Pure Intelligence: On Intelligence Testing, Puritanism, and the Methods and Burdens of History

Abstract

At the dawn of the 1960s, the English historian of Soviet Russia E. H. Carr was anything but a non-controversial man. Known to some as 'the Red Professor of Printing House Square' on account of his pro-Stalinist columns for The Times during the Second World War, and already disliked by many others for his approval of appeasement during the 1930s, Carr was about to attract even more opposition on account of his views on the purpose of writing history in the first place. "If Mr. Carr's remaining volumes equal this impressive opening," Isaiah Berlin had written a decade earlier in a review of Carr's first installment of his The Bolshevik Revolution, "they will constitute the most monumental challenge of our time to that idea of impartiality and objective truth and even-handed justice in the writing of history which is most deeply embedded in the European liberal tradition." Now, in what would become his classic book from 1961 What Is History? Carr wrote simply: "the study of history is a study of causes." Carr famously posited the following scenario: Suppose a Mr. Jones ran over a Mr. Robinson on a blind corner, driving a car with defective brakes. Suppose Mr. Robinson had just come out of a party in which he had consumed an excessive amount of alcohol. Suppose further that he has nipped out of the bash to buy a pack of cigarettes. What must we