this red herring
2179once and for all.
2180 
2181The other source of the attack is the famous crux of Cleopatra's nose. This is the theory
2182that history is, by and large, a chapter of accidents, a series of events determined by
2183chance coincidences, and attributable only to the most casual causes. The result of the
2184Battle of Actium was due not to the sort of causes commonly postulated by historians, but
2185to Antony's infatuation with Cleopatra. When Bajazet was deterred by an attack of gout
2186from marching into central Europe, Gibbon observed that 'an acrimonious humour falling
2187on a single fibre of one man may prevent or suspend the misery of nations' When King
2188Alexander of Greece died in the autumn of 1920 from the bite of a pet monkey, this
2189accident touched off a train of events which led Sir Winston Churchill to remark that 'a
2190quarter of a million persons died of this monkey's bite'. Or take again Trotsky's comment
2191on the fever contracted while shooting ducks which put him out of action at a critical point
2192of his quarrel with Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin in the autumn of 1923: 'One can foresee
2193a revolution or a war, but it is impossible to foresee the consequences of an autumn
2194shooting-trip for wild ducks.'" The first thing to be made clear is that this question has
2195nothing to do with the issue of determinism. Antony's infatuation with Cleopatra, or
2196Bajazet's attack of gout, or Trotsky's feverish chill, were just as much causally determined
2197as anything else that happens. It is unnecessarily discourteous to Cleopatra's beauty to
2198suggest that Antony's infatuation had no cause. The connexion between female beauty and
2199male infatuation is one of the most regular sequences of cause and effect observable in
2200everyday life. These so-called accidents in history represent a sequence of cause and effect
2201interrupting - and, so to speak, clashing with - the sequence which the historian is
2202primarily concerned to investigate. Bury, quite rightly, speaks of a 'collision of two
2203independent causal chains'.' Sir Isaiah Berlin, who opens his essay on Historical
2204Inevitability by citing with praise an article of Bernard Berenson on 'The Accidental View
2205of History, is one of those who confuse accident in this sense with an absence of causal
2206determination. But, this confusion apart, we have a real problem on our hands. How can
2207one discover in history a coherent sequence of cause and effect, how can we find any
2208meaning in history, when our sequence is liable to be broken or deflected at any moment
2209by some other, and from our point of view irrelevant, sequence?
2210 
2211We may pause here for a moment to notice the origin of this recent widespread insistence
2212on the role of chance in history. Polybius appears to have been the first historian to occupy
2213himself with it in any systematic way; and Gibbon was quick to unmask the reason. ‘The
2214Greeks', observed Gibbon, ‘after their country had been reduced to a province, imputed the
2215triumphs of Rome not to the merit, but to the fortune, of the republic.' Tacitus, also a
2216historian of the decay of his country, was another ancient historian to indulge in extensive
2217reflexions on chance. The renewed insistence by British writers on the importance of
2218accident in history dates from the growth of a mood of uncertainty and apprehension
2219which set in with the present century and became marked after 1914. The first British
2220historian to sound this note after a long interval appears to have been Bury, who, in an
2221article of 1909 on 'Darwinism in History', drew attention to 'the element of chance
2222coincidence' which in large measure 'helps to determine events in social evolution'; and a
2223separate article was devoted to this theme in 1916 under the title 'Cleopatra's Nose'.' H. A.
2224L. Fisher, in the passage already quoted, which reflects his disillusionment over the failure
2225of liberal dreams after the First World War, begs his readers to recognise 'the play of the
2226contingent and the unforeseen' in history." The popularity in this country of a theory of
2227history as a chapter of accidents has coincided with the rise in Prance of a school of
2228philosophers who preach that existence - 1 quote Sartre's famous L'Ene et le neant - has
2229'neither cause nor reason nor necessity'. In Germany, the veteran historian Meinecke, as
2230we have already noted, became impressed towards the end of his life with the role of
2231chance in history. He reproached Ranke with not having paid sufficient attention to it; and
2232after the Second World War he attributed the national disasters of the past forty years to a
2233series of accidents, the vanity of the Raiser, the election of Hindenburg to the presidency
2234of the Weimar Republic, Hitler's obsessional character, and so forth - the bankruptcy of a
2235great historian's mind under the stress of the misfortunes of his country.' In a group or a
2236nation which is riding in the trough, not on the crest, of historical events, theories that
2237stress the role of chance or accident in history will be found to prevail. The view that
2238examination results are all a lottery will always be popular among those who have been
2239placed in the third class.
2240 
2241But to uncover the sources of a belief is not to dispose of it; and we have still to discover
2242exactly what Cleopatra's nose is doing in the pages of history. Montesquieu was
2243apparently the first who attempted to defend the laws of history against this intrusion. 'If a
2244particular cause, like the accidental result of a battle, has ruined a state,' he wrote in his
2245work on the greatness and decline of the Romans, 'there was a general cause which made
2246the downfall of this state ensue from a single battle.' The Marxists also had some difficulty
2247over this question. Marx wrote of it only once, and that only in a letter:
2248 
2249World history would have a very mystical character if there no room in it for chance. This
2250chance itself naturally becomes part of the general trend of development and is
2251compensated by other forms of chance. But acceleration and retardation depends on such
2252'accidentals', which include the 'chance' character of the individuals who are at the head of
2253a movement at the outset.
2254 
2255Marx thus offered an apology for chance in history under three heads. First, it was not
2256very important; it could 'accelerate' or ‘retard’ but not, by implication, radically alter, the
2257course of events. Second, one chance was compensated by another, so that in the end
2258chance cancelled itself out. Third, chance was illustrated in the character of individuals.
2259Trotsky reinforced the theory of compensating and self-cancelling accidents by an
2260ingenious analogy:
2261 
2262The entire historical process is a refraction of historical law through the accidental. In the
2263language of biology, we might say that the historical law is realised through the natural
2264selection of accidents.'
2265I confess that I find this theory unsatisfying and unconvincing. The role of accident in
2266history is nowadays seriously exaggerated by those who are interested to stress its
2267importance. But it exists, and to say that it merely accelerates or retards, but does not alter,
2268is to juggle with words. Nor do I see any reason to believe that an accidental occurrence -
2269say, the premature death of Lenin at the age of fifty-four - is automatically compensated
2270by some other accident in such a way as to restore the balance of the historical process.
2271 
2272Equally inadequate is the view that accident in history is merely the measure of our
2273ignorance - simply a name for some- thing which we fail to understand. This no doubt
2274sometimes happens. The planets got their name, which means of course 'wanderers', when
2275they were supposed to wander at random through the sky, and the regularity of their
2276movements was not understood. To describe something as a mischance is a favourite way
2277of exempting oneself from the tiresome obligation to investigate its cause; and, when
2278somebody tells me that history is a chapter of accidents, I tend to suspect him of
2279intellectual laziness or low intellectual vitality. It is common practice with serious
2280historians to point out that something hitherto treated as accidental was not an accident at
2281all, but can be rationally explained and significantly fitted into the broader pattern of
2282events. But this also does not fully answer our question. Accident is not simply something
2283which we fail to understand. The solution of the problem of accident in history must, I
2284believe, be sought in a quite different order of ideas.
2285 
2286At an earlier stage we saw that history begins with the selection and marshalling of facts
2287by the historian to become historical facts. Not all facts are historical facts. But the
2288distinction between historical and unhistorical facts is not rigid or constant; and any fact
2289may, so to speak, be promoted to the status of a historical fact once its relevance and
2290significance are discerned. We now see that a somewhat similar process is at work in the
2291historian's approach to causes. The relation of the historian to his causes has the same dual
2292and reciprocal character as the relation of the historian to his facts. The causes determine
2293his interpretation of the historical process, and his interpretation deter- mines his selection
2294and marshalling of the causes. The hierarchy of causes, the relative significance of one
2295cause or set of causes or of another, is the essence of his interpretation. And this furnishes
2296the clue to the problem of the accidental in history. The shape of Cleopatra's nose,
2297Bajazet's attack of gout, the monkey- bite that killed King Alexander, the death of Lenin -
2298these were accidents which modified the course of history. It is futile to attempt to spirit
2299them away, or to pretend that in some way or other they had no effect. On the other hand,
2300in so far as they were accidental, they do not enter into any rational interpretation of
2301history, or into the historian's hierarchy of significant causes. Professor Popper and
2302Professor Berlin - 1 cite them once more as the most distinguished and widely read
2303representatives of the school - assume that the historian's attempt to find significance in
2304the historical process and to draw conclusions from it is tantamount to an attempt to
2305reduce 'the whole of experience' to a symmetrical order, and that the presence of accident
2306in history dooms any such attempt to failure. But no sane historian pre- tends to do
2307anything so fantastic as to embrace 'the whole of experience'; he cannot embrace more
2308than a minute fraction of the facts even of his chosen sector or aspect of history. The world
2309of the historian, like the world of the scientist, is not a photographic copy of the real
2310world, but rather a working model which enables him more or less effectively to
2311understand it and to master it. The historian distils from the experience of the past, or from
2312so much of the experience of the past as is accessible to him, that part which he recognises
2313as amenable to rational explanation and interpretation, and from it draws conclusions
2314which may serve as a guide to action. A recent popular writer, speaking of the
2315achievements of science, refers graphically to the processes of the human mind, which,
2316'rummaging in the ragbag of observed "facts", selects, pieces, and patterns the relevant
2317observed facts together, rejecting the irrelevant, until it has sewn together a logical and
2318rational quilt of knowledge.' With some qualification as to the dangers of undue
2319subjectivism, I should accept that as a picture of the way in which the mind of the
2320historian works.
2321 
2322This procedure may puzzle and shock philosophers, and even some historians. But it is
2323perfectly familiar to ordinary people going about the practical business of life. Let me
2324illustrate. Jones, returning from a party at which he has consumed more than his usual
2325ration of alcohol, ins car whose brakes turn out to have been defective, at a blind corner
2326where visibility is notoriously poor, knocks down and kills Robinson, who was crossing
2327the road to buy cigarettes at the shop on the corner. After the mess has been cleared up, we
2328meet - say at local police headquarters - to inquire into the causes of the occurrence. Was
2329it due to the driver's semi-intoxicated condition - in which case there might be criminal
2330prosecution? Or was it due to the defective brakes - in which case something might be said
2331to the garage which overhauled the an only the week before? Or was it due to the blind
2332corner - in which case the road authorities might be invited to give the matter their
2333attention? While we are discussing these practical questions, two distinguished gentlemen
2334- 1 shall not attempt to identify them - burst into the room and begin to tell us, with great
2335fluency and cogency, that, if Robinson had not happened to run out of cigarettes that
2336evening, he would not have been crossing the road and would not have been killed; that
2337Robinson's desire for cigarettes was therefore the cause of his death; and that any inquiry
2338which neglects this cause will be waste of time, and any conclusions drawn from it
2339meaningless and futile. Well, what do we do ? As soon as we can break into the flow of
2340eloquence, we edge our two visitors gently but firmly towards the door, we instruct the
2341janitor on no account to admit them again, and we get on with our inquiry. But what
2342answer have we to the interrupters? Of course, Robinson was killed because he was a
2343cigarette-smoker. Everything that the devotees of chance and contingency in history say is
2344perfectly true and perfectly logical. It has the kind of remorseless logic which we find in
2345Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. But, while I yield to none in my
2346admiration for these ripe examples of Oxford scholarship, I prefer to keep my different
2347modes of logic in separate compartments. The Dodgsonian mode is not the mode of
2348history.
