Conclusions

Few, if any, today would accept the possibility of finite history. In 1961 E. H. Carr in What is History?, widely recognised as one of the most important intellectual works of the post-1945 era,1 pointed to Lord Acton’s hopes at the height of Victorian optimism that the CambridgeModern History he was editing would be the opportunity to ‘bring home to every man the last document, and the ripest conclusions of international research’. Acton anticipated that although ‘ultimate history’ would not be possible in his generation, ‘we can dispose of conventional history, and show the point we have reached on the road from one to the other, now that all information is within reach, and every problem has become capable of solution’. Carr points to Professor Sir George Clark’s comments sixty years later on the beliefs Acton expresses in the introduction to the second Cambridge ModernHistory. Clark points out that historians expect their work to be superseded again and again: ‘They consider that knowledge of the past has come down through one or more human minds, has been “processed” by them, and therefore cannot consist of elemental and impersonal atoms which nothing can alter.’ He explains further that faced with this, scholars have become sceptical and some have accepted the doctrine that ‘since all historical judgements involve persons and points of view, one is as good as another and there is no “objective” historical truth’.2