1

Whig history
Whig history presents the past as an inevitable progression towards ever greater liberty
and enlightenment, culminating in modern forms of liberal democracy and constitutional
monarchy. In general, Whig historians stress the rise of constitutional government,
personal freedoms and scientific progress. The term is often applied generally (and
pejoratively) to histories that present the past as the inexorable march of progress toward
enlightenment. It also refers to a specific set of British historians. Its antithesis can be seen
in certain kinds of cultural pessimism.
Terminology
The British historian Herbert Butterfield coined the term "Whig history" in his small but
influential book The Whig Interpretation of History (1931). It takes its name from the
British Whigs, advocates of the power of Parliament, who opposed the Tories, advocates of
the power of the King.
The term has been applied widely in historical disciplines outside of British history (the
history of science, for example) to criticize any teleological or goal-directed, hero-based,
and transhistorical narrative. The abstract noun Whiggishness is sometimes used as a
generic term for Whig history. It should not be confused with Whiggism as a political
ideology, and has no direct relation to either the British or American Whig parties. (The
term Whiggery is ambiguous in contemporary usage: it may either mean party politics and
ideology, or a general intellectual approach.)
Butterfield's intervention
When H. A. L. Fisher in 1928 gave the Raleigh Lecture on The Whig Historians, from Sir
James Mackintosh to Sir George Trevelyan he implied that "Whig historian" was
adequately taken as a political rather than a progressive or teleological label; this put the
concept into play.
[1]
P. B. M. Blaas has argued that Whig history itself had lost all vitality by
1914.
[2]

Butterfield's book on the 'Whig interpretation' marked the emergence of a negative concept
in historiography under a convenient phrase, but was not isolated. Undermining 'whiggish'
narratives was one aspect of the post-World War I re-evaluation of European history in
general, and Butterfield's critique exemplified this trend. Subsequent generations of
academic historians have similarly rejected Whig history because of its presentist and
teleological bent. According to Victor Feske, there is too much readiness to accept
Butterfield's classic formulation from 1931 as definitive.
[3]
A study, Herbert Butterfield and
the Interpretation of History by Keith Sewell, was published in 2005.
Butterfield's formulation
The characteristics of Whig history as defined by Butterfield include interpreting history as
a story of progress toward the present, and specifically toward the British constitutional
settlement. Butterfield wrote:
2
It is part and parcel of the whig interpretation of history that it studies the past with
reference to the present [...]
[4]

Typical distortions thereby introduced are:
Viewing the British parliamentary, constitutional monarchy as the apex of human
political development;
Assuming that the constitutional monarchy was in fact an ideal held throughout all ages
of the past, despite the observed facts of British history and the several power struggles
between monarchs and parliaments;
Assuming that political figures in the past held current political beliefs (anachronism);
Assuming that British history was a march of progress whose inevitable outcome was the
constitutional monarchy; and
Presenting political figures of the past as heroes, who advanced the cause of this political
progress, or villains, who sought to hinder its inevitable triumph.
[5]

Butterfield argued that this approach to history compromised the work of the historian in
several ways. The emphasis on the inevitability of progress leads to the mistaken belief that
the progressive sequence of events becomes "a line of causation," tempting the historian to
go no further to investigate the causes of historical change.
[6]
The focus on the present as
the goal of historical change leads the historian to a special kind of abridgement, selecting
only those events that seem important from the present point of view.
[7]

Butterfield's antidote to Whig history was "to evoke a certain sensibility towards the past,
the sensibility which studies the past 'for the sake of the past', which delights in the
concrete and the complex, which 'goes out to meet the past', which searches for
'unlikenesses between past and present'".
[8]

Subsequent views
Butterfield's formulation has subsequently received much attention, and the kind of
historical writing he argued against in generalised terms is no longer academically
respectable. Despite its polemical success, Butterfield's celebrated book itself has been
criticised by David Cannadine as slight, confused, repetitive and superficial.
[9]

