History: Puzzle and people or prescription and prophecy?

Abstract

In 1971 Elie Kedourie had been working on Middle Eastern history for two decades. He then defined the 'key' to The Chatham House Version, which he had just published, as the 'wish to rescue history from prescription and prophecy'. For him accounts of the past shaped by the desire to prescribe policy or to forecast the future, according to some vision or prearranged pattern, 'failed as history'.' It is questionable whether his definition is enough to encompass all his later work. His mind and interests ranged so widely that they have defied simplistic and sometimes hostile explanations that have been advanced for his underlying motives. Nevertheless, he had the knack of expressing, slightly ironically, large and complicated issues in a succinct and arresting phrase. Kedourie's formula is perhaps as sound and consistent as any that has been offered to explain, in a single sentence, his approaches to both history and political thought. His work in both fields helped form his conception of relationships between historians and politicians. To consider his attitude to such relationships it is appropriate to recall, first, some elements in his academic work which essentially contributed to it. His fundamental view of history is certainly consistent with the insistence of many contemporary and earlier historians that history is about what happened and why, not about how events and the lives of men followed some prescribed pattern or course. About a decade after Kedourie was born, H.A.L. Fisher distanced himself from prescribers of patterns in some reflections on writing his History of Europe (1935):