fatalism with respect to the past, was not to everyone’s taste. It was also used against
him and in a celebrated attack written in Encounter (a magazine Carr despised) Hugh
Trevor-Roper argued that Carr never showed the slightest concern with the victims
of history, he always preferred the ‘victorious cause’.
This was harsh. However,
his attitude towards History with a big ‘H’ definitely infuriated people, even more
sympathetic admirers who frequently criticised him for always assuming that just
because things happened, they had to happen.
Carr however would not budge. The
purpose of the historian, as he saw it, was to understand history, not to rewrite it.
To ask what might-have-been, or what might-have-happened, struck him as being
faintly absurd. As has been noted by others, Carr was always an impatient critic of
retrospective day-dreaming, of counterfactual history.
But if Carr can justly be accused of a certain uncritical acceptance of the historical
fact, this did not make him into a deferential worshipper of all that existed. Oddly
enough, for such a tough-minded historian, he had a great deal of time for some of
history’s more celebrated utopians and losers. Thus he had a soft spot for the
Russian anarchist Bakunin, an even softer one for the gentle Russian radical Herzen,
and though he was never soft on Marx he always regarded Marx as a man of
genius. Moreover, though he was highly critical of Marxism - disputing the labour
theory of value and rejecting what he be saw as the childish notion of a classless
society (Carr once wrote that a ruling class would always be necessary) - he always
felt it was necessary to understand Marxism.
So close did he come to doing so in
fact that many later accused him, quite incorrectly, of having become a Marxist
himself. For one accused of being a subtle apologist for Stalin and Stalinism, Carr
also had some fairly positive things to say about Leon Trotsky, another obvious
dreamer and visionary. This was not because he agreed with Trotsky. As he made
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