What Is History? - Reception

Reception

The claims that Carr made about the nature of historical work in What Is History? proved to be very controversial, and inspired Sir Geoffrey Elton to write his 1967 book The Practice of History in response, defending traditional historical methods. Elton criticized Carr for his "whimsical" distinction between the "historical facts" and the "facts of the past", arguing that it reflected "...an extraordinarily arrogant attitude both to the past and to the place of the historian studying it". Though Elton praised Carr for rejecting the role of "accidents" in history, he maintained that Carr's philosophy of history was merely an attempt to provide a secular version of the medieval view of history as the working of God's master plan with "Progress" playing the part of God. The British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper argued that Carr's dismissal of the "might-have-beens of history" reflected a fundamental lack of interest in examining historical causation. Trevor-Roper asserted that examining possible alternative outcomes of history was far from being a "parlour-game" was rather an essential part of the historians' work. In Trevor-Roper's opinion, only by looking at all possible outcomes and all sides could a historian properly understand the period under study, and those historians who adopted Carr's perspective of only seeking to understand the "winners" of history, and treating the outcome of a particular set of events as the only possible outcome were "bad historians". In a review in 1963 in Historische Zeitschrift, Andreas Hillgruber wrote favourably of Carr's geistvoll-ironischer (ironically spirited) criticism of conservative, liberal and positivist historians. A more positive assessment of What is History? came from the British philosopher W.H. Walsh who in a 1963 review endorsed Carr's theory of "facts of history" and "facts of the past", writing that it is not a "fact of history" that he had toast for breakfast that day. Walsh went on to write that Carr was correct that historians did not stand above history, and were instead products of their own places and times, which in turn decided what "facts of the past" they determined into "facts of history".

The British historian Richard J. Evans credited What Is History? with causing a revolution in British historiography in the 1960s The Australian historian Keith Windschuttle, a critic of Carr noted regretfully that What Is History? has proved to be one of the most influential books ever written about historiography, and that there were very few historians working in the English language since the 1960s who had not read What Is History?