Hugh Trevor-Roper
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Monday 15 January 2024 was the 110th anniversary of the birth of Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper (15 January 1914–26 January 2003), who was born in Glanton, Northumberland, on this date in 1914.
Whenever I travel I visit bookstores, and so it was more than thirty years ago when I was in Brussels in the fall of 1990 I visited a bookstore and I bought a copy of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The European Witchcraze of the Sixteenth and the Seventeenth Century. I read it on the flight back to Oregon, and the book stuck with me; in subsequent years I returned to it on several occasions to revisit the argument, which explained witchcraft in vaguely psychoanalytic terms, which appealed to my native naturalism and rationalism. In this sense it was like A H. M. Jones’ Constantine and the Conversion of Europe, which suggested a naturalistic explanation of Constantine’s vision of the cross before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. I probably read the Jones book before the Trevor-Roper book (I can’t recall for sure, it having been so many years), but I read both in my intellectual formative years, so they had a disproportional influence over me.
While Trevor-Roper’s argument in his book on witches was naturalistic, it was not reductive. This is important to me now and in retrospect, but I don’t think I would have appreciated this distinction thirty years ago. Trevor-Roper resisted oversimplifications and facile conclusions. This I think is reflected in the fact that both Carr’s What is History? and Elton’s The Practice of History mention Trevor-Roper, so that we could say he was caught in the crossfire of the Carr-Elton debate. Carr criticized Trevor-Roper for being insufficiently progressive; Elton criticized Trevor-Roper for implying the pettiness of overly-narrow research.
Trevor-Roper is to be counted among the many historians who have denied that history is a science. In his “Past and Present” (1968), after recounting the contributions of the special sciences to history, has this to say:
“…history itself, though resting on an ever more scientific base, remains itself too human a subject, too dependent on accident, too variable in the proportion even of its recurrent features, to be safely predictable. We may predict in detail, and conditionally, where we have the means of comparison, and such limited predictions may be scientifically, or at least empirically, tested and so justified and useful; but generally and absolutely there can be no prediction, only a guess; and a guess is, in the strict sense, worthless.”
This denial of historical prediction implicitly invokes Popper, who argued that a “theoretical history” would involve prediction of the future, and Popper called all such efforts “historicism,” not withstanding the fact that almost no one else defined historicism in this way. But Popper’s criticism was influential, even if often wide of the mark, and it may be an echo of Popper that we find in Trevor-Roper’s criticism of historical prediction, although, to be fair, almost all historians have rejected historical prediction. We usually find, hand in glove with claims of prediction, claims that there are laws of history. Presumably we could use laws of history, if there are any such, to predict the future by applying the law to the present. Trevor-Roper would have none of this either. His denial of any laws of history, however, comes with strings attached:
“There are numerous… conditional laws of history: empirical rules which can be taken from a wide range of historical experience. Any of them may be applicable to the present, none of them provides a certain formula for the present. For one safe rule of history is that historical situations never exactly repeat themselves: there are too many variable ingredients in each situation for identical recurrence. Even if they should do so, the mere fact of repetition is a new ingredient which may alter the mixture.”
What Trevor-Roper in this passage calls conditional laws of history are familiar to any who have followed the debate over Hempel’s covering law model as applied to historical explanation: the implicit principles to which elliptical historical explanations refer aren’t usually what we would call laws, but rather generalizations that fall short of being laws, and therefore not quite covered by the covering law model. Thus not only is Trevor-Roper caught in the crossfire of the Carr-Elton debate, but he is also caught in the crossfire of Popper and Hempel on the role of laws in history.
