Why History Matters

By the late Sir Geoffrey Elton
(one time Regius Professor of History, University of Cambridge)

THE VARIOUS ARGUMENTS currently put forward against the study of history really follow one of two lines. One complains of what has become known as elitism: why should the generality involve itself with long-gone persons of supposed eminence - with kings and nobles and their likes? It is all a waste of time and especially an unnecessary burdening of the memory. The other argument is more positive. It maintains that the present should free itself of the burden of history; it should look to its own concerns and to the future. A preoccupation with the past is reckoned to be intellectually wrong and morally misleading; besides, all those memories, accurate or not, merely prevent sensible action in solving the problems of the present day. Let the dead past bury its dead, and so forth. These doubts have of late been reinforced by some lavish theories derived from language studies: deconstruction and post-modernism (deep mysteries resolved to deny the existence of the human reason) have convinced too many people that there is no such thing as historical truth. Everything said is supposedly merely a construct put forward by the so-called historians who treat the evidence of the past as a 'text' that they can read any way they please while pretending to relate what that past meant by it. Now it is true that we can never arrive at a totally truthful and unchallengeable understanding of past events: we work on evidence that is both incomplete and ambiguous, and interpretation therefore comes into the exercise. But perfectly valid and effective principles to control the historian's duty to interpret have been worked out: we all talk to one another about our common concerns under rules and by insights that severely limit our personal interventions. Preconceived notions and prejudices exist but are quite easily kept within necessary restraints - far more easily than all those philosophers who have never worked on history would seem to suppose. Historical knowledge cannot be perfect, and historical understanding develops by means of argument and sometimes of controversy, but what emerges - though it may change and develop - is a good deal more assured, and contains far more aspects of reality and establishable truth, than the fancies of self-satisfied speculators would profess. That is to say, history is a true subject of study and worth pursuing for that reason alone, though other benefits exist and shall be listed. Moreover, the intellectual methods of the historian set a very useful example to the student at every stage: though only a minority will come to practise history, just about everybody can gain advantages from following the practitioners' path.

Indeed, the hope that the present might 'free itself' from the alleged burden of history is altogether vain as well as rather silly. As each moment passes it becomes history: we all live in and by history. Which fact surely is as good a reason as any for learning about the past, not in order to dictate to the present but in order to provide a three-dimensional view of the human existence. Since we cannot escape from history we should concentrate on the benefits that a study of it can bring.

History and Human Behaviour

We might start from the fact that much of history - the learned study of the past - is very interesting and often exciting. It is by no means as dry as it often appears to the student who has been led to believe that he is supposed to memorise lists, tables and dates. History is about human behaviour and all that that involves: human behaviour, human ambitions and human relations can be positively amusing as well as highly instructive. All that is here required is a touch of imagination, a serious effort to penetrate past mere laboured seriousness and reasonable accuracy to a close relationship to the people studied. By this I do not mean what is usually called empathy: empathy, a form of condescension, puts the student rather than the object studied at the centre of the operation. It asks us to bestow our kindly sympathy on the people of the past, rather than allow ourselves to seek the benefits which the people of the past stand ready to bestow upon us. Empathetic endeavours will reduce those people to agents for the investigator's own notions, foibles and ambitions. If we are to obtain the real profits offered by historical study we must reduce ourselves to at best a very subordinate position in the enterprise and open ourselves to the thoughts and deeds of people no longer with us, people and thoughts and deeds in their own right, understood from within their own world and conditions. This is not an easy thing to do, but difficulties exist to be overcome, not to be surrendered to. History accords primacy to the subject studied and endeavours to reduce to a minimum the agency through which the experience passes in the present.

Properly handled, the treatment of the past for its own sake chalks up one manifest gain and disallows one frequently advanced but in fact illusory use of historical study. The gain consists in the enormous enlargement of one's acquaintance. Involving oneself in the past means to meet shoals of people - people often very different in standing, mind and achievement from those we encounter within the necessarily limited range of our living experience. Far more men and women, and men and women doing and feeling very unfamiliar things: the honest historian learns to know so many human beings, some of them interesting in themselves and others less so, that he acquires a well based and well ordered understanding of humanity. One of the first things to strike the mind that approaches this task without undue preconceptions can be disconcerting; it soon becomes clear that people do not by any means always behave as theories about behaviour or interest prescribe. (This is why Marxist history has gone so sadly astray, but so did the predestinarian Christian history of an earlier age.) Unpredictability and free will come to dominate the scene. History shows that you can explain what happened and why, but that you cannot really foretell the outcome until it has happened.

