Whig History and Present-Centred History

Author(s): Adrian Wilson and T. G. Ashplant

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Source: The Historical Journal, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Mar., 1988), pp. 1-16
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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The Historical Journal, 3I, I (I988), pp. i-i6
Printedin GreatBritain

WHIG HISTORY AND

PRESENT-CENTRED HISTORY*
ADRIAN WILSON
Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, Cambridge
and
T. G. ASHPLANT
School of Humanities and Social Sciences, LiverpoolPolytechnic

Of the many books written by the late Herbert Butterfield, the most influential
by far was The whig interpretationof 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.
Yet during Butterfield's lifetime there was next to nothing in the literature
by way of reasoned discussion of the argument of The whig interpretation.This
collective silence on the part of historians is certainly regrettable; it may also
seem odd, but is in fact a symptom of a more general reluctance. For
historians, as one recent commentator has observed, 'are not much given to
reflecting at length on the nature of their discipline '.2 Perhaps the very success
of Butterfield's book contributed to this. The whig interpretationoffered a ready-
made answer to certain historiographic issues, and thus helped historians to
avoid 'reflecting at length' on those issues. The problem of historiographic
anachronism, which is the central theme of the book, could be regarded as
already solved; the acceptance of Butterfield's terminology effectively blocked
further discussion and debate.
However, since Butterfield's death in 1979, there have appeared some
critical appraisals of his work which engage both with his substantive writings
and with his historiographic essays and books; and amongst those qualified
* For their help with various aspects of this paper, we wish to thank David Amigoni, Andrew
Cunningham, Patrick Curry, Geoffrey Elton, Rob Iliffe, Susan Morgan, Simon Schaffer, and
Stephen Yeo. For financial support in this study Adrian Wilson wishes to thank the Wellcome
Trust.
1 Herbert Butterfield, The whig interpretation of history(London, I93I); subsequent editions
include a facsimile reprint (New York, I965) of the first edition, and a Penguin edition
(Harmondsworth, I973). Page references below are to the first edition.
2 John Tosh, Thepursuitof history(London, I 984), p. I97.

I 1-2
2 ADRIAN WILSON AND T. G. ASHPLANT

tributes is an essay devoted specifically to The whig interpretation.3Under the

title 'On whiggism', Rupert Hall has broken the silence which surrounds
Butterfield's classic, and has offered a sympathetic yet critical appraisal of the
work. At last, therefore, debate has opened over The whig interpretation;and
Hall's assessment indicates that such debate is long overdue. Hall argues that
The whig interpretationis incoherent in the guidance it offers to the historian;
once subjected to critical scrutiny, Butterfield's argument is seen to be a blunt
and clumsy weapon.4 Similarly, G. R. Elton finds that 'The whig interpretation
proves on re-reading to be perilously thin... lacking in substance'. From these
appraisals it emerges that historians need a much more sophisticated set of
tools than Butterfield offered, if they are to resolve the problems of
historiographical anachronism with which The whig interpretationwas con-
cerned.
The central purpose of the present paper is to offer a set of such tools. In
order to establish the nature of the historian's task, we shall put forward a
critique both of the concept of 'whig history' and of The whig interpretation.It
will then emerge that the issues with which Butterfield dealt superficially go
to the heart of the historian's enterprise. We shall outline our own view of those
issues, arguing that 'whig' history is but one specific variety of the general
problem which we construe as present-centredness.

I. WHIG HISTORY
The hegemony of the term 'whig history' in historical discussion is in itself
surprising. Narrowly construed, it refers to an interpretation of British history,
prevalent in whig political and intellectual circles in the mid-nineteenth
century, which stressed the growth of liberty, parliamentary rule and religious
toleration since the constitutional struggles of the seventeenth century.
Butterfield himself in his book already gave it a wider reference, using 'the
whig interpretation' to describe ways of understanding political and religious
developments in Europe since the Reformation: thus the interpretation of
Luther was one of his key examples. Subsequently, though, the notion 'whig
history' has been used generically as a critical concept in other fields of history
far removed from the political and religious history to which Butterfield first
applied it, and within which it had some real if limited reference. Its use has
now become merely gestural or loosely analogous, defining neither the source
3 Maurice Cowling, 'Herbert Butterfield Igoo-I979', Proceedings of the British Academy,LXV
(I979), 595-609; A. Rupert Hall, 'On whiggism', Historyof Science,XXI (I983), 45-59; G. R.
Elton, 'Herbert Butterfield and the study of history', TheHistorical
_Journal, XXVII (I984), 729-43
(we quote below from p. 734).
will cover similar ground to Hall's general criticisms of
4 Our critique of The whig interpretation
that book, though from a rather different standpoint. We have not dealt with Hall's more specific
argument, that in the particular field of the history of science, Butterfield's historiographic
stricturessimply cannot be followed, and that 'whiggism' is unavoidable. The problem of present-
centredness in the history of science is examined by Andrew Cunningham, 'Getting the game
right: some plain words on the identity and invention of science', Stuidiesin HistoryandPhilosophy
of Science(forthcoming). We shall be referring to this where relevant.
 WHIG HISTORY 3
nor the nature of the approach it critizises; while its very repetition blots out
the need for a more accurate conceptualization.
Why has the term proved so popular? As we have observed, Butterfield was
using it to characterize something broader than a mere fashion or quirk of
English political history. Indeed, at one point he claimed that the 'whig
principle' lay at the heart of all historiographical error:'

It ... is the very sum and definition of all errorsof historical inference. The study of the
past with one eye, so to speak, upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries
in history....

