George Macaulay Trevelyan
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 146th anniversary of the birth of George Macaulay Trevelyan (16 February 1876–21 July 1962), who was born on this date in 1876.
Trevelyan was a remarkably successful popular historian who wrote books that were widely enjoyed during his lifetime. E. H. Carr’s lectures that were turned into his well known book What is History? were originally delivered as the George Macaulay Trevelyan lectures at the University of Cambridge, from January to March 1961 (while Trevelyan was still alive). Carr said of Trevelyan’s England under Queen Anne:
“…if following the technique of connoisseurs of detective novels, you read the end first, you will find on the last few pages of the third volume the best summary known to me of what is nowadays called the Whig interpretation of history; and you will see that what Trevelyan is trying to do is to investigate the origin and development of the Whig tradition, and to root it fairly and squarely in the years after the death of its founder, William III.”
The final paragraph of the third volume of England under Queen Anne presents the reader with an interesting counterfactual that gives deeper insight into the Whig mind and its conception of history:
“If England between the Revolution and the death of George II had not established the rule of the law of freedom, the England of the Nineteenth Century would have proceeded along the path of change by methods of violence, instead of by Parliamentary modification of the law. The establishment of liberty was not the result of the complete triumph of any one party in the State. It was the result of the balance of political parties and religious sects, compelled to tolerate one another, until toleration became a habit of the national mind. Even the long Whig supremacy that was the outcome and sequel of the reign of Anne, was conditional on a vigilant maintenance of institutions in Church and State that were specially dear to the Tories, and a constant respect for the latent power of political opponents, who were fellow subjects and brother Englishmen.”
In this passage, Trevelyan makes it clear that he believed that the alternative to Whig supremacy was violence, imaging a counterfactual England in the 19th century that was rife with angry protest, socially destructive conflict, assassinations, civil unrest, civil wars — that is to say, much like the earlier centuries of English history. It has been said that the Enlightenment had no way to adequately conceptualize violence, and, under these circumstances, violence appears as the ultimate unknown, and thus, in a sense, the ultimate evil. Trevelyan’s counterfactual of a violent 19th century England is as much as saying that, without Whig supremacy, England would have embodied this unknown and unknowable evil.
Trevelyan was, as should be apparent, a committed and convinced Whig, who made no secret of his sympathies in his histories, and he made no secret of making no secret of his sympathies. In his essay “Bias in History” he wrote:
“I once wrote three volumes on Garibaldi. They are reeking with bias. Without bias I should never have written them at all. For I was moved to write them by poetical sympathy with the passions of the Italian patriots of that period, which I retrospectively shared. Such merit as the work has, largely derives from that. And some of its demerits also derive from the same cause. Even I can now see that I was not quite fair to the French, or to the Papalist or to the Italian Conservative points of view in 1849. If I had to write the first volume of that Trilogy again I should alter this somewhat, though not enough to satisfy everyone. But in fact I could not possibly write the book again. What is good in it derived from the passions and powers of my youth, now irrecoverable.”
One might say that, according to this interpretation, bias in history is a feature, not a bug. One could even say that the bias that inspires one to take up a project is the conditio sine qua non of history, and indeed of an intellectual or practical enterprise. Our biases make us who we are, and so it makes us the writers of history that we are. Trevelyan was aware of his Whig bias — I noted above that he made not bones about his biases — and wrote his histories on that basis.
We can understand the Whig mind and the Whig conception of history as one particular exemplification — a political exemplification — of the Enlightenment project, which was repeatedly mutated since it appeared at about the same time as Queen Anne’s reign. In other words, Whig ideology is the first Enlightenment political ideology in England, and it had a powerful influence on the early US as well, with the Whig party being an early political party in the US.
In an essay titled “The Muse of History” Trevelyan made some remarks on the perennial problem of whether there are or can be general laws of history. I found one of these remarks to be particularly interesting:
“…history cannot, like physical science, deduce causal laws of general application. All attempts have failed to discover laws of ’cause and effect’ which are certain to repeat themselves in the institutions and affairs of men. The law of gravitation may be scientifically proved because it is universal and simple. But the historical law that starvation brings on revolt is not proved; indeed the opposite statement, that starvation leads to abject submission, is equally true in the light of past events. You cannot so completely isolate any historical event from its circumstances as to be able to deduce from it a law of general application. Only politicians adorning their speeches with historical arguments have this power; and even they never agree. An historical event cannot be isolated from its circumstances, any more than the onion from its skins, because an event is itself nothing but a set of circumstances, none of which will ever recur.”
This is an interesting and perhaps also a powerful argument with two key ideas: 1) historical events cannot be isolated, and 2) an historical event is nothing but a layering of circumstances, so that they are substantively constituted by context. Whenever anyone says “nothing but” this is a sure sign of reductivism, and reductivism is usually a strong claim to make. If Trevelyan is right, there is no fundamental “core” of historical events, but only accreted context. Peel away all the layers of an onion, and the onion eventually disappears; historical events, Trevelyan suggests, are like this, and therefore historical events cannot be isolated.
I often argue that what makes each of the special sciences distinct is the distinctive mode of abstraction that it employs, but the process of abstraction assumes that after the abstraction has been performed, there is still something that remains. The point in a science is to get to the core of things and formulate a theory about that, even if in actual practice things are always much more complicated than this, and the theory is only an ideal model not realized in practice. According to Trevelyan, there is no distinction between essence and accident in historical events; all is accident of one kind or another, therefore no essence remains after accidents have been banished by abstraction.
Further Resources
_________________________________________________________________
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._M._Trevelyan
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.80888/page/n345/mode/2up
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.22447/page/n11/mode/2up
https://archive.org/details/autobiographyoth0000trev/page/76/mode/2up