2349 
2350History therefore is a process of selection in terms of historical significance. To borrow
2351Talcott Parson's phrase once more, history is 'a selective system ' not only of cognitive, but
2352of causal, orientations to reality. Just as from the infinite ocean of facts the historian
2353selects those which are significant for his purpose, so from the multiplicity of sequences of
2354cause and effect he extracts those, and only those, which are historically significant; and
2355the standard of historical significance is his ability to get them into his pattern of rational
2356explanation and interpretation. Other sequences of cause and effect have to be rejected as
2357accidental, not because the relation between cause and effect is different, but because the
2358sequence itself is irrelevant. The historian can do nothing with it; it is not amenable to
2359rational interpretation, and has no meaning either for the past or the present. It is true that
2360Cleopatra's nose, or Bajazet's gout, or Alexander's monkey- bite, or Lenin's death, or
2361Robinson's cigarette-smoking, had results. But it makes no sense as a general proposition
2362to say that generals lose battles because they are infatuated with beautiful queens, or that
2363wars occur because kings keep pet monkeys, or that people get run over and killed on the
2364roads because they smoke cigarettes. If on the other hand you tell the ordinary man that
2365Robinson was killed because the driver was drunk, or because the brakes did not work, or
2366because there was a blind corner on the road, this will seem to him a perfectly sensible and
2367rational explanation; if he chooses to discriminate, he may even say that this, and not
2368Robinson's desire for cigarettes, was the 'real' cause of Robinson's death. Similarly, if you
2369tell the student of history that the struggles in the Soviet Union in the 1920s were due to
2370discussions about the rate of industrialisation, or about the best means of inducing the
2371peasants to grow grain to feed the towns, or even to the personal ambitions of rival
2372leaders, he will feel that these are rational and historically significant explanations, in the
2373sense that they could also be applied to other historical situations, and that they are 'real'
2374causes of what happened in the sense that the accident of Lenin's premature death was not.
2375He may even, if he is given to reflection on these things, be reminded of Hegel's much
2376quoted and much misunderstood dictum in the introduction to the Ph ilosophy of Right that
2377'what is rational is real, and what is real is rational'.
2378 
2379Let us return for a moment to the causes of Robinson's death. We had no difficulty in
2380recognising that some of the causes were rational and 'real' and that others were irrational
2381and accidental. But by what criterion did we make the distinction? The faculty of reason is
2382normally exercised for some purpose. Intellectuals may sometimes reason, or think that
2383they reason, for fun. But, broadly speaking, human beings reason to an end. And when we
2384recognised certain explanations as rational, and other explanations as not rational, we
2385were, I suggest, distinguishing between explanations which served some end and
2386explanations which did not. In the case under discussion it made sense to suppose that the
2387curbing of alcoholic indulgence in drivers, or a stricter control over the condition of
2388brakes, or an improvement in the siting of roads, might serve the end of reducing the
2389number of traffic fatalities. But it made no sense at all to suppose that the number of traffic
2390fatalities could be reduced by preventing people from smoking cigarettes. This was the
2391criterion by which we made our distinction. And the same goes for our attitude to causes
2392in history. There, too, we distinguish between rational and accidental causes. The former,
2393since they are potentially applicable to other countries, other periods, and other conditions,
2394lead to fruitful generalisations, and lessons can be learned from them; they serve the end
2395of broadening and deepening our understanding. Accidental causes cannot be generalised;
2396and, since they are in the fullest sense of the word unique, they teach no lessons and lead
2397to no conclusions. But here I must make another point. It is precisely this notion of an end
2398in view which provides the key to our treatment of causation in history; and this
2399necessarily involves value judgements. Interpretation in history is, as we saw in the last
2400lecture, always bound up with value judgements, and causality is bound up with
2401interpretation. In the words of Meinecke - the great Meinecke, the Meinecke of the 1920s -
2402'the search for causalities in history is impossible without reference to values ... behind the
2403search for causalities there always lies, directly or indirectly, the search for values'. And
2404this recalls what I said earlier, about the dual and reciprocal function of history - to
2405promote our understanding of the past in the light of the present and of the present in the
2406light of the past. Anything which, like Antony's infatuation with Cleopatra's nose, fails to
2407contribute to this dual purpose is from the point of view of the historian dead and barren.
2408 
2409At this juncture, it is time for me to confess to a rather shabby trick which I have played
2410on you, though, since you will have had no difficulty in seeing through it, and since it has
2411enabled me on several occasions to shorten and simplify what I had to say, you will
2412perhaps have been indulgent enough to treat it as a convenient piece of shorthand. I have
2413hitherto consistently used the conventional phrase 'past and present'. But, as we all know,
2414the present has no more than a notional existence as an imaginary dividing line between
2415the past and the future. In speaking of the present, I have already smuggled another time
2416dimension into the argument. It would, I think, be easy to show that, since past and future
2417are part of the same time-span, interest in the past and interest in the future are
2418interconnected. The line of demarcation between prehistoric and historical times is crossed
2419when people cease to live only in the present, and become consciously interested both in
2420their past and in their future. History begins with the handing down of tradition; and
2421tradition means the carrying of the habits and lessons of the past into the future. Records
2422of the past begin to be kept for the benefit of future generations. 'Historical thinking,',
2423writes the Dutch historian Huizinga, 'is always teleological.' Sir Charles Snow recently
2424wrote of Rutherford that 'like all scientists ... he had, almost without thinking what it
2425meant, the future in his bones'." Good historians, I suspect, whether they think about it or
2426not, have the future in their bones. Besides the question 'Why? is the historian also asks
2427the question 'Whither ?'
24285. History as Progress
2429 
2430LET me begin by quoting a passage from Professor Powicke's inaugural lecture as Regius
2431Professor in Modern History in Oxford thirty years ago:
2432 
2433The craving for an interpretation of history is so deep-rooted that, unless we have a
2434constructive outlook over the past, we are drawn either to mysticism or to cynicism.
2435 
2436'Mysticism' will, I think, stand for the view that the meaning of history lies somewhere
2437outside history, in the realms of theology or eschatology - the view of such writers as
2438Berdyaev or Niebuhr or Toynbeee 'Cynicism' stands for the view, examples of which I
2439have several times quoted, that history has no meaning, or a multiplicity of equally valid
2440or invalid meanings, or the meaning which we arbitrarily choose to give to it. These are
2441perhaps the two most popular views of history today. But I shall unhesitatingly reject both
2442of them. This leaves us with that odd, but suggestive, phrase 'a constructive outlook over
2443the past'. Having no way of knowing what was in Professor Powicke's mind when he used
2444the phrase, I shall attempt to read my own interpretation into it.
2445 
2446Like the ancient civilisations of Asia, the classical civilisation of Greece and Rome was
2447basically unhistorical. As we have already seen, Herodotus as the father of history had few
2448children; and the writers of classical antiquity were on the whole as little concerned with
2449(66 of 97)7/20/2006 1 1:28:45 AM
2450
2451the future as with the past. Thucydides believed that nothing significant had happened in
2452time before the events which he described, and that nothing significant was likely to
2453happen thereafter. Lucretius deduced man's indifference to the future from his indifference
2454to the past:
2455 
2456Consider how that past ages of eternal time before our birth were no concern of ours. This
2457is a mirror which nature holds up to us of future time after our death.' Poetic visions of a
2458brighter future took the form of visions of a return to a golden age of the past - a cyclical
2459view which assimilated the processes of history to the processes of nature. History was not
2460going anywhere: because there was no sense of the past, there was equally no sense of the
2461future. Only Virgil, who in his fourth eclogue had given the classical picture of a return to
2462the golden age, was inspired in the Aeneid momentarily to break through the cyclical
2463conception: 'Imperium sine fine dedi' was a most unclassical thought, which later earned
2464Virgil recognition as a quasi-Christian prophet.
2465 
2466It was the Jews, and after them the Christians, who introduced an entirely new element by
2467postulating a goal towards which the historical process is moving - the teleological view of
2468history. History thus acquired a meaning and purpose, but at the expense of losing its
2469secular character. The attainment of the goal of history would automatically mean the end
2470of history : history itself became a theocracy. This was the medieval view of history. The
2471Renaissance restored the classical view of an anthropocentric world and of the primacy of
2472reason, but for the pessimistic classical view of the future substituted an optimistic view
2473derived from the Jewish-Christian tradition. Time, which had once been hostile and
2474corroding, now became friendly and creative: contrast Horace's 'Damnosa quid non
2475imminuit dies? with Bacon's 'Veritas tempo r is filin' . The rationalists of the Enlightenment,
2476who were the founders of modern historiography, retained the Jewish-Christian
2477teleological view, but secularized the goal; they were thus enabled to restore the rational
2478character of the historical process itself. History became progress towards the goal of the
2479perfection of man’s estate on earth. Gibbon, the greatest of the Enlightenment historians,
2480was not deterred by the nature of his subject from recording what he called 'the pleasing
2481conclusion that every age of the world has increased, and still increases, the real wealth,
2482the happiness, the knowledge, and perhaps the virtue, of the human race'. The cult of
2483progress reached its climax at the moment when British prosperity, power, and self-
2484confidence were at their height; and British writers and British historians were among the
2485most ardent votaries of the cult. The phenomenon is too familiar to need illustration; and I
2486need only quote one or two passages to show how recently faith in progress remained a
2487postulate of all our thinking. Acton, in the report of 1896 on the project of the Cambridge
2488Modern History which I quoted in my first lecture, referred to history as 'a progressive
2489science'; and in the introduction to the first volume of the history wrote that 'we are bound
2490to assume, as the scientific hypothesis on which history is to be written, a progress in
2491human affairs'. In the last volume of the history, published in 1914 Dampier, who was a
2492tutor of my college when I was an undergraduate, felt no doubt that 'future ages will see no
2493limit to the growth of man's power over the resources of nature and of his intelligent use of
2494them for the welfare of his race'." In view of what I am about to say, it is fair for me to
2495admit that this was the atmosphere in which I was educated, and that I could subscribe
2496without reservation to the words of my senior by half a generation, Bertrand Russell: 'I
2497grew up in the full hood of Victorian optimism, and ... something remains with me of the
2498hopefulness that then was easy.' In 1920, when Bury wrote his book The Idea of Progress,
2499a bleaker climate already prevailed, the blame for which he laid, in obedience to the
2500current fashion, on 'the doctrinaires who have established the present reign of terror in
2501Russia', though he still described progress as 'the animating and controlling idea of
2502western civilisation'." Thereafter this note was silent. Nicholas I of Russia is said to have
2503issued an order banning the word 'progress': nowadays the philosophers and historians of
2504western Europe, and even the United States, have come belatedly to agree with him. The
2505hypothesis of progress has been refuted. The decline of the west has become so familiar a
2506phrase that quotation marks are no longer required. But what, apart from all the shouting,
2507has really happened? By whom has this new current of opinion been formed? The other
2508day I was shocked to come across, I think, the only remark of Bertrand Russell I have ever
2509seen which seemed to me to betray an acute sense of class: 'There is, on the whole, much
2510less liberty in the world now than there was a hundred years ago.' I have no measuring-rod
2511for liberty, and do not know how to balance the lesser liberty of few against the greater
2512liberty of many. But an any standard of measurement I can only regard the statement as
2513fantastically untrue. I am more attracted by one of those fascinating glimpses which Mr A.
2514J. P. Taylor sometimes gives us into Oxford academic life. All this talk about the decline
2515of civilisation, he writes, ‘means only that university professors used to have domestic
2516servants and now do their own washing- up'.' Of course, for former domestic servants,
2517washing-up by professors may be a symbol of progress. The loss of white supremacy in
2518Africa, which worries Empire Loyalists, Africaner Republicans, and investors in gold and
2519copper shares, - may look like progress to others. I see no reason why, on this question of
2520progress, I should ipso facto prefer the verdict of the 1950s to that of the 1890s, the verdict
2521of the English-speaking world to that of Russia, Asia, and Africa, or the verdict of the
2522middle-class intellectual to that of the man in the street, who, so cording to Mr.
