on 'Society and the Individual' by E.H.Carr

 This is my attempt to understand EH Carr's Chapter on 'The society and the individual' by articulating my thoughts about it. 

There are mainly two arguments that the chapter seeks to make. The first is whether the historian himself is an individual. The second is whether history itself is made by great men or not. Carr's reaction to both of these is in the negative, with a little bit of nuance to it. 

The first movement is to point out the false dichotomy in statements like those made by John Mill that "individuals are not different when brought together". This implies that there is a possibility of an individual without society or a society without an individual, which is impossible. 'No man is an island onto himself'. Though we may express our individuality in the ultimate freedom by commiting suicide as shown by the protagonist in Dostoevsky's devil, it is still bound by social forces. 

The author points out that ethnonationalism based on racial segregation has been exploded but by our social conditionings we are still different as people. The impacts of these are so deep and varied within countries that it is better to consider countries and cultures as units of analyses. 

There is a feeling among many people that modern man is more individual in thought and opinion than were tribals, but the author reminds us that this is itself an expression of individualism as a social movement. The 'cult of individualism' which is itself a social force rooted in ideas of french revolution, humanism from the rennaisance or the protestantism and capitslism tends to obscure these views and thus lends itself to misleading the common man to think of history as written by individuals about individuals. 

Carr uses the metaphor of a historian as someone who is moving in the procession of history. Where one is in the procession determines to a large extent what they are able to see. He gives the example of Grote writing about Greece, seemingly unaware of slavery or Mommsen writing about Rome, aggrandizing Julius Caesar because of the desire for a strongman to clean up the confusion and indecision he observed in the political climate. 

He gives further examples of Trevyelav who was a Whig historiographer writing optimistically about the rule of Queen Anne and Namier who was a conservative. Not only was what he wrote determined to some extent but also the subjects he chose. Analysing Meinecke's career in germany gave an even clearer insight into this. 

But the historical and material conditions didn't read to change in qualities only across a writer's career. They also led to variations across trends in historical perspectives in a society. Here he gives the example of Toynbee who considers history cyclical. Carr says this is a characteristic of societies in Decline. 

"Man's capacity to rise above the historical situation he is in depends on the sensitivity to which he realises he is conditioned". Before one studies history they must study the historian. Before they study the historian they must study the material conditions that created the historian. All that was mentioned here fits pretty neatly into a marxist perspective. 

The second main argument here is that history is not just a story of great men. It seems like an outrage for a naive view to discount an individual's ability to move the gears of history - it seems like a 'murder of character to see us as puppets of economic and social purposes'. 

Here, the author dismantles the argument of Miss Wedgewood who tries to subvert the question of putting the individual and society in the correct relation when trying to analyse history. She says that since both of these analyses in isolation are going to be necessarily inadequate, it seems that one may pick either one - and in reducing this choice to pure preference, makes it solely on the basis of what seems more pertinent to her. 

This is false because firstly it falls to the same dichotomy Mill's statement presented. And secondly that it makes the claim that the historian can choose which of these units they want to consider. Ironically, the choice of one unit over the other itself represents an unconscious drive, if the reasons for the choice are not articulated well. 

Trying to understand history as a story of individuals doing what they did through choices based on the situations they put themselves in, is first of all intractable - a path integral through a possibility space of human endeavour. But even if we could glean some insight by coarse graining it to only those choices which were consciously made by the individual in their own estimation it would not be a satisfactory explanation. This is because the results of people's conscious actions in the past have not necessarily been what they expected out of them. This understanding leads us to either postulate the existence of a World Spirit as in Hegel or accept that humans are not always aware of their unconscious drives. Carr warns against the 'nonsense' of the former, quoting marx. "History does not do anything, it is men with their sensuous activity who produce all that we call history". Thereby highlighting the great man's duality - individual genius coupled with an unconscious sensitivity to the will of the age that makes him a "Societal phenomenon". 

Hegel's reading of the great man as someone who articulates the will of his age - one who can tell the age what it wants and accomplish it is contrasted with figures such as nietzsche - who perhaps came at a time before the age could appreciate them. There is a distinction between these two types of great men only when one sees history as a linear process. To see it as a rhizome in a Deleuzian sense - with different forces acting along different lines of flight - any of which may be channeled by great men who are sensitive to them, regardless of whether they may be earlier in their time sublates this apparent contradiction. 

In this sense, what makes a great man is not the historical condition but their ability to channel these forces. These forces are in essence nothing but the psychic power of archetypal thought projected by a large population onto an individual. The numbers do count in history, as carr correctly points out. It is an oft repeated mistake by the historian to reduce anonymity to impersonality. At the end of the day, what moved the French or Russian revolutoin was the discontent millions who projected their ideals of egalitarianism or liberty onto a vanguard of "great men". 

The rhizomic perspective also leads well into Carr's second point - of the highly nonlinear spatiotemporal interactions that make up history. The actions of a pressure group or an individual don't necessarily translate into the results they had envisioned. It is in some ways an example of emergence, how when someone channels the power of millions it becomes exceedingly difficult to predict what can be the long reaching implications , though it seems easier to say what will happen in the short term. 

This is how history connects to politics - as great men in the making look to past histories to weave together a narrative that allows them to channel power in the present for a future they hypothesize. In their creative genius of organizing in a way to harness that power, the past is illumined and the future is probed. This is how history becomes a dialogue between the society of today and the society of yesterday.