Carr mentions that the ancient Greeks, such as Herodotus and Lucretius did not have a view on history, which was rather indifferent to any particular sense of significance of the past or any interest in the future. Virgil was perhaps the exception, who referred to the return to a golden age. This reference to a golden age means that they are ascribing some value judgments to the past and the present, a concept to which we will return later on. Jewish and Christian writers and historians then described a goal oriented nature of history, thus denoting meaning and purpose to it. Moving onward, Carr mentions Gibbon, who writes “the pleasing conclusion that every age of the world has increased, and still increases, the real wealth, the happiness, the knowledge, and perhaps the virtue, of the human race”. In the early and middle part of the last century, the idea, that History is a vast, ever increasingly glowing process, changed direction and moved into “negative” territory with strong depressing prognostications of the current state and expected future of the world. Francis Fukuyama[2] is one of the more famous proponents of the idea, that history (admittedly in a limited sense of political developments) has finally reached its nadir of development and the utopian regime of liberal democracies is the best one can achieve.
This concept of history reaching an end, as Fukuyama mentions, or the Marxist proposition that the classless society is the end of political development, is not supported by Carr. The content and objective of history can only be judged on the basis of the present, only when we experience it. Calling it the end or even the beginning is inappropriate and leaves out a vast swathe of future happenings. This is not to say, that history evolves, a point which Carr makes emphatically. He makes a distinction between progress and evolution, saying that evolution is biological and is much more long term in nature and has to be considered separate from progress.
History does resemble evolution in the way that it progresses in fits and starts, has dead ends, deviates into unexpected directions and sometimes even reverses its direction. Carr mentions his time, the middle of last century, as a time when human beings were passing through a turning point. His time was a time of war, killing, dislocation and weakening of various authorities. While saying that, he ends the chapter with, “A society which has lost belief in its capacity to progress in the future will quickly cease to concern itself with its progress in the past….. our view of history reflects our view of society”.