Whether this is so or not, it does seem that something similar to 'the whig
fallacy' frequently comes into play whenever history is written either by, or on
behalf of, a triumphant elite. Still more generally, the past is often seen
historiographically as the origin or precursor or anticipation of the present, in
such a way as to celebrate and legitimize that present, and history writing of
this kind seems to have something important in common with 'whig history',
as Butterfield characterized it. Hence those who are seeking to criticize such
historiography have often found it useful to refer, almost implicitly, to
Butterfield's conception. As a result, the term has passed into the everyday
language of historians - often modified to 'whiggish', as if in acknowledgment
of the extension of usage which has taken place. That usage is now so
widespread that many who routinely use the terms 'whig history' or 'whiggish
history' have never read The whig interpretation,and some of them have never
heard of that book.6
This easy sway of the term 'whig history' has concealed two major problems
in Butterfield's definition and use of it. Firstly, as he employed it, the term
' whig history' embodied the very insularity which it was designed to criticise.
Introducing his criticism of the whig approach, Butterfield wrote:' 'It is
astonishing to what extent the historian has been Protestant, progressive, and
whig, and the very model of the nineteenth-century gentleman.' So 'the
historian', as Butterfield generically conceived someone in that role, was
English, male, and upper-class. Such contrary traditions as that represented
by Alice Clark's Working life of women in the seventeenthcentury (I919), not to
mention the entire panoply of foreign historians, were not very vivid in
Butterfield's mind as he battled with his abstraction 'the whig historian' in
1931. Just as Butterfield's complacent Englishness manifested itself in his

p. 3'.
Butterfield, The whig interpretation,
6 One particular field in which these terms are in common use is the history of science. In the
case of science, the present does indeed seem superior to the past; science is produced by an elite
whose members - the scientists - enjoy great prestige; and its historiography has often consisted
in a celebration of the present by means of a conception of inevitable progress. More recently,
however, historians of science have been striving to avoid such anachronistic assumptions, and to
distance themselves from the associated value judgments. It is not surprising, therefore, that
amongst professional historians of science the label of 'whiggishness' is part of everyday
discourse.
7 Butterfield, The whig interpretation,pp. 3-4.
4 ADRIAN WILSON AND T. G. ASHPLANT