While Trevor-Roper offers little to the philosopher of history reading his works, he did make a suggestive comment that implies the definition of history in terms of purposive movement, in The Rise of Christian Europe (1965):
“I do not deny that men existed even in dark countries and dark centuries, nor that they had political life and culture, interesting to sociologists and anthropologists; but history, I believe, is essentially a form of movement, and purposive movement too. It is not a mere phantasmagoria of changing shapes and costumes, of battles and conquests, dynasties and usurpations, social forms and social disintegration. If all history is equal, as some now believe, there is no reason why we should study one section of it rather than another; for certainly we cannot study it all. Then indeed we may neglect our own history and amuse ourselves with the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe: tribes whose chief function in history, in my opinion, is to show to the present an image of the past from which, by history, it has escaped; or shall I seek to avoid the indignation of the medievalists by saying, from which it has changed?” (p. 9)
And another restatement a few pages on:
“…the positive content of history consisted not in the meaningless fermentation of passive or barbarous societies but in the movement of society, the process, conscious or unconscious, by which certain societies, at certain times, had risen out of the barbarism once common to all…”
I found a passage in Ted Carr’s What is History? that suggests something similar:
“The line of demarcation between prehistoric and historical times is crossed when people cease to live only in the present, and become consciously interested both in their past and in their future. History begins with the handing down of tradition; and tradition means the carrying of the habits and lessons of the past into the future. Records of the past begin to be kept for the benefit of future generations.”
The transmission of tradition lends directionality to history. Is this directionality purposive movement? We could take it as one form of purposive movement, allowing that there may be other forms of purposive movement. At the end of the book Trevor-Roper discusses the processes of Western history in terms of progress, and not in terms of purposive movement:
“The line of progress may not be straight, or even continuous, for history presents many obstacles: social petrifaction here, political decay there, demographic failure, disease, mere accident, and the register of human crime and folly. Through these obstacles history is the story of social forces, of the rejuvenation or sclerosis of institutions, of the fertile or infertile contact of ideas. We can see our own place in the process today. Today, after a long period of predominance, we have gone through a structural crisis which may be compared with that of the fourteenth century. We have had our loss of colonies, our Mongol Empire, our social troubles, our Hundred Years’ War. But I do not think that we should therefore suppose that European history is closed. The history of the past may help to explain what one of the most distinguished living historians — I refer to the great Dutch historian Pieter Geyl — has called ‘the vitality of western civilization’.”
We could say that progress may be another form of purposive movement, along with directionality, with the idea that progress and directionality may overlap, but they do not necessarily coincide. Beyond all forms of purposive movement, according to Trevor-Roper, there is only barbarism — not a term that many historians today would employ — and he implies that the earliest origins of history are given over to barbarism and therefore fall below the threshold of historical interest. In other words, prehistory is not any kind of history at all. We may think of prehistory as a kind of history, but, if we do, we must keep them strictly separated, understanding that history is only concerned with purposive movement.
Needless to say, Trevor-Roper’s purposive movement criterion provoked a response. A 1992 paper by Finn Fuglestad, “The Trevor-Roper Trap or the Imperialism of History. An Essay,” said this of Trevor-Roper’s criterion:
“…the contention that only ‘purposive-movement’ history is ‘real’ history needs to be rejected. I feel strongly that the only acceptable definition of history is that it is the study of the past, any past, including, for want of a better term, ‘ebb-and-flow’ history. Everything (or at least nearly everything) that has happened in the past ought to be of equal importance to the historian since it all partakes of the experience of mankind. It is this experience in all its diversity which we need to unravel and to comprehend as far as possible — if, that is, we want to understand ‘how we came to where we are’ and what and where we are not.”
Fuglestad introduces the idea of “ebb and flow” history, which is a useful idea. Note that Fuglestad does not deny the reality of purposive movement, only that purposive movement unique characterizes history. We can easily see that “ebb and flow” history can apply more widely than prehistory, and in fact Gibbon suggests an “ebb-and-flow” conception of history as applied to civilizations:
“…the events by which the fate of nations is not materially changed, leave a faint impression on the page of history, and the patience of the reader would be exhausted by the repetition of the same hostilities, undertaken without cause, prosecuted without glory, and terminated without effect.” (Chapter XLVI: Troubles In Persia. — Part I.)
Implicit in Gibbon is that events of historical interest are events by which the fate of nations are materially changed, when hostilities are not mere repetitions, when they are undertaken with good cause, then are prosecuted with glory, and are terminated with great effect. We could call this the “Material Change” criterion of history and contrast it to the “Purposive Movement” criterion of history, understanding that the two (again) may overlap but do not necessarily coincide.