2523 
2524Macmillan, has never had it so good. Let us for the moment suspend judgement on the
2525question whether we are living in a period of progress or of decline, and examine a little
2526mote closely what is implied in the concept of progress, what assumptions lie behind it,
2527and how far these have become untenable.
2528 
2529I should like, first of all, to clear up the muddle about progress and evolution. The thinkers
2530of the Enlightenment adopted two apparently incompatible views. They sought to
2531vindicate man's place in the world of nature: the laws of history were equated with the
2532laws of nature. On the other hand, they believed in progress. But what ground was there
2533for treating nature as progressive, as constantly advancing towards a goal ~ Hegel met the
2534difficulty by sharply distinguishing history, which was progressive, from nature, which
2535was not. The Darwinian revolution appeared to remove all embarrassments by equating
2536evolution and progress: nature, like history, turned out after all to be progressive. But this
2537opened the way to a much graver misunderstanding, by confusing biological inheritance,
2538which is the source of evolution, with social acquisition, which is the source of progress in
2539history. The distinction is familiar and obvious. Put a European infant in a Chinese family,
2540and the child will grow up with a white skin, but speaking Chinese. Pigmentation is a
2541biological inheritance, language a social acquisition transmitted by the agency of the
2542human brain. Evolution by inheritance has to be measured in millennia or in millions of
2543years; no measurable biological change is known to have occurred in man since the
2544beginning of written history. Progress by acquisition can be measured in generations. The
2545essence of man as a rational being is that he develops his potential capacities by
2546accumulating the experience of past generations. Modern man is said to have no larger a
2547brain, and no greater innate capacity of thought, than his ancestor 5000 years ago. But the
2548effectiveness of his thinking has been multiplied many times by learning and incorporating
2549in his experience the experience of the intervening generations. The transmission of
2550acquired characteristics, which is rejected by biologists, is the very foundation of social
2551progress. History is progress through the transmission of acquired skills from one
2552generation to another.
2553 
2554Secondly, we need not and should not conceive progress as having a finite beginning or
2555end. The belief, popular less than fifty years ago, that civilisation was invented in the Nile
2556Valley in the fourth millennium B.C. is no more credible today than the chronology which
2557placed the creation of the world in 4004 BC- Civilisation, the birth of which we may
2558perhaps take as a starting-point for our hypothesis of progress, was surely not an
2559invention, but an infinitely slow process of development, in which spectacular leaps
2560probably occurred from time to time. We need not trouble ourselves with the question
2561when progress - or civilisation - began. The hypothesis of a finite end of progress has led
2562to more serious misapprehension. Hegel has been rightly condemned for seeing the end of
2563progress in the Prussian monarchy - apparently the result of an overstrained interpretation
2564of his view of the impossibility of prediction. But Hegel's aberration was capped by that
2565eminent Victorian, Arnold of Rugby, who in his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of
2566Modern History in Oxford in 1841 thought that modern history would be the last stage in
2567the history of mankind: ' It appears to bear marks of the fullness of time, as if there would
2568be no future history beyond it.' Marx's prediction that the proletarian revolution would
2569realise the ultimate aim of a classless society was logically and morally less vulnerable;
2570but the presumption of an end of history has an eschatological ring more appropriate to the
2571theologian than to the historian, and reverts to the fallacy of a goal outside history. No
2572doubt a finite end has attractions for the human mind; and Acton's vision of the march of
2573history as an unending progress towards liberty seems chilly and vague. But if the
2574historian is to save his hypothesis of progress, I think he must be prepared to treat it as a
2575process into which the demands and conditions of successive periods will put their own
2576specific content. And this is what is meant by Acton's thesis that history is not only a
2577record of progress but a 'progressive science', or, if you like, that history in both senses of
2578the word - as the course of events and as the record of those events - is progressive. Let us
2579recall Acton's description of the advance of liberty in history:
2580 
2581It is by the combined efforts of the weak, made under compulsion, to resist the reign of
2582force and constant wrong, that, in the rapid change but slow progress of four hundred
2583years, liberty has been preserved, and secured, and extended, and finally understood.
2584 
2585History as the course of events was conceived by Acton as progress towards liberty,
2586history as the record of those events as progress towards the understanding of liberty: the
2587two processes advanced side by side." The philosopher Bradley, writing in an age when
2588analogies from evolution were fashionable, remarked that 'for religious faith the end of
2589evolution is presented as that which ...is already evolved'. For the historian the end of
2590progress is not already evolved. It is something still infinitely remote; and pointers
2591towards it come in sight only as we advance. This does not diminish its importance. A
2592compass is a valuable and indeed indispensable guide. But it is not a chart of the route.
2593 
2594The content of history can be realised only as we experience it.
2595 
2596My third point is that no sane person ever believed in a kind Of progress which advanced
2597in an unbroken straight line without reverses and deviations and breaks in continuity, so
2598that even the sharpest reverse is not necessarily fatal to the belief. Clearly there ate periods
2599of regression as well as periods of progress. Moreover, it would be rash to assume that,
2600after a retreat, the advance will be resumed from the same point or along the same line.
2601Hegel's or Marx's four or three civilisations, Toynbee's twenty-one civilisations, the theory
2602of a life-cycle of civilisations passing through rise, decline, and fall - such schemes make
2603no sense in themselves. But they are symptomatic of the observed fact that the effort
2604which is needed to drive civilisation forward dies away in one place and is later resumed
2605at another, so that whatever progress we can observe in history is certainly not continuous
2606either in time or in place. Indeed, if I were addicted to formulating laws of history, one
2607such law would be to the effect that the group - call it a class, a nation, a continent, a
2608civilisation, what you will - which plays the leading role in the advance of civilisation in
2609one period is unlikely to play a similar role in the next period, and this for the good reason
2610that it will be too deeply imbued with the traditions, interests, and ideologies of the earlier
2611period to be able to adapt itself to the demands and conditions of the next period. Thus it
2612may very well happen that what seems for one group a period of decline may Seem to
2613another the birth of a new advance. Progress does not and cannot mean equal and
2614simultaneous progress for all. It is significant that almost all our latter-day prophets of
2615decline, our sceptics who see no meaning in history and assume that progress is dead,
2616belong to that sector of the world and to that class of society which have triumphantly
2617played a leading and predominant part in the advance of civilisation for several
2618generations. It is no consolation to them to be told that the role which their group has
2619played in the past will now pass to others. Clearly a history which has played so scurvy a
2620trick on them cannot be a meaningful or rational process. But, if we are to retain the
2621hypothesis of progress, we must, I think, accept the condition of the broken line.
2622 
2623Lastly, I come to the question what is the essential content of progress in terms of
2624historical action. The people who struggle, say, to extend civil rights to all, or to reform
2625penal practice, or to remove inequalities of race or wealth, are consciously seeking to do
2626just those things: they are not consciously seeking to 'progress', to realise some historical
2627'law' or 'hypothesis' or progress. It is the historian who applies to their actions his
2628hypothesis of progress, and interprets their actions as progress. But this does not invalidate
2629the concept of progress. I am glad on this point to find myself in agreement with Sir Isaiah
2630Berlin that 'progress and reaction, however much the words may have been abused, are not
2631empty concepts'.' It is a presupposition of history that man is capable of profiting (not that
2632he necessarily profits) by the experience of his predecessors, and that progress in history,
2633unlike evolution in nature, rests on the transmission of acquired assets. These assets
2634include both material possessions and the capacity to master, transform, and utilise one's
2635environment. Indeed, the two factors are closely inter-connected, and react on one another.
2636Marx treats human labour as the foundation of the whole edifice; and this formula seems
2637acceptable if a sufficiently broad sense is attached to 'labour'. But the mere accumulation
2638of resources will not avail unless it brings with it not only increased technical and social
2639knowledge and experience, but increased mastery of man's environment in the broader
2640sense. At the present time, few people would, I think, question the fact of progress in the
2641accumulation both of material resources and of scientific knowledge, of mastery over the
2642environment in the technological sense. What is questioned is whether there has been in
2643the twentieth century any progress in our ordering of society, in our mastery of the social
2644environment, national or international, whether indeed there has not been a marked
2645regression. Has not the evolution of man as a social being lagged fatally behind the
2646progress of technology!
2647 
2648The symptoms which inspire this question are obvious. But I suspect none the less that it
2649is wrongly put. History has known many turning-points, where the leadership and
2650initiative has passed from one group, from one sector of the world, to another : the period
2651of the rise of the modern state and the shift in the centre of power from the Mediterranean
2652to western Europe, and the period of the French revolution, have been conspicuous
2653modern examples. Such periods are always times of violent upheavals and struggles for
2654power. The old authorities weaken, the old landmarks disappear; out of a bitter clash of
2655ambitions and resentments the new order emerges. What I would suggest is that we are
2656now passing through such a period. It appears to me simply untrue to say that our
2657understanding of the problems of social organisation or our good will to organise society
2658in the light of that understanding have regressed : indeed, I should venture to say that they
2659have greatly increased. It is not that our capacities have diminished, or our moral qualities
2660declined. But the period of conflict and upheaval, due to the shifting balance of power
2661between continents, nations, and classes, through which we are living has enormously
2662increased the strain on these capacities and qualities, and limited and frustrated their
2663effectiveness for positive achievement. While I do not wish to underestimate the force of
2664the challenge of the past fifty years to the belief in progress in the western world, I am still
2665not convinced that progress in history has come to an end. But, if you press me further on
2666the content of progress, I think I can only reply something like this. The notion of a finite
2667and clearly definable goal of progress in history, so often postulated by nineteenth-
2668century thinkers, has proved inapplicable and barren. Belief in progress means belief not
2669in any automatic or inevitable process, but in the progressive development of human
2670potentialities. Progress is an abstract term; and the concrete ends pursued by mankind arise
2671from time to time out of the course of history, not from some source outside it. I profess
2672no belief in the perfectibility of man or in a future paradise on earth. To this extent I would
2673agree with the theologians and the mystics who assert that perfection is not realisable in
2674history. But I shall be content with the possibility of unlimited progress - or progress
2675subject to no limits that we can or need envisage - towards goals which can be defined
2676only as we advance towards them, and the validity of which can be verified only in a
2677process of attaining them. Nor do I know how, without some such conception of progress,
2678society can survive. Every civilised society imposes sacrifices on the living generation for
2679the sake of generations yet unborn. To justify these sacrifices in the name of a better world
2680in the future is the secular counterpart of justifying them in the name of some divine
2681purpose. In Bury's words, ‘the principle of duty to posterity is a direct corollary of the idea
2682of progress'.' Perhaps this duty does not require justification. If it does, I know of no other
2683way to justify it.
2684 
2685This brings me to the famous crux of objectivity in history. The word itself is misleading
2686and question-begging. In an earlier lecture I have already argued that the social sciences -
2687and history among them - cannot accommodate themselves to a theory of knowledge
2688which puts subject and object asunder, and enforces a rigid separation between the
2689observer and the thing observed. We need a new model which does justice to the complex
2690process of interrelation and interaction between them.
2691 
2692The facts of history cannot be purely objective, since they become facts of history only in
2693virtue of the significance attached to them by the historian. Objectivity in history - if we
2694are still to use the conventional term - cannot be an objectivity of fact, but only of relation,
2695of the relation between fact and interpretation, between past, present, and future. I need
2696not revert to the reasons which led me to reject as unhistorical the attempt to judge
2697historical events by erecting an absolute standard of value outside history and independent
2698of it. But the concept of absolute truth is also not appropriate to the world of history - or, I
2699suspect, to the world of science. It is only the simplest kind of historical statement that can
2700be adjudged absolutely true or absolutely false. At a more sophisticated level, the historian
2701who contests, say, the verdict of one of his predecessors will normally condemn it, not as
2702absolutely false, but as inadequate or one-sided or misleading, or the product of a point of
2703view which has been rendered obsolete or irrelevant by later evidence. To say that the
2704Russian revolution was due to the stupidity of Nicholas II or to the genius of Lenin is
2705altogether inadequate - so inadequate as to be altogether misleading. But it cannot be
2706called absolutely false. The historian does not deal in absolutes of this kind.