general formulation, so his own protestantism was apparent in the very first
specific example he gave of how historians should and should not proceed :8
And though a sentence from Aquinas may fall so strangely upon modern ears that it
becomes plausible to dismiss the man as a fool or a mind utterly and absolutely alien,
I take it that to dismiss a man in this way is a method of blocking up the mind against
him.... Precisely because of his unlikeness to ourselves Aquinas is the more enticing
subject for the historical imagination....
Here 'ourselves' refers, of course, to protestants; the words of Aquinas need
not have struck catholics of the time as strange, simply because his thought
had shaped a significant part of their religious teaching. In short, both in
defining his target and in the manner of his attack, Butterfield remained to a
great extent a prisoner of the very tradition he sought to challenge.
The second problem is revealed by Butterfield's own later substantive
writing in the history of science. As Hall has noted, most historians of science
who read The origins of modernscience (I949; 1957) today find it whiggish-
indeed, extremely so. We shall quote just three passages from Butterfield's
book which seem to support such a reading:'
The theory of impetus did not solve all problems, however, and proved to be only the
half-way house to the modern view....
It may be true to say that Aristotle, when he thought of motion, had in mind a horse
drawing a cart, so that his whole feeling for the problem was spoiled by his
preoccupation with a misleading example.
Even the great geniuses who broke through the ancient views in some special field of
study - Gilbert, Bacon and Harvey, for example - would remain stranded in a species
of mediaevalism when they went outside that chosen field. It required their combined
efforts to clear up certain simple things which we should now regard as obvious to an
unprejudiced mind, and even easy for a child.
We may read such sentences as these with a smile or a frown, and condemn
Butterfield at once of the whiggishness against which he had written in I93 I.
But such a judgment would be premature, since there is reason to believe that
Butterfield, in writing this work, was consciously striving to produce a history
of science which avoided the pitfalls of what he saw as whig history. This can
be indicated by three further quotations, taken from the introduction to the
book :10
The subject has not been turned into genuine history.., if we construe our history of
science by drawing lines straight from one great figure to another.
Its whole shape is distorted if we seize now upon this particular man in the fifteenth
century who had an idea that strikes us as modern, now upon another man of the
sixteenth century who had a hunch or an anticipation of some later theory....
It is not sufficient to read Galileo with the eyes of the twentieth century or to interpret
him in modern terms - we can only understand his work if we know something of the
system he was attacking....
8 Ibid. pp. 9-IO.
9 Herbert Butterfield, The origins of modernscience (I957 edn), pp. I3, I4, 2.
10 Ibid. pp. viii-ix.
 WHIG HISTORY 5
These formulations, with their clear echoes of the prescriptions of The whig
interpretationof history, demonstrate that Butterfield was convinced that in The
origins of modern science he had both faced and solved the problem of
whiggishness as this presented itself in the history of science. If we do not now
read The origins of modernscience in this way, this points to a problem in our
understanding of Butterfield's use of the concept 'whig interpretation'.
It seems likely that it would require an exercise of research in itself to
recover just what Butterfield intended by publishing The whig interpretationof
history, and indeed what he meant by the very term 'whig history'. Cambridge
folklore has it that the book was a veiled attack on G. M. Trevelyan, Regius
Professor of History from 1926; but Butterfield himself denied this rumour.
The roots of his attack on 'whig history' certainly include the wider crisis of
British liberalism after the Great War of I9I4-I8, and the concerns of the
book should doubtless be placed in that context. Its argument cannot be
grasped sympathetically without an understanding of Butterfield's own tory
Methodist beliefs, and in particular his conception of a Divine Providence
acting through history but in ways virtually invisible to historical research.
Moreover, any juxtaposition of The whig interpretationwith The origins of modern
science would have to take into account the question as to how Butterfield
became interested in the history of science at all. The answer to that question
would probably involve an examination of his relationship with Marxism.
Butterfield published a critical essay on 'History and the Marxian method' in
Scrutiny (1933); it was a group of Marxists who set up the Cambridge
committee for the history of science in 1936; and it was on behalf of this
committee that Butterfield delivered, in 1948, the lectures which were printed
as The origins of modernscience the following year. Meanwhile, we should also
remember, Butterfield was fighting a running battle with Namier and his
school over eighteenth-century English political history; and part of his
weaponry in this struggle was the cache of personal papers of Charles James
Fox which G. M. Trevelyan himself donated to Butterfield at the same time
that The whig interpretationwas published. Throughout this complex career,
Butterfield went on believing the theses of The whig interpretation.To some
degree, then, that essay needs to be set in the context of his whole life - no
simple task.11
Although such a sympathetic reconstruction of Butterfield's thought would
be highly desirable, there are other ways of coming to grips with The whig
interpretationwhich do not depend on the undertaking of that exercise. We can
certainly ask what guidance the book offers to the historian who is concerned
to avoid the errors of anachronism against which it was written. And if we find
that that guidance is weak or incoherent, then we are forced to one or other
of two possible inferences. On the one hand, we may infer that the weaknesses
" See Ved Mehta, Fly and the appraisals by
thefly-bottle (Harmondsworth, I963), pp. i98-215;
Cowling and Elton cited in note 3 above; Michael Hobart, 'History and religion in Herbert
Butterfield', Journal of the History of Ideas, XXXII (I97I), 543-54; Joseph Needham and Walter
Pagel (eds.), Background to modernscience (Cambridge, I938); Butterfield, Origins of modernscience
(London, I949), Introduction (p. vii). Butterfield's I933 essay (Scrutiny, i) was reprinted as
'Marxist history' in his History and human relations (London, I 95I), pp. 66-IOO.
6 ADRIAN WILSON AND T. G. ASHPLANT

of Butterfield's argument give the historian licence to practise some degree of

whiggish interpretation. On the other hand, we may conclude that some more
rigorous set of methodological tools is needed; that the last word against
anachronistic history has not been said by Butterfield, passionate in this cause
though he was; that the problem needs to be reconsideredfrom some different
standpoint. It is over this choice that we take a different stand from Hall.
However, it will now become apparent that as to the merits and faults of
Butterfield'sclassic essay, we are in substantial agreement with Hall's critique.
We shall therefore take his analysis as the starting-point for our own
observations on Butterfield's argument.
Butterfield's fundamental belief was that the historian should tell the
historical story in as much detail as possible. Thus,'2 'the historian... explains
the French Revolution by discovering exactly what it was that occurred; and
if at any point we need further elucidation, all that he can do is to take us into
greater detail, and make us see in still more definite concreteness what really
did take place'. This belief underlay what Hall has criticized as Butterfield's
'specious inductivism', his assumption that 'the "concrete facts"... assemble
themselves a-theoretically into "explanations"', his 'analogy between the
historical process and a microscope with a zoom-lens system'." Here Hall has
accurately identified a fundamental strain in Butterfield's thought. The
picture of the historian as microscopist is no caricature; Butterfield himself
made just this comparison at one point in The whig interpretation."4 In addition,
this same belief underlies one of Butterfield's central criticisms of whig history,
that its error is an error in 'abridgement'. In Butterfield's view, historical
writing consists precisely in some abridgement of the plenitude of the historical
record, an abridgement which is both necessary and inherently perilous. The
difference between bad (whig) history and good history is that whig history
employs an illegitimate principle for such abridgement. The 'whig fallacy'
employs 'a certain organization of the whole historical story'; and such
organization itself consists precisely in 'selection '.15
Appropriately enough, given this diagnosis, Butterfield's own corrective for
whig history was 'historical research', the detailed investigation of a particular
episode or issue. No doubt he was generalizing from his own experience; that
is, from having written The peace tactics of Napoleon i8o6-8 (published in
I929) - a book whose title indicates a narrowness of focus within which, no