Michael Bentley
[10]
analyses the "Whig theory" according to Butterfield as equivalent to the
formation of a canon of nineteenth-century historians of England (such as William Stubbs,
James Anthony Froude, E. A. Freeman, J. R. Green, W. E. H. Lecky, Lord Acton, J. R.
Seeley, S. R. Gardiner, C. H. Firth and J. B. Bury) that in fact excludes few except Thomas
Carlyle; the theory identifies the common factors. Bentley comments that,
Carlyle apart, the so-called Whigs were predominantly Christian,
predominantly Anglican, thinkers for whom the Reformation supplied the
critical theatre of enquiry when considering the origins of modern England.
3
When they wrote about the history of the English constitution, as so many of
them did, they approached their story from the standpoint of having Good
News to relate.
Roger Scruton, in his A Dictionary of Political Thought (1982), takes the theory underlying
"Whig history" to be centrally concerned with progress and reaction, with the progressives
shown as victors and benefactors. Cannadine
[11]
wrote of the English tradition that:
It was fiercely partisan and righteously judgemental, dividing the personnel
of the past into the good and the bad. And it did so on the basis of the marked
preference for liberal and progressive causes, rather than conservative and
reactionary ones. [...] Whig history was, in short, an extremely biassed view
of the past: eager to hand out moral judgements, and distorted by teleology,
anachronism and present-mindedness.
The Whig historians within a tradition
Paul Rapin de Thoyras's history of England was published in 1723 and became "the classic
Whig history" for the first half of the eighteenth century.
[12]
Rapin claimed that the English
had preserved their ancient constitution against the absolutist tendencies of the Stuarts.
Rapin's history was, however, replaced as the standard history of England in the late
eighteenth century and early nineteenth century by that of David Hume. Hume challenged
Whig views of the past and the Whig historians in turn attacked Hume; but they could not
dent his history.
In the early nineteenth century some Whig historians came to incorporate Hume's views,
dominant for the previous fifty years. These historians were members of the New Whigs
around Charles James Fox and Lord Holland, in opposition until 1830, and so "needed a
new historical philosophy".
[13]
Fox himself intended to write a history of the Glorious
Revolution of 1688 but only managed the first year of James II's reign. A fragment was
published in 1808. Sir James Mackintosh then sought to write a Whig history of the
Glorious Revolution, published in 1834 as the History of the Revolution in England in
1688. Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69) and
Henry Hallam's Constitutional History of England (1827) reveal many Whiggish traits.
According to Arthur Marwick,
[14]
Hallam was the first Whig historian.
Hume still dominated English historiography but this changed when Thomas Babington
Macaulay, utilising Fox and Mackintosh's work and manuscript collections, published the
first volumes of his History of England in 1848. It was an immediate success, replacing
Hume's history and becoming the new orthodoxy.
[15]
While Macaulay was a popular and
celebrated historian of the Whig school, his work did not feature in Butterfield's 1931 book.
According to Ernst Breisach
[16]
"his style captivated the public as did his good sense of the
past and firm Whiggish convictions". Perhaps the pinnacle of Whig history is his widely
read multivolume History of England from the Accession of James II. Macaulay's first
chapter proposes that:
4
I shall relate how the new settlement was, during many troubled years, successfully
defended against foreign and domestic enemies; how, under that settlement, the authority
of law and the security of property were found to be compatible with a liberty of discussion
and of individual action never before known; how, from the auspicious union of order and
freedom, sprang a prosperity of which the annals of human affairs had furnished no
example; how our country, from a state of ignominious vassalage, rapidly rose to the place
of umpire among European powers; how her opulence and her martial glory grew together;
how, by wise and resolute good faith, was gradually established a public credit fruitful of
marvels which to the statesmen of any former age would have seemed incredible; how a
gigantic commerce gave birth to a maritime power, compared with which every other
maritime power, ancient or modern, sinks into insignificance; how Scotland, after ages of
enmity, was at length united to England, not merely by legal bonds, but by indissoluble ties
of interest and affection; how, in America, the British colonies rapidly became far mightier
and wealthier than the realms which Cortes and Pizarro had added to the dominions of
Charles the Fifth; how in Asia, British adventurers founded an empire not less splendid
and more durable than that of Alexander.
... (T)he history of our country during the last hundred and sixty years is eminently the
history of physical, of moral, and of intellectual improvement.
A crucial figure in the later survival and respectability of Whig history was William Stubbs,
the constitutional historian and influential teacher of a generation of historians. According
to Reba Soffer
[17]

