What is History?

_{[Ed. First published on Medium.com, Feb. 26, 2023]}

“Historians imagine the past and remember the future.”

-E.H. Carr, paraphrasing the historian Lewis Namier, in What Is History?, p. 118 (1961, 2018)

The last eight years I have been mostly neglecting the very academic discipline I studied for years and that always been dear to me. Tired of barely thinking on things I actually like to think about, I decided to make my comeback by reading through Edward Hallett Carr’s refreshingly simply titled What is History? It has probably been almost a decade since I last read it and over sixty years since its original publication. What struck me the most is how Carr, as a more theory-sensitive, philosophically-inclined historian, touches on numerous ideas and topics the philosophers of the 70s and 80s would more systematically approach. The constructivist nature of historical facts, the relativism of culture, the constraints of language, the limited distinction between subject and object in history. Now, Carr ultimately and explicitly identifies as a historian, not a philosopher, and What Is History? should be read as a call to action to historians to think more explicitly about what it is they study.

This is not a review of What Is History?, but an acknowledgment of that call to action. I will start by following Carr’s lead and ponder the same question. A future follow-up to this article will explore the question ‘Why is history?’, which is the question that I personally find more interesting to ponder. Of course, before we can move onto the ‘why’, let’s first explore the question…

What is History?

It took Carr multiple lectures and more than one book (he died before finishing the second part to What Is History?) to answer this question. I will settle it, for now, through definition. I identify four concepts related to ‘history’ that are intertwined, often used interchangeably, but conceptually distinct:

• The past refers to all lived experience that is temporally disconnected from the present (the now) and of which we can be certain that it happened in some form. This second aspect makes it distinct from the future, which is also temporally disconnected from the now, but of which we cannot be sure of what the lived experience is going to be. Lived experience refers exclusively to the interactions of humans with other humans and/or their environment.
• History refers to any meaningful narrative on past lived experience. This is generally the result of historical study, but history is not the exclusive domain of the historian. A person’s curriculum vitae, a museum exhibition, an report on an archaeological dig, an archival description, a history textbook for secondary education, and so on, are all as much history as an academic study of the 1925 Locarno Conference.
• History-as-a-discipline refers to the systemic study of the past by — usually — academically trained historians. History-as-a-discipline has norms, methods, standards, best practices and functionally attempts to established ‘what happened’ and ‘why it happened’.
• Historiography is the history and study of history-as-a-discipline. The study of what historians do (their methods) and how historical interpretation has evolved over time.

So, what is history? History is a meaningful reconstruction of lived experience in the past, often — but not exclusively — constructed by scholars whose methods, perspectives and collective output are shaped by historiography. Now that we have established what history is, let’s discuss what is not.

Is history a science?

No. This is a ‘debate’ long dead and buried, its bones every so often revived by three distinct types of necromancer: Adherents of scientism; history undergraduates longing for the perceived status and prestige of “real science”; and myself in this article. Still, it might be occasionally worthwhile to dig up and study the corpse. Not to re-evaluate the cause of death, but to ponder the nature of it. My position on this issue should already be clear, for I am actively referring to the study of the past as history-as-a-discipline, not history-as-a-science. If the past cannot be studied scientifically, and I hold that it cannot, than it follows that history-as-a-discipline is not a science. I also hold that since the question itself is misleading, the answer to it is mostly irrelevant. But let’s start with accepting the question at face value and follow it through. Why is it history-as-a-discipline, not history-as-a-science?

Entire branches of philosophy are dedicated to understanding the nature of (scientific) knowledge and most of it is done by people far more capable than I. I’m content to limit myself to a simple and uncontroversial understanding: For knowledge to be ‘scientific’ it is necessary that any hypothesis must be both falsifiable and independently verifiable. In other words: A question must be answerable and it must be answerable by someone else. Historical hypotheses fail to meet these standards. Consider Blaise Pascal’s aphorism that, had Cleopatra’s nose been shorter, the entire face of world history (or rather ‘all subsequent past lived experience’ in our terms) would have changed. This is an unfalsifiable hypothesis because there was, and always will be, only one singular instance of this particular Cleopatra, nose and all. Since we cannot test the hypothesis, it cannot be proven or disproven. The past happened as it did, it cannot be altered nor experimented upon. To be sure, this does not mean that all past events were determined to happen as they did. Alternative outcomes are, were always a possibility. This leads us to a place where Pascal’s aphorism, or at least its general point, is theoretically true and practically meaningless.