From this somewhat uncomfortable realisation there follows the sad conclusion that what is commonly put forward as the most important product of historical knowledge does not really work. History is not automatically a good guide for action in the present and the future: knowing and comprehending the past does not efficiently equip one for foretelling what will happen. Historians are not prophets, a fact that they should accept. The recent collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe provides an excellent example: first, events totally surprised (and silenced) pro-communist historians, and within a few months developments appeared which totally contradicted (though they did not silence) those historians who had welcomed the event. However, this in no way demolishes the usefulness of historical knowledge - the wide acquaintance with people and events of all sorts - that the sensible student acquires. The historian comes to understand situations and the people moving within them: what he gains is human understanding though not instructions as to action. He should, of course, pay heed to the various forms of study that mankind has worked out for its fate and fortunes - to economics, sociology, anthropology, literature and the arts, and so forth. Everything humanly done or thought of is his province, provided it lies before his own time. His understanding how things happened in that past time also equips him with the right and power to criticise general theories or lesser comprehensive schemata that those other forms of investigation tend to throw up: in the face of assertions which lack real proof or can be historically disproven, he manifests a carefully modulated scepticism. This critical power constitutes an important social role for which no other study offers anything like so effective a training.

The Historical Method

Fulfilling that role does, however, call for some hard work and clear thinking. Several of the essays in this volume bear on this point, but it may be useful here to distil the essence of the historical method which justifies a sceptical approach to other people's views. Every problem involves three main stages of research: a review of the available evidence, the informed criticism of that evidence (what exactly does it testify to?), and the framing of answers to the questions posed. That is the right sequence: to reverse it by following the often heard advice that questions should be precisely framed before the evidence has been reviewed with their help nearly always produces answers arrived at before the investigation. The good historian does not narrow down his enquiry until he has become reasonably well acquainted with the past speaking through what it left behind. For example, one may wish to find out why there was a civil war in seventeenth-century England. The fact of that war can be accepted but what are usually called its causes should be the end of the enquiry, not the beginning. Thus it would be wrong to start by assuming that the split within the nation represented a fundamental division along, for instance, lines of religious beliefs and then to search for evidence to substantiate this. One must first cover the range of evidence for attitudes, beliefs and actions with a mind alert to all possibilities. Such a first investigation will itself put up specific questions, but they will arise from the evidence not from the mind of the enquirer. At this stage, the historian, so far the servant of his evidential material, takes charge and seeks specific answers. In this way he avoids a risk to which much historical writing has before this fallen victim: the risk that it is he and not the past that decides what happened.

The second stage of the operation - the critical assessment of the available evidence - will then be governed by the double awareness of the general scene in which the evidence was produced and the particular issues which it brings into the open. Since this involves the historian's positive intervention he must be particularly careful to avoid injecting preconceived notions, for instance about the relative scale of possible motives: he should still allow the materials he uses to tell their story, so far as he possibly can. On the other hand, the third stage of the operation releases everything to him. Having made himself master as well as servant of both the material and the questions, he can get down to framing his reconstruction, reasonably confident that he is not merely justifying a preconceived point of view but is getting as near the truth of the past as he has any hope of getting. For historians have to come to terms with the inevitable incompleteness of their labours. Since all that the past has left behind is haphazard, patchy and often uncertain evidence, the historian's judgement, however well trained in the principles of right scholarship, will in the end have to choose between possibilities rather than present unquestionably precise conclusions. Hence also those frequent debates among historians which to some people outside the game look like mere wars of self-importance. Historical knowledge most commonly advances in the crucible of debate, a crucible which tends to preserve something of every seriously advanced point of view and by stages creates better knowledge., That is why what some people call revisionism appears at present to be so rampant among historians. Entrenched interpretations in due course call forth legitimate doubt and questioning; in the process evidence both old and new is more thoroughly scrutinised; new and usually better based conclusions emerge. Human nature being what it is, the debaters too often become combatants and differences of opinion are made to look like rival faiths, but that superficial appearance misleads. At issue is the truth of history not the person of the historian, and few debaters forget this fact. One may hope that the language of debate will retain reasonable courtesies and respect the adversary. All attempts to recover the truth of history are bound to be sufficiently incomplete to permit A to think B mistaken but not corrupt.

Thus the study of history matters because it produces better experienced human beings, who are more balanced and humane. Furthermore, a grasp of history and its methods enables reason to subject overconfident and often menacing policy positions to informed criticism. The main profit lies in the unending interest of historical studies. Because they never arrive at a final end and indisputable answer to every question posed they also never cease. Most scholarly labours, once framed as problems, come to an end, and many workers in the realms of the mind find their enterprise concluding before their lives do. Historians go on to the end of their days, living in and with the past, finding new problems and issues to pursue, revising old problems and issues to new conclusions. In short, doing history is endlessly exciting and a lovely way to spend one's days.

The late Sir Geoffrey Elton. Clare College, Cambridge.
‘Why History Matters’ was written as the foreword to The Good History Students’ Handbook, first published by Sempringham in 1993 and frequently reprinted. It is available from the publisher. Click here for details and an order form.