In
his presidential address to the American Historical Association, Samuel Eliot Morison argued in favor of a “common sense” approach to history utilizing the
precepts of Leopold von Ranke: “Historical methodology, as I see it, is a
product of common sense applied to circumstances.” He continued by observing that Ranke sought
to understand the motives of historical actors and accurately record them. In
order to do this, the historian must possess a sense of “balance” and be
intellectually honest. He also stated that in order to fulfill his task the
historian requires “above all, a philosophy of life.”
By this, Morison was not arguing in favor of any form of subjectivism. My
interpretation is that he is arguing for a proper balance between inductive and
deductive reasoning.
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| USS Samuel Eliot Morison |
According to Morison, the historical evidence must be used
in order to discover what actually happened. His contention that the historian
also have a “philosophy of life” is based on the requirements of applying
deductive reasoning to the evidence: “After his main object of describing
events ‘simply as they happened,’ his principle task is to understand the motives and objects of individuals and groups….”
Morison’s article is one of the most sensible things ever written on the subject
of the historian’s craft.
Unfortunately, in What is History, E.H. Carr finds it
necessary to set up Morison as a strawman. He argues against the contribution
of individuals, and the decisions they make, to historical causation. Although
he protests that he is not an advocate of determinism, he does shamelessly
define “causation” in a way that omits human agency. He calls this the “Bad
King John” theory of history (55). Carr’s contempt for individual causation in
history stems from his view that human beings are “moulded by the environment
of the time and place” (53). His argument, of course, begs the question of how
the particulars of “time and place” come about.
His viewpoint is that reason is
inoperable for the individual, but it somehow functions in the aggregate.
History is filled with counterexamples. Hugh Dowding’s fight to create an air
defense system that reached fruition just when it was needed most in the summer of 1940 is a good
example of the individual’s contribution to causation. It is odd that a British
historian who lived through World War II would forget this. It is in this
context that he cites Morison’s quote on the “mass murder of historical
figures” (55). It was less than completely honest of him not to provide the
entire quote: “Personality ceased to be important if statesmen were puppets of
economic and social forces.”
Morison’s critique of “dialectic materialism” must have stung the Marxist Carr.
Hegelianism creates the bizarre
position that abstractions have agency, but human beings do not. G. R. Elton
said it well: “Abstractions describe; they must not be personified into
activators” (102). It is this twisted viewpoint that led Marxists to murder
tens of millions of actual individual human beings in the name of their
abstractions of utopia. Sadly, the same process led/leads many historians to
make excuses for, or to ignore, their crimes.
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