doubt, abridgement was at a minimum. Against this conception of bias-free

'historical research' Hall counterposes a compelling argument. He asks us to
imagine a work of 'cross-sectional history', with a limited chronological focus
(i66o-i670) and a well-constrained substantive topic (the problem of vital
heat), and observes that16
the possible range of data is infinite; selection must be made, and since it would be
absurd for selection to be random, it must be made in accord with certain principles,
12 p.
Butterfield, The whig interpretation, 72. 13 Hall, 'On whiggism', p. 5I'
14 p.
Butterfield, The whig interpretation, 2I. 1 Ibid. pp. 24, 25.
16 Hall, 'On whiggism', p. 52.
 WHIG HISTORY 7
that is a pattern.... The cross-sectional historian might consider [religious views] of
relevance to [vital heat] .... But other cross-sectionalramifications present themselves
in endless rows....
This example effectively undermines Butterfield's argument for the immunity-
from-whiggishness of 'historical research', by showing that 'selection' has to
be at work in the constitution of any and every piece of investigation; and that
such selection is necessarily based upon some prior pattern or set of
principles.
In fact, Butterfield's 'inductivism' and his innocence concerning the nature
of historical research reflected a series of elisions which, we want to suggest,
systematically obscured the real nature of historical knowledge and inference.
Again, Hall has given a valuable pointer to this, in the following observation :17
'Butterfield was careless in his use of the word "history", giving it many
connotations, such as: the past, the records of the past; a historian's narrative
of the past; or ... the process of historical writing.' We would wish to
distinguish the various meanings of 'history' still further by expanding Hall's
last phrase to 'the processes of historical researchand writing'.
This habit of Butterfield's was no mere verbal sloppiness: the very words of
The whig interpretationdemonstrate that Butterfield systematically confounded
the several entities which Hall has rightly distinguished. It will be worth
attending this phenomenon, since the space which Butterfield thereby closed
is the very space which we are concerned to open up in this paper. The most
convenient way of approaching the matter is to consider the formulation
Butterfield gave to the concrete meaning of historical research. Logically, the
historian must be engaged in inferringsome account of the past from the evidence
about the past provided by the surviving relics of the past."8 But not for
Butterfield; in his eyes, research was a process of direct contact with the
past :9

when... engaged upon... research... as we come closer to the past... we cannot save
ourselves from tumbling headlong into it and being immersed in it....
a movement towards historical research... is [a movement towards] ... an actual vision
of all the chances and changes which brought about the modern world.
The key to the fact that Butterfield could make this fundamental category-
mistake is provided by another passage, which suggests that this 'immersion
in this past' was the way he experiencedhistorical research, or at least desired
to experience it :20 ' the historian's passion for manuscripts and sources is ... the
desire to bring himself into genuine relationship with the actual ... the desire
to see at first hand how an important decision comes to be made...'.
Thus Butterfield assumed that the past was contained in its relics, so that in
the act of reading the relics the historian was 'tumbling into' the past, was
17 Ibid. p. 59, note 7.
18 For a definition of the precise meanings we give to the terms 'evidence' and 'relic' in this
context, see the discussion of terminology in section ii below.
" Butterfield, The whig interpretation,
pp. I4-I5, 69-70. 20 Ibid. p. 73.
8 ADRIAN WILSON AND T. G. ASHPLANT

