C. T. McIntire. Herbert Butterfield: Historian as Dissenter. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004. xxv + 499 pp. $47.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-300-09807-5.
Reviewed by Daniel Ritschel (Department of History, University of Maryland, Baltimore County)
Published on H-Albion (December, 2005)
The Politics of the Whig Interpretation of History
Herbert Butterfield enjoyed a career that most historians can only regard with wistful admiration. The son of a West Yorkshire mill worker but also a brilliant scholarship boy, he rose through the academic ranks at Cambridge to become one of the intellectual celebrities of the twentieth century. As a scholar, he is credited with groundbreaking contributions in a number of major fields, including historiography and the histories of science, religion, and international relations. He published twenty-two books and left behind a highly influential school of political history; moreover, his lectures were broadcast to mass audiences by BBC Radio and featured in the New York Times. At Cambridge, he served successively as the Master of Peterhouse, Regius Professor of Modern History, and the Vice-Chancellor of the university. He was knighted in 1968, and received more than a dozen honorary doctorates from around the world. Few historians have equaled Butterfield's prodigious scholarly output and accomplishments.
Within the profession, Butterfield is best remembered for The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), his early polemic against the self-congratulatory presentism of those Victorian historians who wrote history as if the liberal values and institutions of their day were the end-point of historical progress. His devastating critique quickly became commonplace within the profession, and the "Whig interpretation" came to be stigmatized as the hallmark of an unprofessional style of history practiced only by politicians and popular historians. The British Library has included The Whig Interpretation in its index of the most important cultural events of the last century, one of only seven works of history to receive this recognition.
Yet C. T. McIntire's intellectual biography of Butterfield, the first such general consideration of his work, is far from an exercise in reverential hagiography. Instead, the author strikes an admirable balance between his genuine sympathy for Butterfield and his thought, and a critical assessment of his work as a historian. Butterfield emerges from this account as a complex and sophisticated thinker, who, nonetheless, never successfully reconciled the deep contradictions between his empiricist aspiration to cleanse history of its Whiggish defects, and the reality of his own scholarship as a highly partisan commentary on the past, rooted firmly in his own religious and ideological beliefs. Indeed, the great value of McIntire's biography is to be found in its systematic demonstration of the profound discrepancies between its subject's historiographical theory and historical practice.
On the one side of this internal divide stood Butterfield as a lifelong champion of "scientific" or "technical" history, an unabashedly Rankean view of historical scholarship that required that knowledge of the past be based strictly on "facts" derived from detailed archival research. He insisted that historians avoid not only the Whiggish sins of anachronism and ideological partisanship, but also all moral judgments and assumptions about larger patterns or purpose in history. However, Butterfield also believed that if historians devoted themselves to collecting the hard facts of the past, they would eventually uncover the "final story" that would withstand the distorting influence of present-day passions and perspectives (p. 283).
Yet, as McIntire shows over and over again, Butterfield himself rarely practiced what he preached, and his own writings persistently transgressed against his own methodological injunctions. His definition of "scientific" history, for instance, rested on the pre-condition of exhaustive research in archival sources. Yet only two of his own works may be said to have met this basic standard, and most of his other publications are described by McIntire as thought-essays, meditations, and commentaries, based on little or no primary research. Butterfield also persistently defied his own edict against Whiggish meta-narratives, organizing his various historical accounts in successive historical "stages," with "progress" from "barbarism" and "primitive" stages of knowledge and society to the more "civilized" and "adult" stage of the modern period (pp. 257-259, 293, 337). Similarly, though he urged historians to avoid the imposition of moral or ideological judgments, his own style of historical interpretation gravitated toward broad "maxims," shown by McIntire to be derived directly from his political and moral preferences.
The tendency to ignore his own injunctions is perhaps most glaring in the case of Butterfield's insertion of an avowedly Whiggish political ideology into his historical analysis. His Whiggism first emerged in his patriotic paean to English values and politics in The Englishman and His History (1944), which contrasted the continental penchant for revolutionary confrontations and abstract ideologies, with England's Whiggish politics of ordered progress through moderate but timely reforms. Though this has been viewed as an aberration brought on by wartime patriotism, McIntire's analysis of Butterfield's postwar thought reveals that his continued espousal of Whiggish politics rested on a fusion of Burkean conservatism and an explicitly theological doctrine of history. Whereas he rejected the radical schemes of both the Left and Right as guilty of the sins of arrogance and presumption, he celebrated the more tentative and incremental Whiggish approach because it accommodated itself to the pitfalls of human cupidity and respected the constraints of the larger "historical process" governed by "divine Providence" (p. 129). McIntire concludes that Butterfield's politics and historical understanding constituted a "Christian interpretation of history" (p. 131).