2707 
2708Let us go back to the sad case of Robinson's death. The objectivity of our inquiry into that
2709event depended not on getting our facts right - these were not in dispute - but on
2710distinguishing between the real or significant facts, in which we were interested, and the
2711accidental facts, which we could afford to ignore. We found it easy to draw this
2712distinction, because our standard or test of significance, the basis of our objectivity was
2713clear, and consisted of relevance to the goal in view, i.e. reduction of deaths on the roads.
2714But the historian is a less fortunate person than the investigator who has before him the
2715simple and finite purpose of reducing traffic casualties. The historian, too, in his task; of
2716interpretation needs his standard of significance, which is also his standard of objectivity,
2717in order to distinguish between the significant and the accidental; and he too can find it
2718only in relevance to the end in view. But this is necessarily an evolving end, since the
2719evolving interpretation of the past is a necessary function of history. The traditional
2720assumption that change has always to be explained in terms of something fixed and
2721unchangeable is contrary to the experience of the historian. 'For the historian', says
2722Professor Butterfield, perhaps implicitly reserving for himself a sphere into which
2723historians need not follow him, ‘the only absolute is change." The absolute in history is not
2724something in the past from which we start; it is not something in the present, since all
2725present thinking is necessarily relative. It is something still incomplete and in process of
2726becoming - something in the future towards which we move, which begins to take shape
2727only as we move towards it, and in the light of which, as we move forward, we gradually
2728shape our interpretation of the past. This is the secular truth behind the religious myth that
2729the meaning of history will be revealed in the Day of Judgement. Our criterion is not an
2730absolute in the static sense of something that is the same yesterday, today, and for ever:
2731such an absolute is incompatible with the nature of history. But it is an absolute in respect
2732of our interpretation of the past. It rejects the relativist view that one interpretation is as
2733good as another, or that every interpretation is true in its own time and place, and it
2734provides the touchstone by which our interpretation of the past will ultimately be judged.
2735 
2736It is this sense of direction in history which alone enables us to order and interpret the
2737events of the past- the task of the historian - and to liberate and organise human energies
2738in the present with a view to the future - the task of the statesman, the economist, and the
2739social reformer. But the process itself remains progressive and dynamic. Our sense of
2740direction, and our interpretation of the past, are subject to constant modification and
2741evolution as we proceed.
2742 
2743Hegel clothed his absolute in the mystical shape of a world spirit, and made the cardinal
2744error of bringing the course of history to an end in the present, instead of projecting it into
2745the future. He recognised a process of continuous evolution in the past, and incongruously
2746denied it in the future. Those who, since Hegel, have reflected most deeply on the nature
2747of history have seen in it a synthesis of past and future. Tocqueville, who did not entirely
2748free himself from the theological idiom of his day and gave too narrow content to his
2749absolute, nevertheless had the essence of the matter. Having spoken of the development of
2750equality as a universal and permanent phenomenon, he went on:
2751 
2752If the men of our time were brought to see the gradual and progressive development of
2753equality as at once the past and the future of their history, this single discovery would give
2754that development the sacred character of the will of their lord and master.'
2755 
2756An important chapter of history could be written on that still unfinished theme. Marx, who
2757shared some of Hegel's inhibitions about looking into the future, and was principally
2758concerned to root his teaching firmly in past history, was compelled by the nature of his
2759theme to project into the future his absolute of the classless society. Bury described the
2760idea of progress, a little awkwardly, but clearly with the same intention, as 'a theory which
2761involves a synthesis of the past and a prophecy of the future'. Historians, says Namier in a
2762deliberately paradoxical phrase, which he proceeds to illustrate with his usual wealth of
2763examples, ‘imagine the past and remember the future'. Only the future can provide the key
2764to the interpretation of the past; and it is only in this sense that we can speak of an ultimate
2765objectivity in history. It is at once the justification and the explanation of history that the
2766past throws light on the future, and the future throws light on the past.
2767 
2768What, then, do we mean when we praise a historian for being objective, or say that one
2769historian is more objective than another? Not, it is clear, simply that he gets his facts right,
2770but rather that he chooses the right facts, or, in other words, that he applies the right
2771standard of significance. When we call a historian objective, we mean I think two things.
2772First of all, we mean that he has a capacity to rise above the limited vision of his own
2773situation in society and in history - a capacity which, as I suggested in an earlier lecture, is
2774partly dependent on his capacity to recognise the extent of his involvement in that
2775situation, to recognise, that is to say, the impossibility of total objectivity. Secondly, we
2776mean that he has the capacity to project his vision into the future in such a way as to give
2777him a more profound and more lasting insight into the past than can be attained by those
2778historians whose outlook is entirely bounded by their own immediate situation. No
2779historian today will echo Acton's confidence in the prospect of 'ultimate history'. But some
2780historians write history which is more durable, and has more of this ultimate and objective
2781character, than others; and these are the historians who have what I may call a long-term
2782vision over the past and over the future. The historian of the past can make an approach
2783towards objectivity only as he approaches towards the understanding of the future.
2784 
2785When, therefore, I spoke of history in an earlier lecture as a dialogue between past and
2786present, I should rather have called it a dialogue between the events of the past and
2787progressively emerging future ends. The historian's interpretation of the past, his selection
2788of the significant and the relevant, evolves with the progressive emergence of new goals.
2789To take the simplest of all illustrations, so long as the main goal appeared to be the
2790organisation of constitutional liberties and political rights, the historian interpreted the past
2791in constitutional and political terms.
2792 
2793When economic and social ends began to replace constitutional and political ends,
2794historians turned to economic and social interpretations of the past. In this process, the
2795sceptic might plausibly allege that the new interpretation is no truer than the old; each is
2796true for its period. Nevertheless, since the pre occupation with economic and social ends
2797represents a broader and more advanced stage in human development than the
2798preoccupation with political and constitutional ends, so the economic and social
2799interpretation of history may be said to represent a more advanced stage in history than the
2800exclusively political interpretation. The old interpretation is not rejected, but is both
2801included and superseded in the new. Historiography is a progressive science, in the sense
2802that it seeks to provide constantly expanding and deepening insights into a course of
2803events which is itself progressive. This is what I should mean by saying that we need 'a
2804constructive outlook over the past'. Modern historiography has grown up during the past
2805two centuries in this dual belief in progress, and cannot survive without it, since it is this
2806belief which provides it with its standard of significance, its touchstone for distinguishing
2807between the real and the accidental. Goethe, in a conversation towards the end of his life,
2808cut the Gordian knot a little brusquely:
2809 
2810When eras are on the decline, all tendencies are subjective; but on the other hand when
2811matters ate ripening for a new epoch, all tendencies are objective.
2812 
2813Nobody is obliged to believe either in the future of history or in the future of society. It is
2814possible that our society may be destroyed or may perish of slow decay, and that history
2815may relapse into theology - that is to say, a study not of human achievement, but of the
2816divine purpose - or into literature - that is to say, a telling of stories and legends without
2817purpose or significance. But this will not be history in the sense in which we have known
2818it in the last 200 years.
2819 
2820I have still to deal with the familiar and popular objection to any theory which finds the
2821ultimate criterion of historical judgement in the future. Such a theory, it is said, implies
2822that success is the ultimate criterion of judgement, and that, if not whatever is, whatever
2823will be, is right. For the past 200 years most historians have not only assumed a direction
2824in which history is moving, but have consciously or unconsciously believed that this
2825direction was on the whole the right direction, that mankind was moving from the worse to
2826the better, from the lower to the higher. The historian not only recognised the direction,
2827but endorsed it. The test of significance which he applied in his approach to the past was
2828not only a sense of the course on which history was moving, but a sense of his own moral
2829involvement in that course. The alleged dichotomy between the 'is' and the 'ought',
2830between fact and value, was resolved. It was an optimistic view, a product of an age of
2831overwhelming confidence in the future; Whigs and Liberals, Hegelians and Marxists,
2832theologians and rationalists, remained firmly, and more or less articulately, committed to
2833it. For 200 years it could have been described without much exaggeration as the accepted
2834and implicit answer to the question 'What is history?' The reaction against it has come with
2835the current mood of apprehension and pessimism, which has left the held clear for the
2836theologians who seek the meaning of history outside history, and for the sceptics who find
2837no meaning in history at all. We are assured on all hands, and with the utmost emphasis,
2838that the dichotomy between 'is’ and 'ought' is absolute and cannot: be resolved, that
2839'values' cannot be derived from 'facts'. This is, I think, a false trail. Let us see how a few
2840historians, or writers about history, chosen more or less at random, have felt about this
2841question.
2842 
2843Gibbon justifies the amount of space devoted in his narrative to the victories of Islam on
2844the ground that 'the disciples of Mohammed still hold the civil and religious sceptre of the
2845Oriental world'. But, he adds, ‘the same labour would be unworthily bestowed on the
2846swarms of savages who, between the seventh and twelfth centuries, descended from the
2847plains of Scythia', since 'the majesty of the Byzantine throne repelled and survived these
2848disorderly attacks'. This seems not unreasonable. History is, by and large, a record of what
2849people did, not of what they failed to do: to this extent it is inevitably a success story.
2850Professor Tawney remarks that historians give 'an appearance of inevitableness to an
2851existing order 'by dragging into prominence the forces which have triumphed and thrusting
2852into the background those which they have swallowed up'. But is not this in a sense the
2853essence of the historian's job? The historian must not underestimate the opposition; he
2854must not represent the victory as a walk-over if it was touch-and- go. Sometimes those
2855who were defeated have made as great a contribution to the ultimate result as the victors.
2856These are familiar maxims to every historian. But, by and large, the historian is concerned
2857with those who, whether victorious or defeated, achieved something. I am not a specialist
2858in the history of cricket. But its pages are presumably studded with the names of those
2859who made centuries rather than of those who made ducks and were left out of the side.
2860Hegel's famous statement that in history 'only those peoples can come under our notice
2861which form a state', has been justly criticised as attaching an exclusive value to one form
2862of social organisation and paving the way for an obnoxious state- worship. But, in
2863principle, what Hegel is trying to say is correct, and reflects the familiar distinction
2864between prehistory and history; only those peoples which have succeeded in organising
2865their society in some degree cease to be primitive savages and enter into history. Carlyle in
2866his French Revolution called Louis XV 'a very World Solecism .incarnate'. He evidently
2867liked the phrase, for he embroidered it later in a longer passage:
2868 
2869What new universal vertiginous movement is this: of institutions, social arrangements,
2870individual minds, which once worked co-operative, now rolling and grinding in distracted
2871collision? Inevitable; it is the breaking-up of a World Solecism, worn out at last.
