Causes, Events and Evidence

Abstract

In Michael Oakeshott’s view, which he expounds in a review of E. H. Carr’s What is History? (1961), causal explanation threatens to elide the two separate meanings of ‘history’, namely a form of enquiry and a series of events in the past.¹ In his criticism of Carr’s Marxist ‘Whiggism’ — or the distortion of the past for the purposes, or through the lens, of the present — Oakeshott mocked the historian of the Soviet Union for claiming that ‘history is the study of causes’, in which ‘every historical argument revolves around the question of the priority of causes’ and where determinism simply implies that there are no ‘causeless events’.² The British philosopher’s targets, which, he implied, invalidated the very notion of ‘causality’, were the unjustified use of natural-scientific ‘laws’ in history and the ‘evolutionism’ of Marxist historiography, which manipulated events to arrive at a predetermined outcome: ‘There can in fact be no “scientific” attitude towards the past, for the world as it appears in scientific theory is a timeless world, a world, not of actual events, but of hypothetical situations’.³ Oakeshott’s priority was to preserve the particularity and alterity of the past, despite conceding that historians were obliged to ‘create and construct’ historical accounts, by examining the ‘relations’ — which were frequently identified only by their contiguity — between individual events.⁴ To use the term ‘cause’ simply to mean a set of events which bring about another event or set of events — rather than to connote adherence to a ‘law’ or historical direction — was to exclude ‘all that properly (or even distantly) belongs to the notion of causality’.⁵