A.J.P. Taylor: 'Profound Forces' in History
Paul Kennedy marks A.J.P. Taylor's 80th birthday this month by charting the tensions in the man and his writing - between views of history as 'accident' and 'grand design'.
Historians are not just chroniclers writing in a vacuum. They change the way we view the past, they invent new categories for studying it. Often they tell us as much of their own times as of the periods they write about. In turn their 'ways of seeing' are challenged by historians succeeding them with new outlooks or obsessions. From this perspective History Today presents a major new series on history makers, past and present. We launch it with a profile of perhaps our most popular historian of modern times.
Problems confront every scholar who grapples with motive 'forces' in history, and especially with the analysis of short-term events versus long-term trends, and with the general versus the particular Do the 'general trends' of the period appear so overwhelming as to carry all before them? Do the particular actions of idiosyncratic leaders affect the decisions of states? What is the role of accident, and coincidence?
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