2872 
2873The criterion is once more historical: what fitted one epoch had become a solecism in
2874another, and is condemned on that account. Even Sir Isaiah Berlin, when he descends from
2875the heights of philosophical abstraction and considers concrete historical situations,
2876appears to have come round to this view. In a broadcast delivered some time after the
2877publication of his essay on Historical Inevitability , he praised Bismarck, in spite of moral
2878shortcomings, as a 'genius' and 'the greatest example in the last century of a politician of
2879the highest powers of political judgement', and contrasted him favourably in this respect
2880with such men as Joseph II of Austria, Robespierre, Lenin, and Hitler, who failed to
2881realise 'their positive ends'. I find this verdict odd. But what interests me at the moment is
2882the criterion of judgement. Bismarck, says Sir Isaiah, understood the material in which he
2883was working; the others were led away by abstract theories which failed to work. The
2884moral is that 'failure comes from resisting that which works best ... in favour of some
2885systematic method or principle claiming universal validity'." In other words the criterion
2886of judgement in history is not some 'principle claiming universal validity', but 'that which
2887works best '. It is not only - 1 need hardly say - when analysing the past that we invoke this
2888criterion of 'what works best'. If someone informed you that he thought that, at the present
2889juncture, the union of Great Britain and the United States of America in a single state
2890under a single sovereignty was desirable, you might agree that this was quite a sensible
2891view. If he went on to say that constitutional monarchy was preferable to presidential
2892democracy as a form of government, you might also agree that this was quite sensible. But
2893suppose he then told you that he proposed to devote himself to conducting a campaign for
2894the reunion of the two countries under the British crown; you would probably reply that he
2895would be wasting his time. If you tried to explain why, you would have to tell him that
2896issues of this kind have to be debated on the basis not of some principle of general
2897application, but of what would work in given historical conditions; you might even
2898commit the cardinal sin of speaking of history with a capital H and tell him that History
2899was against him. The business of the politician is to consider not merely what is morally
2900or theoretically desirable, but also the forces which exist in the world, and how they can be
2901directed or manipulated to probably partial realisations of the ends in view. Our political
2902decisions, taken in the light of our interpretation of history, are rooted in this compromise.
2903But our interpretation of history is rooted in the same compromise. Nothing is more
2904radically false than to set up some supposedly abstract standard of the desirable and
2905condemn the past in the light of it. For the word 'success', which has come to have
2906invidious connotations, let us by all means substitute the neutral 'that which works best'.
2907Since I have joined issue with Sir Isaiah Berlin on several occasions during these lectures,
2908 
2909I am glad to be able to close the account with, at any rate, this measure of agreement.
2910 
2911But acceptance of the criterion of 'what works best' does not make its application either
2912easy or self-evident. It is not a criterion which encourages snap verdicts, or which bows
2913down to the view that what is, is right. Pregnant failures are not unknown in history.
2914History recognises what I may call 'delayed achievement': the apparent failures of today
2915may turn out to have made a vital contribution to the achievement of tomorrow - prophets
2916born before their time. Indeed, one of the advantages of this criterion over the criterion of
2917a supposedly fixed and universal principle is that it may require us to postpone our
2918judgement or to qualify it in the light of things that have not yet happened. Proudhon, who
2919talked freely in terms of abstract moral principles, condoned the coup d'etat of Napoleon
2920III after it had succeeded; Marx, who rejected the criterion of abstract moral principles,
2921condemned Proudhon for condoning it. Looking back from a longer historical perspective,
2922we shah probably agree that Proudhon was wrong and Marx right. The achievement of
2923Bismarck provides an excellent starting-point for an examination of this problem of
2924historical judgement; and, while I accept Sir Isaiah's criterion of 'what works best', I am
2925still puzzled by the narrow and short-term limits within which he is apparently content to
2926apply it. Did what Bismarck created really work well? I should have thought that it led to
2927an immense disaster. This does not mean that I am seeking to condemn Bismarck, who
2928created the German Reich, or the mass of Germans who wanted it and helped to create it.
2929But, as a historian, I still have many questions to ask. Did the eventual disaster occur
2930because some hidden flaws existed in the structure of the Reich I or because something in
2931the internal conditions which brought it to birth destined it to become self-assertive and
2932aggressive I or because, when the Reich was created, the European or world scene was
2933already so crowded, and expansive tendencies among the existing Great Powers already so
2934strong, that the emergence of another expansive Great Power was sufficient to cause a
2935major collision and bring down the whole system in ruins I On the last hypothesis, it may
2936be wrong to hold Bismarck and the German people responsible, or solely responsible, for
2937the disaster: you cannot really blame the last straw. But an objective judgement on
2938Bismarck’ s achievement and how it worked awaits an answer from the historian to these
2939questions, and I am not sure that he is yet in a position to answer them all definitively.
2940What I would say is that the historian of the 1920s was nearer to objective judgement than
2941the historian of the 1880s, and that the historian of today is nearer than the historian of the
29421920s; the historian of the year 2000 may be nearer still. This illustrates my thesis that
2943objectivity in history does not and cannot rest on some fixed and immovable standard of
2944judgement existing here and now, but only on a standard which is laid up in the future and
2945is evolved as the course of history advances. History acquires meaning and objectivity
2946only when it establishes a coherent relation between past and future.
2947 
2948Let us now take another look at this alleged dichotomy between fact and value. Values
2949cannot be derived from facts. This statement is partly true, but partly false. You have only
2950to examine the system of values prevailing in any period or in any country to realise how
2951much of it is moulded by the facts of the environment. In an earlier lecture I drew attention
2952to the changing historical content of value-words like liberty, equality, or justice. Or take
2953the Christian church as an institution largely concerned with the propagation of moral
2954values. Contrast the values of primitive Christianity with those of the medieval papacy, or
2955the values of the medieval papacy with those of the Protestant churches of the nineteenth
2956century. Or contrast the values promulgated today by, say, the Christian church in Spain,
2957with the values promulgated by the Christian churches in the United States. These
2958differences in values spring from differences of historical fact. Or consider the historical
2959facts which in the last century and a half have caused slavery or racial inequality or the
2960exploitation of child labour - all once accepted as morally neutral or reputable - to be
2961generally regarded as immoral. The proposition that values cannot be derived from facts
2962is, to say the least, one-sided and misleading. Or let us reverse the statement. Facts cannot
2963be derived from values. This is partly true, but may also be misleading, and requires
2964qualification. When we seek to know the facts, the questions which we ask, and therefore
2965the answers which we obtain, are prompted by our system of values. Our picture of the
2966facts of our environment is moulded by our values, i.e. by the categories through which we
2967approach the facts; and this picture is one of the important facts which we have to take
2968into account. Values enter into the facts and are an essential part of them. Our values are
2969an essential part of our equipment as human beings. It is through our values that we have
2970that capacity to adapt ourselves to our environment, and to adapt our environment to
2971ourselves, to acquire that mastery over our environment, which has made history a record
2972of progress. But do not, in dramatising the struggle of man with his environment, set up a
2973false antithesis and a false separation between facts and values. Progress in history is
2974achieved through the interdependence and interaction of facts and values. The objective
2975historian is the historian who penetrates most deeply into this reciprocal process.
2976 
2977A clue to this problem of facts and values is provided by our ordinary use of the word
2978'truth' - a word which straddles the world of fact and the world of value, and is made up of
2979elements of both. Nor is this an idiosyncrasy of the English language. The words for truth
2980in the Latin languages, the German Wahrheit, the Russian pravda, ' all possess this dual
2981character. Every language appears to require this word for a truth which is not merely a
2982statement of fact and not merely a value judgement, but - embraces both elements. It may
2983be a fact that I went to London last week. But you would not ordinarily call it a truth: it is
2984devoid of any value content. On the other hand, when the Founding Fathers of the United
2985States in the Declaration of Independence referred to the self-evident truth that all men are
2986created equal, you may feel that the value content of the statement predominates over the
2987factual content, and may on that account challenge its right to be regarded as a truth.
2988Somewhere between these two poles - the north pole of valueless facts and the south pole
2989of value judgements still struggling to transform themselves into facts - lies the realm of
2990historical truth. The historian, as I said in my first lecture, is balanced between fact and
2991interpretation, between fact and value. He cannot separate them. It may be that, in a static
2992world, you are obliged to pronounce a divorce between fact and value. But history is
2993meaningless in a static world. History in its essence is change, movement, or - if you do
2994not cavil at the old-fashioned word - progress.
2995 
2996I return therefore in conclusion to Acton's description of progress as 'the scientific
2997hypothesis on which history is to be written'. You can, if you please, turn history into
2998theology by making the meaning of the past depend on some extra-historical and super-
2999rational power. You can, if you please, turn it into literature - a collection of stories and
3000legends about the past without meaning or significance. History properly sec-called can be
3001written only by those who find and accept a sense of direction in history itself. The belief
3002that we have come from somewhere is closely linked with the belief that we are going
3003somewhere. A society which has lost belief in its capacity to progress in the future will
3004quickly cease to concern itself with its progress in the past. As I said at the beginning of
3005my first lecture, our view of history reflects our view of society. I now come back to my
3006starting-point by declaring my faith in the future of society and in the future of history.
3007 
30086. The Widening Horizon
3009THE conception which I have put forward in these lectures of history as a constantly
3010moving process, with the historian moving within it, seems to commit me to some
3011concluding reflexions on the position of history and of the historian in our time. We live in
3012an epoch when - not for the first time in history - predictions of world catastrophe are in
3013the air, and weigh heavily on all. They can be neither proved nor disproved. But they are
3014at any rate far less certain than the prediction that we shall all die; and, since the certainty
3015of that prediction does not prevent us from laying plans for our own future, so I shall
3016proceed to discuss the present and future of our society on the assumption that this country
3017- or, if not this country, some major part of the world - will survive the hazards that
3018threaten us, and that history will continue.
3019 
3020The middle years of the twentieth century find the world in a process of change probably
3021more profound and more sweeping than any which has overtaken it since the medieval
3022world broke up in ruins and the foundations of the modern world were laid in the fifteenth
3023and sixteenth centuries. The change is no doubt ultimately the product of scientific
3024discoveries and inventions, of their ever more widespread application, and of
3025developments arising directly or indirectly out of them. The most conspicuous aspect of
3026the change is a social revolution comparable with that which, in the fifteenth and sixteenth
3027centuries, inaugurated the rise to power of a new class based on finance and commerce,
3028and later on industry. The new structure of our industry and the new structure of our
3029society present problems too vast for me to embark on here. But the change has two
3030aspects more immediately relevant to my theme - what I may call a change in depth, and a
3031change in geographical extent. I will attempt to touch briefly on both of these.
3032 
3033History begins when men begin to think of the passage of time in terms not of natural
3034processes - the cycle of the seasons, the human life-span - but of a series of specific events
3035in which men are consciously involved and which they can consciously influence. History,
3036says Burckhardt, is 'the break with nature caused by the awakening of consciousness'.'
3037History is the long struggle of man, by the exercise of his reason, to understand his
3038environment and to act upon it. But the modern period has broadened the struggle in a
3039revolutionary way. Man now seeks to understand, and to act on, not only his environment
3040but himself; and this has added, so to speak, a new dimension to reason, and a new
3041dimension to history. The present age is the most historically-minded of all ages. Modern
3042man is to an unprecedented degree self-conscious and therefore conscious of history. He
3043peers eagerly back into the twilight out of which he has come, in the hope that its faint
3044beams will illuminate the obscurity into which he is going; and, conversely, his aspirations
3045and anxieties about the path that lies ahead quicken his insight into what lies behind. Past,
3046present, and future are linked together in the endless chain of history.
3047 
3048The change in the modern world which consisted in the development of man's
3049consciousness of himself may be said to begin with Descartes, who first established man's
3050position as a being who can not only think, but think about his own thinking, who can
3051observe himself in the act of observing, so that man is simultaneously the subject and the
3052object of thought and observation. But the development did not become fully explicit till
3053the latter part of the eighteenth century, when Rousseau opened up new depths of human
3054self-understanding and self-consciousness, and gave man a new outlook on the world of
3055nature and on traditional civilisation. The French revolution, said de Tocqueville, was
3056inspired by 'the belief that what was wanted was to replace the complex of traditional
3057customs governing the social order of the day by simple elementary rules deriving from
3058the exercise of the human reason and from natural law'. 'Never till then,' wrote Acton in
3059one of his manuscript notes, 'had men sought liberty, knowing what they sought.'" For
3060Acton, as for Hegel, liberty and reason were never far apart. And with the French
3061revolution was linked the American revolution.
