Progress Is Necessary

WHAT IS HISTORY? (209 pp.)--Edward Hal left Carr--Knopf ($3.50).

"I often think it odd" said one of the characters in Northanger Abbey, "that history should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention." How much of it is invention, how it should be invented, and to what end, is the subject of this dazzling display of witty wisdom by one of the world's top historians. Professor E. H. Carr of Trinity College, Cambridge, originally put together his thoughts in the form of six lectures, delivered a year ago to his fellow Fellows at Cambridge. The BBC found them so interesting that it put the entire text on the air. In book form, they should fuel many an erudite bull session.

Professor Carr deftly disposes of the "common-sense view of history" as an assemblage of facts like so many fish, stone-cold dead in a fish store ("The historian collects them, takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to him"). Instead, Carr demonstrates, facts are more "like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use--these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch." A self-styled optimist, Carr believes that the idea of progress is necessary to answer his title question. History turns into theology when the meaning of the past depends on "some extra-historical and superrational power." It becomes literature when it is merely a collection of stories about the past. Concludes Carr: "History properly so-called can be written only by those who find and accept a sense of direction in history itself. The belief that we have come from somewhere is closely linked with the belief that we are going somewhere. A society which has lost its belief in its capacity to progress in the future will quickly cease to concern itself with its progress in the past."

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