His rhetorical gifts often concealed his combination of High Church Anglicanism,
Whig history, and civic responsibility.
George Kitson Clark writes
[18]

...the survival of the myth through the times of Stubbs is one of the most interesting
and significant facts in its history. [...] ... indeed it was largely later 19th century
historians who converted that very equivocal, essentially medieval character Simon
de Montfort into a forward-looking, Liberal-minded statesman with a profound
understanding of the virtues of representative government.
Other applications of the term
In the history of science
It has been argued that the history of science is "riddled with Whiggish history".
[19]
Like
other Whig histories, Whig history of science tends to divide historical actors into "good
guys," who are on the side of truth (as we now know it) and "bad guys," who opposed the
emergence of these truths because of ignorance or bias.
[20]
From this whiggish perspective,
Ptolemy would be criticized because his astronomical system placed the Earth at the center
of the universe while Aristarchus would be praised because he placed the Sun at the center
of the solar system. This kind of evaluation ignores historical background and the evidence
5
that was available at a particular time: did Aristarchus have evidence to support his idea
that the Sun was at the center; were there good reasons to reject Ptolemy's system before
the sixteenth century?
The writing of Whig history of science is especially found in the writings of scientists
[21]

and general historians,
[22]
while this whiggish tendency is commonly opposed by
professional historians of science. Nicholas Jardine describes the changing attitude to
whiggishness this way:
[23]

By the mid-1970s, it had become commonplace among historians of science
to employ the terms Whig and Whiggish, often accompanied by one or
more of hagiographic, internalist, triumphalist, even positivist, to
denigrate grand narratives of scientific progress. At one level there is, indeed,
an obvious parallel with the attacks on Whig constitutional history in the
opening decades of the century. For, as P. B. M. Blaas has shown, those
earlier attacks were part and parcel of a more general onslaught in the name
of an autonomous, professional and scientific history, on popular, partisan
and moralising historiography. Similarly,... For post-WWII champions of the
newly professionalized history of science the targets were quite different.
Above all, they were out to establish a critical distance between the history of
science and the teaching and promotion of the sciences. In particular, they
were suspicious of the grand celebratory and didactic narratives of scientific
discovery and progress that had proliferated in the inter-war years.
More recently, some scholars have argued that Whig history is essential to the history of
science. At one level, "the very term 'the history of science' has itself profoundly Whiggish
implications. One may be reasonably clear what 'science' means in the 19th century and
most of the 18th century. In the 17th century 'science' has very different meaning. For
example chemistry is inextricably mixed up with alchemy. Before the 17th century
dissecting out such a thing as 'science' in anything like the modern sense of the term
involves profound distortions."
[24]
The science historians' rejection of whiggishness has
been criticized by some scientists for failing to appreciate the temporal depth of scientific
research.
[25]

As teleology
In The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1986, see anthropic principle for details) John
D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler identify Whiggishness (Whiggery) with a teleological
principle, of 'convergence' in history to liberal democracy.
[26]

In popular culture
Despite their shortcomings as interpretations of the past, Whiggish histories continue to
influence popular understandings of political and social development. This persistence
reflects the power of dramatic narratives that detail epic struggles for enlightened ideals.
Aspects of the Whig interpretation are apparent in films, television, political rhetoric, and
even history textbooks.
[27]