indeed seeing it 'at first hand'. The corollary of this was that written history,
when judiciously composed, would in its turn reproduce the past. And
Butterfield said as much :21 ' In reality the process of mutation which produced
the present is as long and complicated as all the most lengthy and complicated
works of historical research placed end to end, and knit together and regarded
as one whole.' It thus becomes apparent how Butterfield could deploy the
'specious inductivism' correctly identified by Hall, and how as the corollary
of this he saw historical writing as simple abridgement. The past is ready for
the historian, assembled in the sources; to read those sources is at once to see
the real nature, to enter the real complexity, of the past; and what the
historian does is to reproducethat complexity in his/her act of writing. The
historical record constitutes a sort of plenum; it is the task of the historian to
enter that plenum, to inhabit it, and return to the present with an accurate
picture of its nature.
Curiously, at one point Butterfield embarked upon an altogether more
sophisticated and accurate formulation :22
Even before we have examined the subject closely, our story will have assumed its
general shape.... Given this original bias we can follow a technical procedure which
is bound to confirm and imprison us in it; for when we come, say, to examine Martin
Luther more closely, we have a magnet that can draw out of history the very things that
we go to look for.... It matters very much how we start upon our labours....
Here, and here alone. Butterfield indicated that the historian might in fact
pursue research(as distinct from writing) which constituted a self-confirming
process. Yet the insight remained entirely local. It pertained only to the whig
historian: the full passage from which we have quoted concerns not the
historian in general, but the historian who has begun with the 'underlying
assumption' of the whig approach. And elsewhere, as we have seen, Butterfield
wrote of 'historical research' as an automatic corrective t.o the 'whig fallacy'.
Moreover, even within the passage we have just quoted, we find Butterfield's
usual naivety as to the relationship between the past, its relics, and the
researcher: a presupposition is a 'magnet that can draw out of history the very
things that we go to look for', as if 'history' is in front of the researcher and
available for extraction.
One might expect that in his chapter on 'The art of the historian',
Butterfield would come to deal more directly with the process of historical
research, inference and writing. It was here that he acknowledged that the
historian was not merely an observer or a passive transcriber of information
but an active subject who constituted his/her object of study. Yet the portrait
Butterfield painted of the historian's activity left the matter in the deepest
obscurity.23 On the question of researchhe contrasted the 'purely scientific'
work of the historian (the simple extraction of facts from the sources) with
what he called the 'historic sense'. This was 'a kind of awareness that only
21 Ibid. p. 22. 2
Ibid. pp. 26-7.
23 Ibid. chapter5 (pp. 90-106); we quotefrompp. 92-3.
 WHIG HISTORY 9
comes through insight and sympathy and imagination'; to put it to work was
' an art . .. something like divination'. These 'resources' of our 'humanity'
enable us to discover: '[the] innuendo [of] our documents'; 'the overtones in
history and in life'; 'the human side of our subject'; 'significances' as distinct
from facts.
These are surely incoherent gestures: Butterfield expressly refrained from
any explicit formulation of either the working, or the objects, of the 'historic
sense'. Furthermore, Butterfield made contradictory statements about the role
and scope of imaginative sympathy in the art of the historian. Here, when
discussing this issue directly, he suggested that 'the whig historian has
performed this part of his function admirably, but ... for ... only one side of the
historical story': that is, that the whig historian has exercised his imaginative
sympathy only on behalf of such heroes as Luther. Yet throughout the earlier
chapters of the book Butterfield had argued that whig history necessarily
distorts the motives even of its own heroes.24
What is striking is the dichotomy Butterfield was positing here, between the
researching of 'facts' and the discovering of 'significances'. The one activity
was too simple to require any elaboration: historical facts are simply waiting
to be found. By contrast, the other activity was imbued with mystery: it could
be indicated by hints and gestures, but never described or defined. In neither
case was there anything useful that could be said about the work of the
historian, which remained a craft mystery.
As for historical writing - which he portrayed as 'the art of abridgement' -
Butterfield's positive pronouncements were again brief and delphic :25
the abridgement... must be an exposition in some form or other of complexity....
[The] problem of abridgement.. is... the organic question of how to reduce details
without losing the purport and tenor of the whole. All abridgement is a kind of
impressionism... and it implies the gift of seeing the significant detail and detecting the
sympathies between events, the gift of apprehending the whole pattern upon which the
historicalprocessis working.... It is the selection of facts for the purpose of maintaining
the impression- maintaining, in spite of omissions, the inner relations of the whole....
Just as with research, so with writing: Butterfield could only gesture towards
what was required. And once again the ubiquitous formulation emerged:
good writing was based upon good selection, selection from that plenum of
history which made up the historical record.
We may fairly assume that Butterfield was writing genuinely from his own
experience, conveying what the problems of historiography felt like to him.
But it is clear that he had not reflected on that experience in such a way as to
offer any convincing guide to other historians. And perhaps this is why, in
Hall's words,26 'The whig interpretation... fails to give any positive idea of what
real, non-whig history may be ... [It] is a negative essay. It tells us what history
should not be, not what it might be.' Butterfield could offer no concrete