Not only can the past not be experimented on, there also exists no separation of subject and object when it comes to ‘the study of past events’. Any such study happens exclusively in the mind of a singular historian. One of my favorite books on the causes of the First World War is Christopher Clark’s excellent The Sleepwalkers. How Europe Went To War In 1914. This book can only be written by a single person and that person is Christopher Clark. The Sleepwalkers is the result of his personal interpretation of those sources he chose to select or discard, shaped by his previous studies and experiences. Unlike the ‘natural’ sciences where I could verify someone else’s hypothesis by repeating the experiment, I cannot likewise repeat and thus validate Clark’s piece of scholarship. If I were to attempt to answer his questions my answers would not be a reproduction of The Sleepwalkers.

Still, though, what about historical facts? Even if my interpretation of the facts would not reproduce The Sleepwalkers, both Clark and I are still bound to the same historical facts, would we not? Not quite. A common, though fundamental misconception, even among academically trained historians, is the idea of historical facts as a thing in itself. This misconception is almost woven into the fabric of history-as-a-discipline via the classic, but false, dichotomy of ‘primary’ and ‘secondary sources’. The suggestion being, of course, that the so-called ‘primary sources’ are hierarchically superior to the ‘secondary sources’. If I were to limit myself to only those sources cited by Clark in his bibliography, we would only work with the same sources, but these are not the same as facts. If I were to step outside the bounds of the thought experiment I could select different sources and, within those, find different facts to include in my work. Even within the sources cited by Clark I could find different facts to include or dismiss. This is where E.H. Carr is right in principle when he differentiates between ‘facts of the past’ and ‘historical facts’:

“It is the historian who has decided for his own reasons that Caesar’s crossing of that petty stream, the Rubicon, is a fact of history, whereas the crossing of the Rubicon by millions of other people before or since interests nobody at all.”

-E.H. Carr, What Is History?, p. 7–8 (1961, 2018)

The point being that ‘historical facts’ are either mindnumbingly basic and uninteresting of themselves, or of some other category altogether. Historical facts are so mundane that they’re essentially based and not at all what the historian’s concerned with. It is a fact that Gavrilo Princip shot Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914. It is not necessarily a fact that this caused the First World War. Nobody questions the former statement, entire libraries have been written on the latter. Historians are thus more concerned with definition rather than they are with facts.

That is not to say that establishing what happened is unimportant, history is not fiction. And although the dictionary disagrees with me on this, I’d say that the opposite of fiction is not necessarily fact. And if we accept that, at least in human affairs, this dichotomy is actually multifaceted, than it is not too great a leap to realize that past events are not what the historian studies. And this is where I feel that Carr does not go far enough, even though his own arguments were leading him there. There are no ‘past events’ to be found in the archives — and trust me, I have looked — , only (textual) representations of past events. The Sound Toll Registers do not contain actual 18th century fluyt-type merchant vessels carrying goods into the Baltic Sea. Only the textual records of these ships doing that. Like a map is not the territory, a record is not the event. Hence my definition of history concerning past lived events, not the events themselves. What the historian studies are fragments of observation and how this meaningfully connects to the historian’s own circumstances.

So history-as-a-discipline is not generally a science. One might object that I am unfairly comparing history-as-a-discipline to the so-called ‘hard sciences’ and that I am thus comparing apples to oranges. A turn of phrase which has always puzzled me, since these are perfectly comparable where it concerns our conceptualization of fruit. But I digress. If history-as-a-discipline is essentially, conceptually different from the hard sciences, than how does it compare to the social sciences?

History contra the social sciences

I’ll be concise on this one. If history-as-a-discipline is not a science in general, than it cannot be a social science in particular. How, then, does it relate to adjacent disciplines within the social sciences? A common critique of history from the social sciences is that history is a discipline without theory. Historians use social/scientific theory all the time. All serious academic history is contextualized with at least a modicum of theory. However, the theory is always from a different discipline: Archaeology, philosophy, economics, sociology, anthropology, political theory, law, etc. etc. Simultaneously, these disciplines rarely employ theory that is explicitly ‘historical’ in itself. Bluntly put: Sociological theory might explain a historical question, but ‘historical theory’ never explains a sociological one. There have been theories of history, true, but these are permadead and buried. There are no immutable ‘laws of history’ that will bring history to a natural end. ‘History’ is not a metaphysical force nor a material phenomenon. There is no End of History, there is no Last Man. In this sense the criticism that history is without theory holds true. In another sense it is missing the forest for the trees.