6
Popular understandings of human evolution and paleoanthropology may be imbued with a
form of "whiggishness". See, for example, the celebrated scientific illustration, The March
of Progress (1965). Most portrayals and fictionalized adaptations of the Scopes Trial, such
as in Inherit the Wind (1955), subscribe to a Whig view of the trial and its aftermath. This
was challenged by historian Edward J. Larson in his book Summer for the Gods: The
Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (1997), for
which he won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1998.
[28]

Notes
1. Michael Bentley, Modernizing England's Past: English Historiography in the Age
of Modernism (2005), p. 171.
2. Bentley p. 95.
3. From Belloc to Churchill: Private Scholars, Public Culture, and the Crisis of British
Liberalism, 1900-1939 (1996), p. 2.
4. http://www.eliohs.unifi.it/testi/900/butterfield/chap_2.html
5. According to its critics, a Whig interpretation requires human heroes and villains
in the story. J. Hart, Nineteenth-Century Social Reform: A Tory Interpretation of
History, Past & Present 1965 31(1):39-61.
6. Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, (New York: W. W.
Norton), 1965, p. 12.
7. Butterfield, pp. 24-5.
8. Adrian Wilson and T. G. Ashplant, "Whig History and Present-Centred History,"
The Historical Journal, 31 (1988): 1-16, at p. 10.
9. G. M. Trevelyan (1992), p. 208.
10. Michael Bentley, Modern Historiography: An Introduction (1999), pp.64-5.
11. G. M. Trevelyan, p.197.
12. Hugh Trevor-Roper, 'Introduction', Lord Macaulay's History of England (Penguin
Classics, 1979), p. 10.
13. Trevor-Roper, p. 12.
14. The Nature of History (second edition 1980), p. 47.
15. Trevor-Roper, pp. 25-6.
16. Historiography (second edition, 1994), p.251.
17. Discipline and Power: The University, History, and the Making of an English Elite
(1994), p. 87.
7
18. The Critical Historian (1967), p. 167.
19. C. T. McIntire, Herbert Butterfield: Historian as Dissenter, (New Haven: Yale
Univ. Pr., 2004), p. 205.
20. John A. Schuster, "The Problem of 'Whig History" in the History of Science"
21. "The conventional stories of the past that appear in the introductory chapters of
science textbooks are certainly a form of Whiggism. Historians take great delight in
exposing the artificially constructed nature of these stories, and some scientists find the
results uncomfortable." Peter J. Bowler and Iwan Rhys Morus, Making Modern Science: A
Historical Survey, (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Pr., 2005) ISBN 0-226-06861-7, p. 2.
22. "the history of science as composed by both ex-scientists and general historians
has largely consisted of Whig history, in which the scientific winners write the account in
such a way as to make their triumph an inevitable outcome of the righteous logic of their
cause." Ken Alder, "The History of Science, or, an Oxymoronic Theory of Relativistic
Objectivity", pp. 297-318 in Lloyd Kramer and Sarah Maza, ed., A Companion to Western
Historical Thought, (Blackwell,), p. 301.
23. Nick Jardine, "Whigs and Stories: Herbert Butterfield and the Historiography of
Science," .History of Science, 41 (2003): 125-140, at pp. 127-8.
24. R. Anthony Hyman, "Whiggism in the History of Science and the Study of the Life
and Work of Charles Babbage"
25. Edward Harrison, "Whigs, prigs and historians of science", Nature, 329 (1987):
213-14.[1]
26.
Barrow, John D.; Tipler, Frank J. (19 May 1988). The Anthropic Cosmological Principle.
foreword by John A. Wheeler. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 911, 135. LC 87-
28148. ISBN 9780192821478.
http://books.google.com/books?id=uSykSbXklWEC&printsec=frontcover. Retrieved 31
December 2009.
27. James A. Hijiya, "Why the West is Lost," The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd
Ser., Vol. 51, No. 2. (Apr., 1994), pp. 276-292.
28. Ronald P. Ladouceur, "Ella Thea Smith and the Lost History of American High
School Biology Textbooks," Journal of the History of Biology, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Sep., 2008),
pp. 435-471.