3062 
3063Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation,
3064conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
3065 
3066It was, as Lincoln's words suggest, a unique event - the first occasion in history when men
3067deliberately and consciously formed themselves into a nation, and then consciously and
3068deliberately set out to mould other men into it. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
3069man had already become fully conscious of the world around him and of its laws. They
3070were no longer the mysterious decrees of an inscrutable providence, but laws accessible to
3071reason. But they were laws to which man was subject, and not laws of his own making: In
3072the next stage man was to become fully conscious of his power over his environment and
3073over himself, and of his right to make the laws under which he would live.
3074 
3075The transition from the eighteenth century to the modern world was long and gradual. Its
3076representative philosophers were Hegel and Marx, both of whom occupy an ambivalent
3077position. Hegel is rooted in the idea of laws of providence converted into laws of reason.
3078Hegel's world spirit grasps providence firmly with one hand and reason with the other. He
3079echoes Adam Smith. Individuals 'gratify their own interests; but something more is
3080thereby accomplished, which is latent in their action though not present in their
3081consciousness'. Of the rational purpose of the world spirit he writes that men 'in the very
3082act of realising it, make it the occasion of satisfying their desire, whose import is different
3083from that purpose'. This is simply the harmony of interests translated into the language of
3084German philosophy. Hegel's equivalent for Smith's 'hidden band' was the famous 'cunning
3085of reason' which sets men to work to future purposes of which they are not conscious. But
3086Hegel was none the less the philosopher of the French revolution, the first philosopher to
3087see the essence of reality in historical change and in the development of man’s
3088consciousness of himself. Development in history meant development towards the concept
3089of freedom. But, after 1815, the inspiration of the French revolution fizzled out in the
3090doldrums of the Restoration. Hegel was politically too timid and, in his later years, too
3091firmly entrenched in the Establishment of his day to introduce any concrete meaning into
3092his metaphysical propositions. Herzen's description of Hegel's doctrines as 'the algebra of
3093revolution' was singularly apt. Hegel provided the notation, but gave it no practical
3094content. It was left for Marx to write the arithmetic into Hegel's algebraic equations.
3095 
3096A disciple both of Adam Smith and of Hegel, Marx started from the conception of a world
3097ordered by rational laws of nature. Like Hegel, but this time in a practical and concrete
3098form, he made the transition to the conception of a world ordered by laws evolving
3099through a rational process in response to man's revolutionary initiative. In Marx's final
3100synthesis history meant three things, which were inseparable one from another and formed
3101a coherent and rational whole: the motion of events in accordance with objective, and
3102primarily economic, laws; the corresponding development of thought through a dialectical
3103process; and corresponding action in the form of the class struggle, which reconciles and
3104unites the theory and practice of revolution. What Marx offers is a synthesis of objective
3105laws and of conscious action to translate them into practice, of what are sometimes
3106(though misleadingly) called determinism and voluntarism. Marx constantly writes of laws
3107to which men have hitherto been subject without being conscious of them: he more than
3108once drew attention to what he called the 'false consciousness' of those emneshed in a
3109capitalist: economy and capitalist society: 'the conceptions formed about the laws of
3110production in the minds of the agents of production and circulation will differ widely from
3111the real laws'. But one finds in Marx's writings striking examples of calls for conscious
3112revolutionary action. 'Philosophers have only interpreted the world differently', ran the
3113famous thesis on Feuerbach; 'but the point is to change it. "The proletariat', declared the
3114Communist Manifesto, 'will use its political dominance to strip the bourgeoisie step by
3115step of all capital, and concentrate all means of production in the hands of the state.' And
3116in Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx spoke of 'intellectual self-consciousness
3117dissolving by a century-old process all traditional ideas'. It was the proletariat which
3118would dissolve the false consciousness of capitalist society, and introduce the true
3119consciousness of the classless society. But the failure of the revolutions of 1848 was a
3120serious and dramatic setback to developments which had seemed imminent when Marx
3121began to work. The latter part of the nineteenth century passed in an atmosphere which
3122was still predominantly one of prosperity and security. It was not till the turn of the
3123century that we completed the transition to the contemporary period of history, in which
3124the primary function of reason is no longer to understand objective laws governing the
3125behaviour of man in society, but rather to reshape society, and the individuals who
3126compose it, by conscious action. In Marx, 'class', though not precisely defined, remains on
3127the whole an objective conception to be established by economic analysis. In Lenin, the
3128emphasis shifts from 'class' to 'party', which constitutes the vanguard of the class and
3129infuses into it the necessary element of class-consciousness. In Marx, ‘ideology' is a
3130negative term - a product of the false consciousness of the capitalist order of society. In
3131Lenin, 'ideology' becomes neutral or positive - a belief implanted by an elite of class-
3132conscious leaders in a mass of potentially class-conscious workers. The moulding of class-
3133consciousness is no longer an automatic process, but a job to be undertaken.
3134 
3135The other great thinker who has added a fresh dimension to reason in our time is Freud.
3136Freud remains today a somewhat enigmatic figure. He was by training and background a
3137nineteenth-century liberal individualist, and accepted without question the common, but
3138misleading, assumption of a fundamental antithesis between the individual and society.
3139Freud, approaching man as a biological rather than as a social entity, tended to treat the
3140social environment as something historically given rather than as something in constant
3141process of creation and transformation by man himself. He has always been attacked by
3142the Marxists for approaching what are really social problems from the standpoint of the
3143individual, and condemned as a reactionary on that account; and this charge, which was
3144valid only in part against Freud himself, has been much more fully justified by the current
3145neo-Freudian school in the United States, which assumes that maladjustment’s are
3146inherent in the individual, and not in the structure of society, and treats the adaptation of
3147the individual to society as the essential function of psychology. The other popular charge
3148against Freud, that he has extended the role of the irrational in human affairs, is totally
3149false, and rests on a crude confusion between recognition of the irrational element in
3150human behaviour and a cult of the irrational. That a cult of the irrational does exist in the
3151English- speaking world today, mainly in the form of a depreciation of the achievements
3152and potentialities of reason, is unfortunately true; it is part of the current wave of
3153pessimism and ultra-conservatism, of which I will speak later. But this does not stem from
3154Freud, who was an unqualified and rather primitive rationalist. What Freud did was to
3155extend the range of our knowledge and understanding by opening up the unconscious
3156roots of human behaviour to consciousness and to rational enquiry. This was an extension
3157of the domain of reason, an increase in man's power to understand and control himself and
3158therefore his environment; and it represents a revolutionary and progressive achievement.
3159In this respect, Freud complements, and does not contradict, the work of Mane. Freud
3160belongs to the contemporary world, in the sense that, though he himself did not entirely
3161escape from the conception of a fixed and invariable human nature, he provided tools for a
3162deeper understanding of the roots of human behaviour and thus for its conscious
3163modification through rational processes.
3164 
3165For the historian Freud's special significance is two-fold. In the first place, Freud has
3166driven the last nail into the coffin of the ancient illusion that the motives from which men
3167allege or believe themselves to have acted are in fact adequate to explain their action: this
3168is a negative achievement of some importance, though the positive claim of some
3169enthusiasts to throw light on the behaviour of the great men of history by the methods of
3170psycho-analysis should be taken with a pinch of salt. The procedure of psycho-analysis
3171rests on the cross-examination of the patient who is being investigated: you cannot cross-
3172examine the dead. Secondly, Freud, reinforcing the work of Marx, has encouraged the
3173historian to examine himself and his own position in history, the motives - perhaps hidden
3174motives - which have guided his choice of theme or period and his selection and
3175interpretation of the facts, the national and social background which has determined his
3176angle of vision, the conception of the future which shapes his conception of the past. Since
3177Marx and Freud wrote, the historian has no excuse to think of himself as a detached
3178individual standing outside society and outside history. This is the age of self-
3179consciousness :the historian can and should know what he is doing.
3180 
3181This transition to what I have called the contemporary world - the extension to new
3182spheres of the function and power of reason - is not yet complete: it is part of the
3183revolutionary change through which the twentieth-century world is passing. I should like
3184to examine some of the main symptoms of the transition.
3185 
3186Let me begin with economics. Down to 1914 belief in objective economic laws, which
3187governed the economic behaviour of men and nations, and which they could defy only to
3188their own detriment, was still virtually unchallenged. Trade cycles, price fluctuations,
3189unemployment, were determined by those laws. As late as 1930, when the great
3190depression set in, this was still the dominant view. Thereafter things moved fast. In the
31911930s, people began to talk of ‘the end of economic man', meaning the man who
3192consistently pursued his economic interests in accordance with economic laws; and since
3193then nobody, except a few Rip Van Winkles of the nineteenth century, believes in
3194economic laws in this sense. Today economics has become either a series of theoretical
3195mathematical equations, or a practical study of how some people push others around. The
3196change is mainly a product of the transition from individual to large-scale capitalism. So
3197long as the individual entrepreneur and merchant predominated, nobody seemed in control
3198of the economy or capable of influencing it in any significant way; and the illusion of
3199impersonal laws and processes was preserved. Even the Bank of England, in the days of
3200its greatest power, was thought of not as a skilful operator and manipulator, but as an
3201objective and quasi-automatic registrar of economic trends. But with the transition from a
3202laissez-faire economy to a managed economy (whether a managed capitalist economy or a
3203socialist economy, whether the management is done by large-scale capitalist and,
3204nominally private, concerns or by the state), this illusion is dissolved. It becomes clear that
3205certain people are taking certain decisions for certain ends, and that these decisions set our
3206economic course for us. Everyone knows today that the price of oil or soap does not vary
3207in response to some objective law of supply and demand. Everyone knows, or thinks he
3208knows, that slumps and unemployment are man-made: governments admit, indeed claim,
3209that they know how to cure them. The transition has been made from laissez-faire to
3210planning, from the unconscious to the self-conscious, from belief in objective economic
3211laws to belief that man by his own action can be the master of his economic destiny.
3212 
3213Social policy has gone hand in hand with economic policy: indeed economic policy has
3214been incorporated in social policy. Let me quote from the last volume of the first
3215Cambridge Modern History , published in 1910, a highly perceptive comment from a
3216writer who was anything; but a Marxist and had probably never heard of Lenin :
3217 
3218The belief in the possibility of social reform by conscious effort is the dominant current of
3219the European mind; it has superseded the belief in liberty as the one panacea. ... Its
3220currency in the present is as significant and as pregnant as the belief in the rights of man
3221about the time of the French revolution.
3222 
3223Today, fifty years after this passage was written, more than forty years after the Russian
3224revolution, and thirty years after the great depression, this belief has become a
3225commonplace; and the transition from submission to objective economic laws which,
3226though supposedly rational, were beyond man's control to belief in the capacity of man to
3227control his economic destiny by conscious action seems to me to represent an advance in
3228the application of reason to human affairs, an increased capacity in man to understand and
3229master himself and his environment which I should be prepared, if necessary, to call by
3230the old- fashioned name of progress.
