E. H. カーの古典的名著 What is History ?（1961年）は、1962年刊行の岩波新書、清水幾太郎訳『歴史とは何か』が六十年に亘って読みつがれてきたが、今年五月に近藤和彦氏による新訳『歴史とは何か』が岩波書店から単行本として刊行され、すこぶる売れ行き好調なようだ。そもそも原本が名著だからとか、読みやすい日本語に訳されているからという理由だけでは、この例外的な売れ行き良さは説明できないように思う。特定の国や時代の歴史に興味があるだけの人たちも本書を手にとることはほとんどないだろう。「ポスト真実」が政治の世界でまかり通っている現代社会で、歴史において何が真実なのかという問いに真剣に向かい合おうとしている人たちが本書を読んでいるのではないだろうか。確かに今まさに読まれるべき一冊であるに違いない。Lynn Hunt の History. Why It Matters, Polity, 2018 がよく読まれているのも、やはり同じ問いに向かい合おうしてのことだろう。
What is History ? から授業で引用するのは以下の二箇所。
In the first place, the facts of history never come to us ‘pure’, since they do not and cannot exist in a pure form: they are always refracted through the mind of the recorder. It follows that when we take up a work of history, our first concern should be not with the facts which it contains but with the historian who wrote it.
What is History?, Penguin Modern Classics, p. 18.
The historian starts with a provisional selection of facts and a provisional interpretation in the light of which that selection has been made – by others as well as by himself. As he works, both the interpretation and the selection and ordering of facts undergo subtle and perhaps partly unconscious changes through the reciprocal action of one or the other. And this reciprocal action also involves reciprocity between present and past, since the historian is part of the present and the facts belong to the past. The historian and the facts of history are necessary to one another. The historian without his facts is rootless and futile; the facts without their historian are dead and meaningless. My first answer therefore to the question, What is History?, is that it is a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past.
Ibid., p. 26.
「現在と過去との間の尽きることを知らぬ対話」（清水訳）は歴史家だけに任せておいてよいことではないと思う人たちが増えているとすれば、少しは未来に希望が持てるかもしれない。