24 See particularly ibid. chapter 3 (pp. 34-63); and also pp. 27-8, 78-82.
Ibid. pp. I02-3. 26 Hall, 'On whiggism', pp. 49, 50.
IO ADRIAN WILSON AND T. G. ASHPLANT

alternative because, as we have tried to show, he had not theorised the tasks of
the historian. His essay was designed to a different end: 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'.27It is this sensibility which is displayed in Thewhiginterpretation
as the
counter, the alternative, the antidote to whig history. But this leaves us with
one sensibility battling it out against another; Butterfield bequeathed no
logical criteria of choice. As a result, his arguments fail to persuade Hall.
Against Butterfield's critique of the whig concepts of filiation and progress,
Hall evokes an alternative vision of the historian's purpose:28
The need in the human consciousnessto search for ancestry and continuity is deep....
The question is put, and the questioner will find an answer somewhere; if academic
historians are silent he or she will seek an answer in other ways.... Academia does not
exist solely for the sake of delighting and gratifying itself.
This very different sensibility isjust as valid as that which Butterfieldsought
to elicit. If one wishes, as we do, to go beyond such a confrontation of differing
sensibilities, then one will have to develop a different framework of
historiographic critique, and above all a framework of historiographical
method. In the remainder of this paper we shall argue that the problems of
what Butterfield identified as 'whig history' arise from the structural position
of the historian in studying the past, and are more accurately and fruitfully
defined as problems of present-centredness.

II. PRESENT-CENTRED HISTORY

Butterfield was consistent in arguing that the 'whig fallacy' had something to
do with the relation between the present and the past. His claim was that
(with our emphases added) :29
It is part and parcel of the whig interpretation of history that it studies the past with
referenceto thepresent... Through this system of immediate referenceto thepresentday
historical personages can easily and irresistibly be classed into the men who furthered
progress and the men who tried to hinder it.... The whig historian stands on the
summit of the twentieth century and organiseshis scheme of historyfromthepointof view
of his ownday.
What we would point out is that Butterfield moved here between two
different formulations. The first and dominant formulation was that the whig
fallacy arose from 'the principle of direct reference to the present'. The most
characteristically Butterfieldian rendering of this first formulation was 'with
one eye on the present'.30 The second formation was rather different.
27 Butterfield,The whig interpretation,
pp. i6, 92, I7.
28 Hall, 'On whiggism', pp. 53, 54.
pp. I I-I 3. This passage is quoted by Hall, 'On whiggism',
29 Butterfield, Thewhiginterpretation,

p. 46. 3 Butterfield, The wvhiginterpretation,p. 3I.

 WHIG HISTORY

According to this characterization of the problem, it was the 'point of view'

of the present that was at work.
The distinctiveness of this second formulation can be brought out if we
recast it into Butterfieldian metaphor. History written from the point of view
of the present amounts to history written with both eyes in thepresent. 'With both
eyes': that is, with the whole observing apparatus. 'In the present': that is,
constrained by the perceptual and conceptual categories of the present, bound
within the framework of the present, deploying a perceptual 'set' derived from
the present. And this, we want to argue, is the fundamental cause of the 'whig
fallacy'; this is at once the reason that it arises at all and the reason it is so
pervasive; this is the mainspring of a major pattern of historiographical
error.
The term we use to describe this condition is present-centredness. By using this
term, we seek to capture the fundamental epistemological point that what any
observer sees is a function of the position from which that observer observes;
or, more accurately in this context, what any would-be-knower construesis a
function of that would-be-knower's construing 'position'. What 'whig history'
exemplifies is that a historian's position in the present can lead that historian
to misunderstand, and so to misrepresent, the past he/she is studying. This is
not just a matter of imposing anachronistic value judgments and moral
judgments. Nor is it just a matter of being unfair to the losers in the story. It
also involves (as Butterfield observed) distorting the activities even of the whig
historian's own heroes. Thus what is wrong with whig history concerns not
merely values or moral judgments but also the substantive accuracy of the
story. And the reason for this is that the whig historian observes, researches,
and writes from a present-centred viewpoint.
But what does it mean to describe a historian as 'present-centred'? Is this
to say anything more than the commonsense observation that the historian
lives in the present, but studies the past? In what way does the historian's
position in the present matter? The researching and writing of history is a
conceptual operation: it necessarily involves interpretation, even in the
seemingly simple act of description. And interpretation takes place within a
certain framework; it involves the making of assumptions, the using of words,
the posing of questions. Thus the attempt to recognize or classify the past, let
alone to understand it, depends essentially on the framework of the historian.
Now the critical problem for the historian is whethertheframework he/she is using
is appropriateto thepast he/she is studying. The case of whig history demonstrates
that it is perfectly possible for a historian to work with inappropriate
categories, with anachronistic assumptions and expectations, in short with a
present-centred mental 'set', and so to produce history which distorts the past.
As we shall see, this problem is by no means confined to classical whig history.
But the advantage of whig history as an illustration of our argument is that it
presents these problems in a form with which most historians are familiar.
What the example of whig history serves to illustrate is a far wider set of
problems inherent in the activities of each and every historian. Although it
I2 ADRIAN WILSON AND T. G. ASHPLANT