3231I have no space to touch in detail on the similar processes at work in other fields. Even
3232science, as we have seen, is now less concerned to investigate and establish objective laws
3233of nature, than to frame working hypotheses by which man may be enabled to harness
3234nature to his purposes and transform his environment. More significant, man has begun,
3235through the conscious exercise of reason, not only to transform his environment but to
3236transform himself. At the end of the eighteenth century Malthus, in an epoch-making
3237work, attempted to establish objective laws of population, working, like Adam Smith's
3238laws of the market, without anyone being conscious of the process. Today nobody
3239believes in such objective laws; but the control of population has become a matter of
3240rational and conscious social policy. We have seen in our time the lengthening by human
3241effort of the span of human life and the altering of the balance between the generations in
3242our population. We have beard of drugs consciously used to influence human behaviour,
3243and surgical operations designed to alter human character. Both man and society have
3244changed, and have been changed by conscious human effort, before our eyes. But the most
3245significant of these changes have probably been those brought about by the development
3246and use of modern methods of persuasion and indoctrination. Educators at all levels are
3247nowadays more and more consciously concerned to make their contribution to the shaping
3248of society in a particular mould, and to inculcate in the rising generation the attitudes,
3249loyalties, and opinions appropriate to that type of society; educational policy is an integral
3250part of any rationally planned social policy. The primary function of reason, as applied to
3251man in society, is no longer merely to investigate, but to transform; and this heightened
3252consciousness of the power of man to improve the management of his social, economic,
3253and political affairs by the application of rational processes seems to me one of the major
3254aspects of the twentieth- century revolution.
3255 
3256This expansion of reason is merely part of the process which I called in an earlier lecture
3257'individualisation' - the diversification of individual skills and occupations and
3258opportunities which is the concomitant of an advancing civilisation. Perhaps the most far-
3259reaching social consequence of the industrial revolution has been the progressive increase
3260in the numbers of those who learn to think, to use their reason. In Great Britain our
3261passion for gradualism is such that the movement is sometimes scarcely perceptible. We
3262have rested on the laurels of universal elementary education for the best part of a century,
3263and have still not advanced very far or very quickly towards universal higher education.
3264This did not matter so much when we led the world. It matters more when we are being
3265overtaken by others in a greater hurry than ourselves, and when the pace has everywhere
3266been speeded up by technological change. For the social revolution and the technological
3267revolution and the scientific revolution are part and parcel of the same process. If you
3268want an academic example of the process of individualisation, consider the immense
3269diversification over the past fifty or sixty years of history, or of science, or of any
3270particular science, and the enormously increased variety of individual specialisation’s
3271which it offers. But I have a far more striking example of the process at a different level.
3272More than thirty years ago a high German military officer visiting the Soviet Union
3273listened to some illuminating remarks from a Soviet officer concerned with the building
3274up of the Red air force:
3275 
3276We Russians have to do with still primitive human material. We are compelled to adapt
3277the dying machine to the type of dyer who is at our disposal. To the extent to which we are
3278successful in developing a new type of men, the technical development of the material will
3279also be perfected. The two factors condition each other. Primitive men cannot be put into
3280complicated machines.'
3281 
3282Today, a bare generation later, we know that Russian machines are no longer primitive,
3283and that millions of Russian men and women who plan, build, and operate these machines
3284are no longer primitive either. As a historian, I am more interested in this latter
3285phenomenon. The rationalisation of production means something far more important - the
3286rationalisation of man. All over the world today primitive men are learning to use
3287complicated machines, and in doing so are learning to think, to use their reason. The
3288revolution, which you may justly call a social revolution, but which I will call in the
3289present context the expansion of reason, is only just beginning. But it is advancing at a
3290staggering pace to keep abreast of the staggering technological advances of the last
3291generation. It seems to me one of the major aspects of our twentieth-century revolution.
3292 
3293Some of our pessimists and sceptics will certainly call me to order if I fail at this point to
3294notice the dangers and the ambiguous aspects of the role assigned to reason in the
3295contemporary world. In an earlier lecture I pointed out that increasing individualisation in
3296the sense described did not imply any weakening of social pressures for conformity and
3297uniformity. This is indeed one of the paradoxes of our complex modern society.
3298 
3299Education, which is a necessary and powerful instrument in promoting the expansion of
3300individual capacities and opportunities, and therefore of increasing individualisation, is
3301also a powerful instrument in the hands of interested groups for promoting social
3302uniformity. Pleas frequently heard for more responsible broadcasting and television, or for
3303a more responsible press, are directed in the first instance against certain negative
3304phenomena which it is easy to condemn. But they quickly become pleas to use these
3305powerful instruments of mass persuasion in order to inculcate desirable tastes and
3306desirable opinions - the standard of desirability being found in the accepted tastes and
3307opinions of the society. Such campaigns, in the hands of those who pro- mote them, are
3308conscious and rational processes designed to shape society, by shaping its individual
3309members, in a desired direction. Other glaring examples of these dangers are provided by
3310the commercial advertiser and the political propagandist. The two roles are, indeed,
3311frequently doubled; openly in the United States, and rather more sheepishly in Great
3312Britain, patties and candidates employ professional advertisers to put themselves across.
3313The two procedures, even when formally distinct, are remarkably similar. Professional
3314advertisers and the heads of the propaganda departments of great political parties are
3315highly intelligent men who bring all the resources of reason to bear on their cask. Reason,
3316however, as in the other instances we have examined, is employed not for mere
3317exploration, but constructively, not statically, but dynamically. Professional advertisers
3318and campaign managers are not primarily concerned with existing facts. They are
3319interested in what the consumer or elector now believes or in events only in so far: as this
3320enters into the end-product, i.e. what the consumer or elector can by skilful handling be
3321induced to believe or want. Moreover, their study of mass psychology has shown them
3322that the most rapid way to secure acceptance of their views is through an appeal to the
3323irrational element in the make-up of the customer and elector, so that the picture which
3324confronts us is one in which an elite of professional industrialists or party leaders, through
3325rational processes more highly developed than ever before, attains its ends by
3326understanding and trading on the irrationalism of the masses. The appeal is not primarily
3327to reason: it proceeds in the main by the method which Oscar Wilde called 'hitting below
3328the intellect'. I have somewhat overdrawn the picture lest I should be accused of
3329underestimating the danger. But it is broadly correct, and could easily be applied to other
3330spheres. In every society, more or less coercive measures are applied by ruling groups to
3331organise and control mass opinion. This method seems worse than some, because it
3332constitutes an abuse of reason.
3333 
3334In reply to this serious and well-founded indictment I have only two arguments. The first
3335is the familiar one that every invention, every innovation, every new technique discovered
3336in the course of history has had its negative as well as its positive sides. The cost has
3337always to be borne by somebody. I do not know how long it was after the invention of
3338printing before critics began to point oat that it facilitated the spread of erroneous
3339opinions. Today it is a commonplace to lament the death- roll on the roads caused by the
3340advent of the motor-car; and even some scientists deplore their own discovery of ways and
3341means to release atomic energy because of the catastrophic uses to which it can be, and
3342has been, put. Such objections have not availed in the past, and seem unlikely to avail in
3343the future, to stay the advance of new discoveries and inventions. What we have learned of
3344the techniques and potentialities of mass propaganda cannot be simply obliterated. It is no
3345more possible to return to the small-scale individualist democracy of Lockeian or liberal
3346theory, partially realised in Great Britain in the middle years of the nineteenth century,
3347than it is possible to return to the horse and buggy or to early laissez-faire capitalism. But
3348the true answer is that these evils also carry with them their own corrective. The remedy
3349lies not in a cult of irrationalism or a renunciation of the extended role of reason in modern
3350society, but in a growing consciousness from below as well as from above of the role
3351which reason can play. This is not a utopian dream, at a time when the increasing use of
3352reason at all levels of society is being forced on us by our technological and scientific
3353revolution. Like every other great advance in history, this advance has its costs and its
3354losses, which have to be paid, and its dangers, which have to be faced. Yet, in spite of
3355sceptics, and cynics, and prophets of disaster, especially among the intellectuals of
3356countries whose former privileged position has been undermined, I shall not be ashamed
3357to treat it as a signal example of progress in history. It is perhaps the most striking and
3358revolutionary phenomenon of our time.
3359 
3360The second aspect of the progressive revolution through which we are passing is the
3361changed shape of the world. The great period of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in
3362which the medieval world finally broke up in ruins and the foundations of the modern
3363world were laid, was marked by the discovery of new continents and by the passing of the
3364world centre of gravity hem the shores of the Mediterranean to those of the Atlantic. Even
3365the lesser upheaval of the French revolution had its geographical sequel in the calling in of
3366the new world to redress the balance of the old. But the changes wrought by the twentieth-
3367century revolution are far more sweeping than anything that has happened since the
3368sixteenth century. After some 400 years the world centre of gravity has definitely shifted
3369away from western Europe. Western Europe, together with the out- dying parts of the
3370English-speaking world, has become an appenage of the North American continent, or, if
3371you like, an agglomeration in which the United States serves both as power- house and as
3372control-tower. Nor is this the only, or perhaps the most significant, change. It is by no
3373means clear that the world centre of gravity now resides, or will continue for long to
3374reside, in the English-speaking world with its western European annex. It appears to be the
3375great land-mass of eastern Europe and Asia, with its extensions into Africa, which today
3376calls the tune in world affairs. The 'unchanging east' is nowadays a singularly - worn-out
3377cliche.
3378 
3379Let us take a quick look at what has happened to Asia in the present century. The story
3380begins with the Angle-Japanese alliance of 1902 - the first admission of an Asiatic country
3381to the charmed circle of European Great Powers. It may perhaps be regarded as a
3382coincidence that Japan signalised her promotion by challenging and defeating Russia, and,
3383in so doing, kindled the first spark which ignited the great twentieth-century revolution.
3384The French revolutions of 1789 and 1848 had found their imitators in Europe. The first
3385Russian revolution of 1905 awakened no echo in Europe, bur found its imitators in Asia:
3386in the next few years revolutions occurred in Persia, in Turkey, and in China. The First
3387World War was not precisely a world war, but a European civil war - assuming that such
3388an entity as Europe existed - with world- wide consequences; these included the
3389stimulation of industrial development in many Asian countries, of anti-foreign feeling in
3390China, and of Indian nationalism, and the birth of Arab nationalism. The Russian
3391revolution of 1917 provided a further and decisive impulse. What was significant here was
3392that its leaders looked persistently, but in vain, for imitators in Europe, and finally found
3393them in Asia. It was Europe that had become 'unchanging', Asia that was on the move. I
3394need not continue this familiar story down to the present time. The historian is hardly yet
3395in a position to assess the scope and significance of the Asian and African revolution. But
3396the spread of modern technological and industrial processes, and of the beginnings of
3397education and political consciousness, to millions of the population of Asia and Africa, is
3398changing the face of those continents; and, while I cannot peer into the future, I do not
3399know of any standard of judgement which would allow me to regard this as anything but a
3400progressive development in the perspective of world history. The changed shape of the
3401world resulting from these events has brought with it a relative decline in the weight,
3402certainly of this country, perhaps of the English-speaking countries as a whole, in world
3403affairs. But relative decline is not absolute decline; and what disturbs and alarms me is not
3404the march of progress in Asia and Africa, but the tendency of dominant groups in this
3405country - and perhaps elsewhere - to turn a blind or uncomprehending eye on these
3406developments, to adapt towards them an attitude oscillating between mistrustful disdain
3407and affable condescension, and to sink back into a paralysing nostalgia for the past.
3408 
3409What I have called the expansion of reason in out twentieth- century revolution has
3410particular consequences for the historian; far the expansion of reason means, in essence,
3411the emergence into history of groups and classes, of peoples and continents, that hitherto
3412lay outside it. In my first lecture I suggested that the tendency of medieval historians to
3413view medieval society through the spectacles of religion was due to the exclusive
3414character of their sources. I should like to pursue this explanation a little further. It has, I
3415think, correctly, though no doubt with some exaggeration, been said that the Christian
3416church was 'the one rational institution of the Middle Ages'. Being the one rational
3417institution, it was the one historical institution; it alone was subject to a rational course of
3418development which could be comprehended by the historian. Secular society was moulded
3419and organised by the church, and had no rational life of its own. The mass of people
3420belonged, like prehistoric peoples, to nature rather than to history. Modern history begins-
3421when more and more people emerge into social and political consciousness, become aware
3422of their respective groups as historical entities having a past and a future, and enter fully
3423into history. It is only within the last zoo years at most, even in a few advanced countries,
3424that social, political, and historical consciousness has begun to spread to anything like a
3425majority of the population. It is only today that it: has become possible for the first time
3426even to imagine a whole world consisting of peoples who have in the fullest sense entered
3427into history and become the concern, no longer of the colonial administrator or of the
3428anthropologist, but of the historian.
