What is History?

February 2003 · Historically Speaking sionalized jargon that has afflicted so many other fields. Historians still retain the capacity to speak to a wider audience without having significantly to water down what we say. And that means that we are also more successful in speaking to each other across our respective subfields than many social scientists are. That accounts for the health of the profession. It explains the strong level of interest in history among both students and the general public. Another good thing is that historians are constantly redefining what we consider to be significant. We are very good at opening up new meanings across the micro/macro scale that I mentioned earlier. What worries me is the herd instinct that has developed in the discipline. Sometimes our fascination with new things tends to crowd out the amount ofattention we pay to old things that are still highly significant. With the burgeoning ofsocial and cultural history in recent years, many university faculties have marginalized the study ofpolitical , diplomatic, and military history—in short, the study ofpower. It's considered to be elitist, and therefore an illegitimate thing to study. There is no way I can accept that. There will always be distinctions between the powerful and the powerless, and the obligation ofthe historian is to give equal attention to both sides of that polarity. It's significant , I think, that students are still as interested as they ever were in these "old fashioned" topics. Their curiosity, these days, exceeds that ofmany oftheir professors. John Gaddis is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military andNaval History at Yale University. He is working on a book about George F. Kennan. What IS History? John Lukacs Books considered in this essay include: Edward Hallett Carr, What is History? (Penguin , 1961); David Cannadine, ed., What is History Now? (PalgravelMacmillan, 2002); John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape ofHistory: How Historians Map the Past (Oxford University Press, 2002); and Paul Veyne, Writing History: Essay on Epistemology, translatedby Mina Moore-Rinvolucri (Wesleyan University Press, 1984). What is History? is die title of Edward Hallett Carr's 1961 Trevelyan Lectures , a book that, we are told, sold hundreds ofdiousands since diat time. The authors of two ofthe above-listed books consider What isHistory? not only a milestone but a decisive turning-point in the history ofhistory itself. This is why I must begin diis review essay with a summary of my reservations about Carr's view ofhistory. I read What is History? in 1961, when I was in the middle ofwriting my Historical Consciousness (published in 1968, with additions in 1985 and 1994), in the Index ofwhich I see at least eleven references to Carr, all of diem critical or even dismissive. In myrecent At the End ofan Age (2002), diere are only two short discussions ofCarr, but I also wrote that "Carr's book was fairly well written (diough poorly diought out)." Before writing die present essay, I diought I should reread Carr: I can nowreportthat I found What isHistory?betterdianwhenI firstread it, fired as I had been widi youdiful energy and vanity , more dian fortyyears ago. But my criticisms ofhis essential themes remain the same. There was Carr's inclination to assert something like subjective determinism: "Before you study die history, study the historian ." Yes: die understanding ofhistory, as indeed all human knowledge, is participant. But diis is not what Carr asserted. In his view the historian's background (especially his social background) virtually determines die history he will write. This is arguable, to say die least—consider but the sons ofrich bourgeois who became Marxists, or the offspring ofJewishMarxists who chose to become neoconservatives . In the same book—and this is perhaps even more serious—the subjectivist Carr could not detach himselffrom the objective -subjective terminology: "It does not follow that, because a mountain appears to take on different angles ofvision, ithas objectively no shape at all or an infinity ofshapes." But the more objective our concept ofthe shape of the mountain, the more abstract that mountain becomes. Moreover, die existence ofdie mountain was meaningless until men appeared and sawit, and eventuallycalled it a mountain. (Much later they conceived it as an "objective fact.") There was...