Edward Hallett Carr was born in 1892 and educated at the Merchant Taylors' School,London, end Trinity College, Cambridge. He joined the Foreign Office in 1916, and, afternumerous jobs in and connected with the F.O. at home and abroad, he resigned in 1936,and became Wilson Professor of International Politics at the University College of Wales,Aberystwyth. He was Assistant Editor of The Times from 1941 a, 1946, Tutor In Politicsat Balliol College, Oxford, from 1953 to 1955, and became a Fellow of Trinity College,Cambridge, in 1955. Among his many publications are: The Romantic Exiles, The TwentyYear’s Crisis 1919-1939, Conditions of Peace, The Soviet Impact on the Western World,The New Society (1951). The first six volumes of his large-scale History of Soviet Russiahas been published in Pelicans, including the Bolshevik Revolution, The Interregnum, andtwo volumes of Socialism in One Country. Professor Carr's most recent book, a collectionof essays, is 1917: Before and After (1968)
750/carr.htm (49 of 97)7/20/2006 11:28:45 AM /WHAT IS HISTORY
id: a5fd6bf6074abcd60341390bf17f899d - page: 49
The favourite form of contemporary international controversy on moral issues is a debate on rival claims to freedom and democracy. The conceptions are abstract and universal. But the content put into them has varied throughout history, from time to time and from place to place; any practical issue of their application can be understood and debated only in historical terms. To take a slightly less popular example, the attempt has been made to use the conception of 'economic rationality' as an objective and non-controversial criterion by which the desirability of economic policies can be tested and judged. The attempt at once breaks down. Theorists brought up on the laws of classical economics condemn planning in principle as an irrational intrusion into rational economic processes; for exa
id: f7be8b91768c68898a63a880d6f11a3a - page: 50
It may, of course, be true that planners often behave irrationally, and therefore foolishly. But the criterion by which they must be judged is not the old 'economic rationality' of classical economy. Personally, I have more sympathy with the converse argument that it was the uncontrolled unorganised laissez-faire economy which was essentially irrational, and that planning is an attempt to introduce 'economic rationality' into the process. But the only point which I wish to make at the moment is the impossibility of erecting an abstract and super-historical standard by which historical actions can be judged. Bath sides inevitably read into such a standard the specific content appropriate to their own historical conditions and aspirations.
id: ba90585b471098ab151edb7ad227e102 - page: 50
This is the real indictment of those who seek to erect a superhistorical standard or criterion in the light of which judgement is passed on historical events or situations whether that standard derives from some divine authority postulated by the theologians, or from a static Reason or Nature postulated by the philosophers of the Enlightenment. It is not that shortcoming occur in the application of the standard, or defects in the standard itself. It is that the attempt to erect such a standard is unhistorical and contradicts the very essence of history. It provides a dogmatic answer to questions which the historian is bound by his vocation incessantly to ask: the historian who accepts answers in advance to these questions goes to work with his eyes blindfolded and renounces his vocation. History is movement; and movement implies comparison. That is why historians tend to express their moral judgements in words of a comparative nature like progressive' and 'reactionary' rather tha
id: 686c51bf7b2822c62ec09bc167114af1 - page: 50