Butterfield and the Whig Interpretation of History
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Monday 07 October 2024 is the 124th anniversary of the birth of Sir Herbert Butterfield (07 October 1900–20 July 1979), who was born in Oxenhope, England, on this date in 1900.
Butterfield’s primary claim to fame lies in his book The Whig Interpretation of History, which has been quite influential among historians. Butterfield’s book immediately established “Whiggish history” as a term of historiographical abuse. Here is how the influence of this book was described in a paper by Wilson and Ashplant in their 1988 paper “Whig History and Present-centred History”:
“The importance of that essay is not just that it attained the status of a classic in Butterfield’s own lifetime, and has continued to be reprinted for over fifty years. Its main significance is that the historical profession in Britain came to accept its polemical terminology. The phrase ‘whig history’ has long been used as a term of historiographical criticism, in such a way as to imply, firstly, that everyone knows what it means, and secondly, that nobody wants to be ‘whiggish’. This usage is much in accordance with Butterfield’s intentions: he succeeded in implanting the term in the professional language of historians.”
No historian since Butterfield’s book has wanted to be tarred with the brush of Whiggish history. What did Butterfield mean by Whiggish history? Butterfield wrote:
“It is part and parcel of the whig interpretation of history that it studies the past with reference to the present; and though there may be a sense in which this is unobjectionable if its implications are carefully considered, and there may be a sense in which it is inescapable, it has often been an obstruction to historical understanding because it has been taken to mean the study of the past with direct and perpetual reference to the present.” (p. 11)
But it’s not just studying the past with reference to the present; there is usually an element of progressivism mixed in:
“…there is a sense in which the whig historian sometimes seems to believe that there is an unfolding logic in history, a logic which is on the side of the whigs and which makes them appear as co-operators with progress itself…” (pp. 41–42)
We can distinguish these two theses, that of 1) the whiggish historian judging the past in light of the present, and 2) that this judgment is based on a principle of progress in which the present is the culmination of this progress. We can also distinguish two versions of the progress thesis, one in which the present is understood to fully embody the culmination of progress, and one in which the present represents progress in comparison to the past, but the future promises further progress, and will be better than the future. We can identify this second version with the idea of the infinite perfectibility that appeared during the Enlightenment. Condorcet embodied this thesis on progress. Many critics of Hegel have identified his views with the first version of progress, in which the present has already attained perfection, though I wouldn’t myself credit this view to Hegel. I will mention once again that Arthur Lovejoy identified the philosophies of history of Herder, Kant, Lessing, and Schiller as progressivist, and I noted that the parallel Francophone tradition consisted of Turgot, Voltaire, Condorcet, and Guizot. But these were philosophers, and Butterfield was more interested in historians.
In hindsight, the height of folly of Whiggish history is frequently attributed to the 19th century English historian Thomas Babington Macaulay. Macaulay has become the poster child of Whiggish history, though I don’t think this is an entirely accurate assessment. Certainly Macaulay does discuss progress. Twice in Volume 1 of Macaulay’s five-volume The History of England from the Accession of James the Second, Macaulay appealed to the “progress of civilisation”:
“In the monarchies of the middle ages the power of the sword belonged to the prince; but the power of the purse belonged to the nation; and the progress of civilisation, as it made the sword of the prince more and more formidable to the nation, made the purse of the nation more and more necessary to the prince.”
And in the following fascinating passage about Bath, in a discussion of the improved housing of the city:
“Readers who take an interest in the progress of civilisation and of the useful arts will be grateful to the humble topographer who has recorded these facts, and will perhaps wish that historians of far higher pretensions had sometimes spared a few pages from military evolutions and political intrigues, for the purpose of letting us know how the parlours and bedchambers of our ancestors looked.”