Though McIntire shows that Butterfield sought, at times, to reconcile the polarities of his thought, he also makes it clear that such efforts were tentative and far from satisfying, and one is left wondering if it was at all possible to systematize such grossly contradictory tendencies. In the end, Butterfield emerges not as a heroic figure who helped purge professional history of the methodological impurities left over from before its birth as a scholarly discipline in the nineteenth century, but as a symbol of the profession's abortive struggle in the next century to establish scientific credentials for our essentially humanistic and inescapably politicized craft. It says much that the historian regarded widely as a symbol of history's empiricist ambitions is described by his biographer as both an "ideologue" and "preacher" (pp. 229, 210).
While McIntire has written a thought-provoking reassessment of Butterfield's work, his own approach raises a few methodological questions. First, his dense analysis of Butterfield's texts is accompanied by remarkably little discussion of the place of his thought within the wider intellectual environment. This may be a reflection of Butterfield's own striking insularity. Despite his jet-setting academic career on both sides of the Atlantic, McIntire's account suggests that Butterfield's inspiration remained moored in his Methodist upbringing and formative encounters with Leopold Ranke, Lord Acton, G.M. Trevelyan, and Howard Temperley, his original mentor at Peterhouse. McIntire accordingly offers only a limited discussion of Butterfield's position within contemporary academic culture, portraying him instead as an intellectual dissenter who refused to fit into any single school or tradition.
Yet, even if Butterfield was so thoroughly insulated within the walls of Peterhouse and Cambridge, others have been able to place his thought into much broader contexts. P. B. M. Blaas, for instance, has situated The Whig Interpretation of History at the tail end of a far longer anti-Whig reaction among historians since the turn of the century.[1] Christopher Parker, on the other hand, has argued that Butterfield's "Christian history" represented an archaic throwback to the nineteenth-century historiographical tradition of Liberal Anglicanism.[2] One would have liked to see such rival assessments evaluated by McIntire.
It is also disappointing that, in a work that emphasizes the ideological roots of Butterfield's historical thought, the author does not offer a more contextual analysis of his subject's politics. McIntire describes Butterfield's position as that of a Burkean "New Whig," determined not to defeat, but to reconstruct and reinvigorate the Whig tradition in politics (pp. 59-60). However, beyond suggesting that this "New Whiggism" was "transformative and progressive," McIntire does not seek to identify its precise ideological location, explaining instead that it "flatly refuses to fit neatly into any of the going categories," leaving Butterfield "standing completely outside of twentieth-century politics" (pp. xvi, 131).
Yet McIntire's own discussion of Butterfield's "New Whiggism" lends strong support to Reba Soffer's suggestion that his views represented a distinctly conservative brand of Whiggism that was deeply skeptical of man-made reforms and endorsed "cautious progress" or "organic development" only in the context of strong social hierarchy and humble acceptance of the larger providential course of human history.[3] Soffer's interpretation certainly helps explain why Butterfield became such a central figure among postwar conservative historians. It also clarifies his crucial role in the genesis of the aggressively conservative school of "high politics" that emerged under his tutelage at Peterhouse in the 1960s, and whose followers have been described as "Butterfield's Tories."[4] It is ironic that we are offered no discussion of this crucial legacy in McIntire's otherwise revealing account of the highly politicized scholarship of their mentor.
Notes
[1]. P. B. M. Blaas, Continuity and Anachronism: Parliamentary and Constitutional Development in Whig Historiography and the Anti-Whig Reaction between 1890 and 1930 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1978).
[2]. C. Parker, The English Historical Tradition since 1850 (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1990), p. 206.
[3]. R. N. Soffer, " British Conservative Historiography and the Second World War," in British and German Historiography, 1750-1950, ed. B. Stuchtey and P. Wende (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 373-399; and, "Commitment and Catastrophe: Twentieth-Century Conservative Historiography in Britain and America," in Anglo-American Attitudes: From Revolution to Partnership, ed. Fred M. Leventhal and Roland Quinault (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 227-242.
[4]. Richard Brent, "Butterfield's Tories: High Politics and the Writing of Modern British Political History," Historical Journal 30, no. 4 (1987): pp. 943-954.
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Citation:
Daniel Ritschel. Review of McIntire, C. T., Herbert Butterfield: Historian as Dissenter.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
December, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11043
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