Peace, one and all…
I was reading E. H. Carr What is History? on the train to work this morning. I wanted to post the following passage for two reasons. Firstly, it is a profound thought. Secondly, it is beautifully expressed – in that older academic way of writing which, alas, has gone out of fashion in recent years. Enjoy…
‘The liberal nineteenth-century view of history has a close affinity with the economic doctrine of laissez-faire – also the product of a serene and self-confident outlook on the world. Let everyone get on with his job, and the hidden hand wouold take care of the universal harmony. The facts of history were themselves a demonstration of the supreme fact of a beneficent and apparently infinite progress towards higher things. This was the age of innocence, and historians walked in the Garden of Eden, without a scrap of philosophy to cover them, naked and unashamed before the god of history. Since then, we have known Sin and experienced a Fall; and those historians who today pretend to dispenses with a philosophy of history are merely trying, vainly and self-consciously, like members of a nudist colony, to recreate the Garden of Eden in their garden suburb. Today the awkward question can no longer be evaded’
(E. H. What is History? page 14)
Ma’as salama,
Abdur Rahman