Despite his skepticism of events that have made a faint impression upon the pages of history, Gibbon did nevertheless write the history of Byzantium, however much his disdain shines through his words. In writing the history of the Byzantine survival of Roman history, does Gibbon demonstrate that Byzantium was worthwhile of his historical inquiry after all, or did Gibbon write the history of Byzantium only because he was writing the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, which Byzantium (in the eyes of some historians) so richly illustrates? Is the decline of a civilization a purposive movement? Do we record the decline of a society only because it once held historical value, or because the process itself is historical?
Gibbon seems to be wrestling with the problem of what deserves to be called history, which he distinguished by material change and Trevor-Roper by purposive movement. Here we can recur to the Carr/Elton debate, as Ted Carr makes a distinction between mere facts and historical facts, which latter involve, “the process by which a mere fact about the past is transformed into a fact of history.” Carr’s criterion for historical facts are different from those of Gibbon and Trevor-Roper. Elton is sharply critical of Carr’s distinction, calling it, “an extraordinarily arrogant attitude both to the past and to place of the historian in studying it.” For Elton, it is sufficient that a fact be knowable for it to be a part of history. For Trevor-Roper, presumably, a fact would be an historical fact if it is a fact of purposive movement, or it is a fact that illustrates purposive movement.
The common problem for Gibbon, Trevor-Roper, Carr, Elton, and every other historian is the problem of the selection of material that is used for a history. This problem has been exacerbated by exponentially increasing accumulation of knowledge of the past. What are called the auxiliary sciences, and especially archaeology, have added so much material to the historian’s already burgeoning sources that we are now in a position to write the histories of peoples who never wrote their own history, and thereby to add them to the rolls of recorded history. In many cases, these peoples are our own ancestors who were engaged in the very earliest efforts that would eventually give birth to our civilization. Is not the formation of a civilization exhibiting purposive movement itself a purposive movement? And if this formative stage is a purposive movement, by Trevor-Roper’s own implicit definition, it rises to the status of history.
This is a mirror image of the same problem as the breakdown of a civilization, of which I earlier asked if we write the history of the collapse of a civilization (as Gibbon did) merely for purposes of completeness, or because it is part of the story of the development of civilization. We may chose to write the history of the formation of a society even if it isn’t history sensu stricto, but ought we to write an account, and ought we to call it history?
With purposive movement criterion of history it would be easy to assimilate Trevor-Roper to some broad-brush account of history, but he rejected universal history, and was especially critical of Toynbee. In a letter to James Shiel of 21 January 1992, Trevor-Roper wrote:
“As for poor old Toynbee and his protégé, disciple and biographer McNeill (who has tried so hard and so faithfully to praise him and has only succeeded in letting some very unattractive cats out of the bag), I believe that ‘universal history’ is an impossibility in their terms — or in those of Hegel, Ranke, Spengler and the Marxists. The lessons of history, in my opinion, must be allowed to emerge out of history: they are complex and tentative and conditional: the idea of a ‘science of history’, as proclaimed by the positivists of the late 19th and early 20th century, is, to me, a chimera. There are rules in history, but not of history. And so my favourite historians are Gibbon (who never forces the pace) and Jacob Burckhardt, whose historical understanding was so sensitive that he alone, of all the 19th century historians, succeeded in prophesying, cautiously but in fact accurately, the most important developments of the 20th.”
Note that he says universal history is impossible on the terms of Toynbee, O’Neill, Hegel, Ranke, Spengler, Marx. This is a highly diverse group of historians and historical thinkers; once we exclude all their presuppositions, what is left? Very little, it would seem. However, Trevor-Roper left open the possibility of universal history on other terms, though he does not specify in the above what terms those would be. Deriving what these terms might be from Trevor-Roper’s work, we can appeal to his (earlier quoted) “Past and Present,” in which he wrote:
“The philosophy of the greatest historians cannot be quickly summarized. It is not crude. It is subtle; and in a long work it must be allowed gradually to emerge.”
This, I think, must be the final word for the moment.