Here we can see Macaulay interested not in some abstract and ideal conception of progress, and not with political progress, but with the mundane manifestation of progress in the ordinary business of life. Reading the above passage I was reminded of Boswell’s The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (published in 1785, almost three-quarters of a century prior to Macaulay’s work), in which he recorded Johnson’s and his appreciation of the comforts of civilization:
“We were favoured with Sir James Colquhoun’s coach to convey us in the evening to Cameron, the seat of Commissary Smollet. Our satisfaction of finding ourselves again in a comfortable carriage was very great. We had a pleasing conviction of the commodiousness of civilization, and heartily laughed at the ravings of those absurd visionaries who have attempted to persuade us of the superior advantages of a state of nature.”
This is a theme to be found throughout Boswell’s writings on Samuel Johnson, who seems to have rarely missed an opportunity to take issue with Rousseau’s primitivism. The relevance here is the progress of the useful arts, which is appreciated by Macaulay no less than by Boswell and Johnson. Perhaps we would have a kinder appreciation of Whiggish history if we focused on the development of the useful arts rather than focusing on the development of political progress, moral progress, and spiritual progress, all of which pose problems that are rather more intractable than progress in the useful arts.
Macaulay himself also can be read as a critic of Whiggish history, as in this passage:
“We read in our Saxon chronicles of tyrants, who, when at the height of greatness, were smitten with remorse, who abhorred the pleasures and dignities which they had purchased by guilt, who abdicated their crowns, and who sought to atone for their offences by cruel penances and incessant prayers. These stories have drawn forth bitter expressions of contempt from some writers who, while they boasted of liberality, were in truth as narrow-minded as any monk of the dark ages, and whose habit was to apply to all events in the history of the world the standard received in the Parisian society of the eighteenth century.”
The charge of Whiggish history, after all, is the charge of judging all of history by contemporary standards, which are to be understood as the norm by which all history is to be judged, and here we find Macaulay condemning this in its earlier form of judging medieval tyrants by the standards of Parisian society of the eighteenth century.
Butterfield doesn’t mention Macauley in The Whig Interpretation of History, but he does discuss Macaulay in The Englishman and His History. However, Macaulay’s appearance in Butterfield’s The Englishman and His History is not a takedown of Macaulay as a vulgar representative of Whiggish history or an uncritical prophet of progress, but as a representative of continuity rather than progress:
“Macaulay refers to the fact that England has always taken particular pride in the maintenance of her institutional continuity. Our statesmen and lawyers have been under the influence of the past to a greater degree than those of other countries. From the 17th century our greatest innovators have tried to show that they were not innovators at all but restorers of ancient ways. And so it is that even when we have a revolution we look to the past and try to carry it out in accordance with ancient precedents.” (p. 3)
Macaulay, according to Butterfield, is an historian of continuity, not of progress, so maybe Macaulay isn’t the best cautionary tale to be told when it comes to Whiggish history, but I wanted to mention him because he is so often cited in this connection.
Butterfield wrote many books in addition to his work on Whiggish history, among them History and Human Relations, a section of which was anthologized in Hans Meyerhoff’s The Philosophy of History in Our Time. Meyerhoff introduces the Butterfield excerpt as follows:
“Butterfield argues that the historian should not indulge in moral judgments, partly because we know so little about the secret motives hidden in the human heart, partly because of the Christian maxim: Judge not lest ye be judged!”
This caution is of a piece with Butterfield critique of Whiggish history, which judges the past in light of the present. Here is an excerpt from History and Human Relations that focuses on the role of moral judgment in history:
“If we consider these facts, if we note the nature of the questions which the technical procedure of the historian is intended and qualified to answer, if we bear in mind the intellectual realm in which that kind of question is appropriately discussed, we are in a position to embark upon an estimate of the place which moral judgments ought to have in history. And in view of the situation that has been described, it may be possible to reduce the shock sometimes produced by the thesis which denies any ethical character (in the usual sense of the words) to the technical historian’s universe.”
Here Butterfield introduces the figure of the technical historian, who is presented as an historian concerned only to get the story right, without any moral judgment made on the events being narrated. Butterfield calls technical history,
“…the sort of history which is the subject of a high and austere academic discipline. It may never exist in its absolute purity. But its assertions have a higher authenticity in so far as the ideal is attained.”