3429 
3430This is a revolution in our conception of history. In the eighteenth century history was still
3431a history of elite’s. In the nineteenth century British historians began, haltingly and
3432spasmodically, to advance towards a view of history as the history of the whole national
3433community. J. R. Green, a rather pedestrian historian, won fame by writing the first
3434History of the English People. In the twentieth century every historian pays lip service to
3435this view; and, though performance lags behind profession, I shall not dwell on these
3436shortcomings, since I am much more concerned with our failure as historians to take -
3437account of the widening horizon of history outside this country and outside western
3438Europe. Acton in his report of 1896 spoke of universal history as 'that which is distinct
3439from the combined history of all countries'. He continued:
3440 
3441It moves in a succession to which the nations are subsidiary. Their story will be told, not
3442for their own sake, but in reference and subordination to a higher series, according to the
3443time and degree in which they contribute to the common fortunes of mankind.'
3444 
3445It went without saying for Acton that universal history, as he conceived it, was the concern
3446of any serious historian. What are we at present doing to facilitate the approach to
3447universal history in this sense ?
3448 
3449I did not intend in these lectures to touch on the study of history in this university: but it
3450provides me with such striking examples of what I am trying to say that it would be
3451cowardly of me to avoid grasping the nettle. In the past forty years we have made a
3452substantial place in our curriculum for the history of the United States. This is an
3453important advance. But it has carried with it a certain risk of reinforcing the parochialism
3454of English history, which already weighs like a dead hand on our curriculum, with a more
3455insidious and equally dangerous parochialism of the English-speaking world. The history
3456of the English- speaking world in the last 400 years has beyond question been a great
3457period of history. But to treat it as the centre-piece of universal history, and everything
3458else as peripheral to it, is an unhappy distortion of perspective. It is the duty of a university
3459to correct such popular distortions. The school of modern history in this university seems
3460to me to fall short in the discharge of this duty. It is surely wrong that a candidate should
3461be allowed to sit for an honours degree in history in a major university without an
3462adequate knowledge of any modern language other than English; let us take warning by
3463what happened in Oxford to the ancient and respected discipline of philosophy when its
3464practitioners came to the conclusion that they could get on very nicely with plain everyday
3465English. It is surely wrong that no facilities should be offered to the candidate to study the
3466modern history of any continental European country above the text-book level. A
3467candidate possessing some knowledge of the affairs of Asia, Africa, or Latin America has
3468at present a very limited opportunity of displaying it in a paper called with magnificent
3469nineteenth-century panache 'The Expansion of Europe'. The title unfortunately fits the
3470contents: the candidate is not invited to know anything even of countries with an important
3471and well-documented history like China or Persia, except what happened when the
3472Europeans attempted to take them over. Lectures are, I am told, delivered in this university
3473on the history of Russia and Persia and China - but not by members of the faculty of
3474history. The conviction expressed by the professor of Chinese in his inaugural lecture five
3475years ago that China cannot be regarded as outside the mainstream of human history' has
3476fallen on deaf ears among Cambridge historians. What may well be regarded in the future
3477as the greatest historical work produced in Cambridge during the past decade has bees
3478written entirely outside the history department and without any assistance from it: I refer
3479to Dr Needham's Science and Civilisation in China. This is a sobering thought. I should
3480not have exposed these domestic sores to the public gaze, but for the fact that I believe
3481them to be typical of most other British universities and of British intellectuals in general
3482in the middle years of the twentieth century. That stale old quip about Victorian insularity
3483'Storms in the Channel - the Continent Isolated', has an - uncomfortably topical ring today.
3484Once more storms are raging in the world beyond; and, while we in the English-speaking
3485countries huddle together and tell ourselves in plain everyday English that other countries
3486and other continents are isolated - by their extraordinary behaviour from the boons and
3487blessings of our civilisation, it sometimes looks as if we, by our inability a unwillingness
3488to understand, were isolating ourselves from what is really going on in the world.
3489 
3490In the opening sentences of my first lecture I drew attention to the sharp difference of
3491outlook which separates the middle years of the twentieth century from the last years of
3492the nineteenth. I should like in conclusion to develop this contrast; and, if in this context I
3493use the words 'liberal' and 'conservative', it will be readily understood that I am not using
3494them in their sense as labels for British political parties. When Acton spoke of progress, he
3495did not think in terms of the popular British concept of gradualism'. 'The Revolution, or as
3496we say Liberalism' is a striking phrase from a letter of 1887. ' The method of modern
3497progress', he said in a lecture on modern history ten years later, 'was revolution’; and in
3498another lecture he spoke of ‘the advent of general ideas which we call revolution'. This is
3499explained in one of his unpublished manuscript notes: 'The Whig governed by
3500compromise: the Liberal begins the reign of ideas." Acton believed that 'the reign of ideas'
3501meant liberalism, and that liberalism meant revolution. In Acton's lifetime, liberalism had
3502not yet spent its force as a dynamic of social change. In an day, what survives of
3503liberalism has everywhere become a conservative factor in society. It would be
3504meaningless today to preach a return to Acton. But the historian is concerned first to
3505establish where Acton stood, secondly to contrast his position with that of contemporary
3506thinkers, and thirdly to inquire what elements, in his position may be still valid today. The
3507generation Acton suffered, no doubt, from overweening self-confidence and optimism and
3508did not sufficiently realise the precarious nature of the structure on which its faith rested.
3509But it possessed two things both of which we are badly in need of today: a sense of change
3510as a progressive factor in history, and belief in reason as our guide for the understanding
3511of its complexities.
3512 
3513Let us now listen to some voices of the 1950s. I quoted in an earlier lecture Sir Lewis
3514Namier's expression of satisfaction that, while 'practical solutions' were sought for
3515'concrete problems', 'programmes and ideals are forgotten by both cuties', and his
3516description of this as a symptom of ‘national maturity'.' I am not fond of these analogies
3517between the life-span of individuals and that of nations; and, if such an analogy is
3518invoked, attempts one to ask what follows when we have passed the stage of 'maturity'.
3519 
3520But what interests me is the sharp contrast drawn between the practical and the concrete,
3521which are praised, and 'programmes and ideals', which are condemned, This exaltation of
3522practical action over idealistic theorising is, of course, the hall-mark of conservatism. In
3523Namier's thought it represents the voice of the eighteenth century, of England at the
3524accession of George III, protesting against the impending onset of Acton's revolution and
3525reign of ideas. But the same familiar expression of out-and-out conservatism in the form
3526of out-and-out empiricism is highly popular in our day. It may be found in the most
3527popular form in Professor Trevor-Roper's remark that 'when radials scram that victory is
3528indubitably theirs, sensible conservatives knock them on the nose'." Professor Oakeshott
3529offers us a more sophisticated version of this fashionable empiricism: in our political
3530concerns, he tells us, we 'sail a boundless and bottomless sea' where there is 'neither
3531starting- point nor appointed destination', and where our sole aim can be 'to keep afloat on
3532an even keel'.' I need not pursue the catalogue of recent writers who have denounced
3533political 'utopianism' and 'messianism'; these have become the current terms of
3534opprobrium for far-reaching radical ideas on the future of society. Nor shall I attempt to
3535discuss recent trends in the United States, where historians and political theorists have had
3536less inhibitions than their colleagues in this country in openly proclaiming their allegiance
3537to conservatism. I will quote only a remark by one of the most distinguished and most
3538moderate of American conservative historians, Professor Samuel Morison of Harvard,
3539who in his presidential address to the American Historical Association in December 1950o
3540thought that the time bad come for a reaction against what he called 'the Jefferson-
3541Jackson-F, D. Roosevelt line' and pleaded for a history of the United States 'written from a
3542sanely conservative point of view '.
3543 
3544But it is Professor Popper who, at any rate in Great Britain, has once more expressed this
3545cautious conservative outlook in its dearest and most uncompromising form. Echoing
3546Namier's rejection of 'programmes and ideals', he attacks policies which allegedly aim at
3547're-modelling the " whole of society " in accordance with a definite plan', commends what
3548he calls 'piecemeal social engineering', and does not apparently shrink from the imputation
3549of 'piecemeal tinkering' and 'muddling through'." On one point, indeed, I should pay
3550tribute to Professor Popper. He remains a stout defender of reason, and will have no art
3551with past or present excursions into irrationalism. But, if we look into his prescription of
3552'piecemeal social engineering', we shall see how limited is the role which he assigns to
3553reason, Though his definition of ‘piecemeal engineering' is not very precise, we are
3554specifically told that criticism of ‘ends' is excluded; and the cautious examples which he
3555gives of its legitimate activities - 'constitutional reform' and 'a tendency towards greater
3556equalization of incomes' - show plainly that it is intended to operate within the
3557assumptions of our existing society. The status of reason in Professor Popper's scheme of
3558things is, in fact, rather like that of a British civil servant, qualified to administer the
3559policies of the government in power and even to suggest practical improvements to make
3560them work better, but not to question their fundamental presuppositions or ultimate
3561purposes. This is useful work: I, too, have been a civil servant in my day. But this
3562subordination of reason to the assumptions of the existing order seems to me in the long
3563run wholly unacceptable. This is not how Acton thought of reason when he propounded
3564his equation revolution = liberalism = reign of ideas. Progress in human affairs, whether in
3565science or in history or in society, has come mainly through the bold readiness of human
3566beings not to confine themselves to seeking piecemeal improvements in the way things are
3567done, but to present fundamental challenges in the name of reason to the current way of
3568doing things and to the avowed or hidden assumptions on which it rests. I look forward to
3569a time when the historians and sociologists and political thinkers of the English-speaking
3570world will regain their courage for that task.
3571 
3572It is, however, not the waning of faith in reason among the intellectuals and the political
3573thinkers of the English-speaking world which perturbs me most, but the loss of the
3574pervading sense of a world in perpetual motion. This seems at first sight paradoxical for
3575rarely has so much superficial talk been heard changes going on around us. But the
3576significant thing is that change is no longer thought of as achievement, as opportunity, as
3577progress, but as an object of fear. When our political and economic pundits prescribe, they
3578have nothing to offer us but the warning to mistrust radical and far-reaching ideas, to shun
3579anything that savours of revolution, and to advance - if advance we must - as slowly and
3580cautiously as we can. At a moment when the world is changing its shape more rapidly and
3581more radically than at any time in the last 400 years, this seems to me a singular blindness,
3582which gives ground for apprehension not that the world- wide movement will be stayed,
3583but that this country - and perhaps other English-speaking countries - may lag behind the
3584general advance, and relapse helplessly and uncomplainingly into some nostalgic
3585backwater. For myself, I remain an optimist; and when Sir Lewis Namier warns me to
3586eschew programmes and ideals, and Professor Oakeshott tells me that we are going
3587nowhere in particular and that all that matters is to see that nobody rocks the boat, and
3588Professor Popper wants to keep that dear old T-model on the road by dint of a little
3589piecemeal engineering, and Professor Trevor-Roper knocks screaming radicals on the
3590nose, and Professor Morison pleads for history written in a sane conservative spirit, I shall
3591look out on a world in tumult and a world in travail, and shall answer in the well worn
3592words of a great scientist: 'And yet - it moves.'