may seem to the historian as if his/her enterprise is simple and unproblem-

atical, in fact, there are major difficulties inherent in the very project of writing
history at all. This is not how it appears to the working historian, sitting for
example in the Round Room and perusing the document which has finally
appeared from the bowels of the Public Records Office. On the contrary,
provided that the historian has mastered the script and the basic format of
such a document, all appears to be transparent: the labour of reading,
interpreting, note-taking may be arduous, but it hardly seems to pose an
epistemological problem. Yet this seeming naturalness of the historian's work
conceals fundamental difficulties concerning the relationship between the
historian, the document in question, and the past society from which it derives.
To begin to understand these difficulties, it is necessary to develop an
appropriate terminology. Hence we distinguish systematically between several
terms commonly used interchangeably by historians - with the effect, we
believe, of eliding crucial stages in the process of historical research and
writing.
We refer to all surviving material traces of the human past as relics of the
past. Such relics include both free-standing human artefacts, and natural
features marked or modified by human impact (earthworks, quarries, tracks,
etc.). A major category among these relics comprises texts of all sorts -
inscribed, written or printed. These have traditionally constituted a large
proportion of those relics of the past which historians have chosen to work
with.
In referring to the historian's use of relics of the past, we draw a distinction
between the terms 'source' and 'evidence'. This distinction is intended to
register two different stages of the historian's involvement with the relics of the
past. Those portions of the relics of the past which historians turn to in
investigating the past, we refer to as sources.Which relics are treated as sources
changes over time. In part, new interests constitute different relics as
sources.31 In part, new techniques allow further relics to be employed as
sources.32 And, in addition, new interests and techniques allow relics which
have been examined as sources for one set of questions to be re-examined as
sources for another set.33 In each case, the treatment of certain relics as sources
involves the historian making assumptions about how the investigation of
these relics can serve to further the chosen line of historical enquiry. In other
words, the very act of defining any relics of the past as sources for a given
historical enquiry already imports the presence of the historian. A source does
31 This has happened on a large scale with the development of social history. For instance, the
John Johnson collection of printed ephemera in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, which was
originally assembled to record varieties of printing practice, is now increasingly used for the
contents of its handbills and flysheets.
32 Thus radiocarbon dating permits organic materials to be examined as a source for questions
of ancient chronology; ultra-violet light enables an erased or over-written manuscript to be
read.
3 For instance, the rise of labour history and women's history has involved challenging the
claim that there are no sources from which such histories could be written.
 WHIG HISTORY

not exist in and of itself; it is created by the historian's focusing on some relic
of the past.
We refer to (parts of) the sources as evidenceonly when they are deployed
within a historian's argument. In this way, we wish to stress the forensic aspect
of the term - that evidence is always for some argument, and adduced by some
historian. Evidence, then, is a term defining a use to which certain relics of the
past have been put. Some relics having been previously selected as sources,
that is as bodies of potential evidence, the historian has subsequently extracted
certain aspects of, or items from, those sources as evidence for particular parts
of the argument. So the term evidence refers to a stage in the processing of
relics of the past at which they are integrally entwined in the historian's
categories.
To refer to relics of the past simply as sources is to omit the historian's
intervention in focusing on a certain limited portion of those relics. To refer
to sources, in whole or in part, as evidence is to elide the essential role of the
historian in extracting parts of the sources as evidence for a case. The term
' evidence' used in that way is crucially misleading. It implies that the sources,
or that part of them being referred to, by themselves constitute evidence for
something; whereas in fact they can only ever do so within the context of the
historian's argumentation.
In short, the historian is using, as sources of evidence about the past, relics
of the past which are the product of human activities (both individual and
institutional) of the past. The interpretation of these relics demands a
comprehension both of the category-systemswhich shaped the human activities
through which these relics were created, and of the uses which those activities
implied for these relics. As we shall now see, such a comprehension is by no
means easily attained; indeed, there are powerful pressures working against the
historian's attaining it.
The activities which produced the given relics were shaped and structured
by the category-systems of the past. Now it cannot be known at the outset of
any historical enquiry whether the category-systems underlying those relics to
be employed in the enquiry are the same as the category-system of the
historian. And certainly the questions which structure the historian's enquiry,
and which indeed have defined these particular relics of the past as a source
of potential evidence for that enquiry, derive from the present. Hence there is
a gap between questions posed within one category-system, and sources of
evidence generated within what was quite possibly another category-system.
The danger is that unless the historian is first aware of that gap, and explores
its nature, then he/she will misinterpret such relics as offering direct answers
to his/her questions, when in fact they cannot do so. It is clear that this
procedure, left uncorrected, would lead to misunderstanding.
This problem is not confined to the realm of historical enquiry, although it
presents particular difficulties there. All human communication, even in a
shared present, involves a degree of negotiation between different category-
systems. The need becomes many times greater in investigating the past. The
I4 ADRIAN WILSON AND T. G. ASHPLANT