In several episodes I’ve talked about the problem of moralizing history. Historicism was one response to this. However, Butterfield doesn’t take up the banner of historicism, but he is emphatic that the historian must not render moral judgments on the past. Butterfield also doesn’t take up the banner of objectivity, which many historians who share Butterfield’s rejection of moralizing history take up. Butterfield blazes his own trail, a trail that he shares at times with historicism and at other times with those who demand objectivity. Instead, Butterfield has the figure of the technical historian, as well as what he calls scientific history, as his banners:
“…moral judgments on human beings are by their nature irrelevant to the enquiry and alien to the intellectual realm of scientific history. It has practical significance in that, granted such a view of the matter, these moral judgments must be recognised to be an actual hindrance to enquiry and reconstruction; they are in fact the principal reason why investigation is so often brought to a premature halt.”
It certainly is true that moral judgments on history are a hindrance to historical enquiry and reconstruction, but Butterfield has something more in mind, which may be the source of his choice not to explicitly invoke historicism or objectivity:
“Yet we do not deny the importance of morality in life any more than we deny the hand of God in history, if we decide to conduct technical history without this postulate. On the contrary we shall find that, at the last stage of the argument, the historical realm emerges as a moral one in what we may regard as a higher sense of the word altogether. Indeed we may say that precisely because all men are sinners and precisely because the rest of the truth about the matter cannot be disentangled short of the Judgment Day, the vindication of the moral element in history neither requires nor permits the separation of the sheep from the goats by the technical historian. Precisely because the issue is so important and precisely because life is a moral matter every inch of the way (while no historian can keep his ethical vigilance continuous or trouble to be making moral judgments absolutely all the time) -precisely for these reasons the occasional dip into moral judgments is utterly inadequate to the end it purports to serve.”
A similarly incisive passage from Butterfield’s Christianity and History, in which Butterfield looks toward the bigger picture, contrasts to the above focus on scientific history that embodies Weber’s ideal of value-free inquiry:
“It is true that technical history and historical research only comprise a specialised part of our attitude to the past, and their realm is restricted by the character of the apparatus which they use and the kind of evidence which is available. They provide us with a reasonable assurance that certain things did happen, that they happened in a certain order, and that certain connections exist between them, independent of any philosophy or creed of ours. But for the fulness of our commentary on the drama of human life in time, we have to break through this technique — have to stand back and see the landscape as a whole — and for the sum of our ideas and beliefs about the march of ages we need the poet and the prophet, the philosopher and the theologian..”
Butterfield places almost insuperable demands on the historian. As a technical historian, he is to focus on the work of history without being hindered by moral judgments. At the same time, the historian is to be a poet, a prophet, a philosopher, and a theologian. Elsewhere in History and Human Relations Butterfield says that the historian must strive for imaginative sympathy, but, even in striving, he will never be fully successful. He writes:
“…the only understanding we ever reach in history is but a refinement, more or less subtle and sensitive, of the difficult — and sometimes deceptive — process of imagining oneself in another person’s place.”
We could take this as an epitaph upon Collingwood’s philosophy of history, which is focused on the imaginative reenactment of past historical figures. Butterfield is saying that we must attempt this reenactment, but we will always fail to achieve a perfect. Because we cannot really penetrate into the past in the way that Collingwood suggests that we can, we must not judge it as historians. However, when we come to history not as technical historians, we judge according to our metaphysical grasp of their world. And this is the other reason we must not judge history as historians.
Ultimately, historical judgment is superfluous. No one is going to be convinced by the historian, nor will any one be dissuaded by the historian, of the rightness or the wrongness of some action that an historian recounts. These judgments of rightness and wrongness flow from a source that is extra-historical. Whether a human being is capable of being a technical historian in Butterfield’s sense, and then turning around to re-connect with his overall metaphysical view of the world and then entering in a judgment, is an interesting question. Butterfield implies that this is possible, but certainly the task he assigns the historian is a difficult one, and few historians would measure up.