I have two points to make. The first one of clarification. There is theory in history, but these are explicitly descriptive and implicitly explanatory. ‘Late-Classical Antiquity’ and ‘Byzantium’ are theoretical constructs. The emperor Justinian did not consider himself ‘Byzantine’ nor as an individual living at the tail end of the late-classical or early mediaeval period. These and other descriptive abstractions are inevitable to history and do not exist in the past. Theoretical constructs like ‘the Renaissance’ and ‘the First World War’ are in the domain of historiography. Thus history has no theory, but history-as-a-discipline is symbiotically intertwined with historiography.

The second point I want to make is not so much a point as it is a tu quoque counter-criticism to the social scientists who argue that ‘history has no theory’: True, however..! I must point out that likewise ‘all theory has history’. Every study of human interaction necessarily presupposes and requires a historical frame of reference. Every discipline of human interaction is inevitably at least quasi-historical. There always exists a discontinuity, a passage of time, between collection, selection and interpretation of the data. What differentiates the social sciences from history-as-a-discipline, rather than it making the social sciences inherently historical, is the creation of the data. History-as-a-discipline (but also archaeology, which to me is only distinct from history-as-a-discipline in that it studies past lived experiences from a material perspective) studies what remains, what is left, what has survived for some reason or another. Other disciplines, some better than others, can plan and create what it studies. I can’t today attempt to write a definitive Marxist history of current Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte’s socio-economic policies, because he will enact policies tomorrow. Therefore I cannot beforehand know what my definitive Marxist hypotheses are going to be, which facts are going to remain accessible to me, and which of these remaining facts I will find to be significant for selection. Compare this to a sociological, anthropological, economical study which can be formulated beforehand and executed, mostly, irrelevant of future lived events at some future point in time. This distinction between ‘knowing what to look for’ and ‘finding what is left behind’ is what differentiates history from the social sciences.

Nevertheless, all the social sciences take some measure of indirect observation and temporal disconnect. The economist does not in-present-time see all the variables that move the markets. These are first recorded and preserved through some procedure and analyzed post facto. A snapshot in time that no experiment is going to exactly replicate. Any analysis only going to explain how and why those markets moved at or in that point in time. I think this begs the question — one that has been posed and pondered before, but not often enough to my convictions — if human experience is historical, than what are the qualities and dynamics of ‘the historical’?

From history to the historical

In this article I have failed to eludicate the question: What is history? I have, at best, answered what history-as-a-discipline is. In What Is History, Carr unequivocally puts academic understanding of the past ahead of any other form of historical perspective. History belongs exclusively to the historian:

“Nobody is obliged to write or read history; and excellent books can be written about the past which are not history. But I think we are entitled by convention … to reserve the word ‘history’ for the process of inquiring into the past of man in society.”

-E.H. Carr, What Is History?, p. 43 (1961, 2018)

I’d say they are entitled to reserve the word, but in doing so you fatally limit the scope of the answer to the very question you pose. I think that’s the ultimate weakness to Carr’s argument. Many of his ‘diagnoses’ are insightful and correct. It’s — or else it should be — required reading for historians. What Carr ultimately fails to answer is the apparently self-evident question why historians are the custodians of history. If history always involves more than just history, than it can’t be just for historians.

I would like to finally point to the quote that opens this article, forcing you to scroll back, thereby artificially inflating this article’s ‘time read’. Car cites Lewis Namier near the apotheosis of his argument for a constructivist interpretation of history-as-a-discipline. I like the quote because it’s true and something good historians do. However, why limit yourself to the discipline? If the historian is not and cannot be the ultimate arbiter of historical understanding and significance, than why this self-imposed limitation? Why and how is history told? Why and how do we ‘monumentalize’ the past through preservation long past original function or purpose? What does it mean to be historical? ‘What is history?’ is an important question that leads to dead answers.