historian normally uses his/her understanding of language as the principal

working tool or device for reading/interpreting a relic of the past. In everyday
life, we use language in conversation and in correspondence: here there is a
living interlocutor or correspondent who can answer back, argue, explain,
query, and so on. However, in historical research there is no analogue to this
interchange.34 How, then, are we to notice the difference between the two
situations, between the two sets of uses of our linguistic skills? We may be
pulled up short by brute incomprehension. Or again, we may find that 'a
sentence from Aquinas strikes us' as bizarre. But this will point us to a
difficulty only if we are prepared to be sympathetic. And all too often, our
misunderstanding is enfolded upon itself in such a way as to be experienced as
comprehension - as, for instance, when a sentence or paragraph from (say)
William Harvey strikes us as modern, advanced, sensible, scientific,
experimental, correct. Through resting content with this perception, and
setting aside what we do not understand or agree with as backward, irrational
and superstitious, we fall into an impenetrable present-centredness, as
Butterfield did in The origins of modernscience.
Just as each and every relic of the past was constituted within a category-
system of its own society, so too it originally had a use in what was once the
present. The historian in examining such a relic has a use to which he/she is
putting (or intending to put) that relic. And each of these uses is associated
with an underlying pattern of activity. One pattern of activity underlies the
use which the relic originally had; another pattern of activity underlies the use
to which the historian is now putting it. Now it is almost never the case that
these two uses are the same. On the contrary, the normal state of affairs is that
the historian is putting the given relic to a use for which its actual creators did
not intend it and could not have intended it. Thus the historian uses police files
to reconstruct the motives and social profiles of revolutionary crowds; uses
parish registers to discover the mean age at marriage; uses Newton's Principia
to elucidate the nature of scientific method. Hence the activity of the historian
is not merely independent of the activities which produced the given relic;
rather, the activity of the historian is systematically at odds with those
activities.
What enhances this problem is that in the natural act of reading, the
historian is necessarily, though perhaps unconsciously, assigning some activity
to the person/people/institution in the past that produced the given relic.
Unless the historian attends to the discrepancy of uses which is involved, it is
likely that he/she will assign the wrong activity. As Skinner has shown for the
history of ideas, and as Cunningham argues for the history of science, the
nature of the activities thus imputed is a function of the historian's initial
framework of enquiry.35 In writing a book, a sixteenth-century author is
assumed by the historian of ideas to be contributing to political thought; in
34 Oral history constitutes at least a partial exception to this rule.
35 See Quentin Skinner, 'Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas', Historyand
Theogy,viii (I969), 3-53; and Cunningham's paper cited in note 4 above.
 WHIG HISTORY I5

carrying out an experiment, an eighteenth-century natural philosopher is

assumed by the historian of science to be practising science. These assumptions
once made, the activities and their authors are hacked about until they fit into
the procrustean bed prepared for them: here a superstitious survival, there an
idea ahead of its time. The butchery completed and the carcass trimmed, the
historian can press on relentlessly, content that everything does indeed fit into
the initial framework.
This analysis demonstrates that the very position of the historian - as an
observer in the present making use of the relics of the past - leads directly to
misunderstanding. The degree and the form of misunderstanding can vary
enormously; but there can be no mistaking the fact that it is from such
misunderstanding that historical research begins. Thus the problem formulated
(for the history of ideas) by Quentin Skinner as 'Meaning and Understanding'
might be better expressed as 'Meaning and Misunderstanding'.36
Unless the historian attends to this problem, two pervasive dangers present
themselves. The first of these is that the historian will simply find in the past
what he/she is looking for, namely what fits his/her initial categories. This is
the simplest form of what Butterfield characterized as the whig error.
Alternatively, and more subtly, the historian may search for what fits these
categories, and fail to find anything which so fits; construe this failure as
indicating the absence of the phenomenon in question; and then erect this
absenceinto a substantive finding. These two errors, though seemingly opposite
in character, are but two sides of the same coin. In the former, that which fits
the categories of the present is singled out, while the rest of the past is
discarded; in the latter, the past is seen simply as the negation, the absence,
of the presence. In either case, the past is subordinated to, forced to fit, the
categories of the present.
The reason that such distortions can occur is not confined to historical
interpretation, but is a property of human perception, interpretation and
inference at large. What any human observer 'sees' is a function not simply
of the object(s) that observer is observing, but also of the observer's own
categories, assumptions, values, expectations, hypotheses, preconceptions,
purposes, interests, attitudes. The most obvious way of illustrating this, in the
specific context of historical research and inference, is that two different
historians can look at the same document, the same source, and see radically
different things. Knowledge, then, is constructed. What makes this possible is
the complexity and diversity of meanings which can be inferred from any so-
called 'text'. To adapt a famous philosophical example, we would be well
advised to regard every historical relic (document, text, building) as a
duck-rabbit-cow-pig-elephant-table-mountain- and so on, ad infinitum.3
The historian of ducks will see a duck (or no duck -in which case that
historian ignores this particular relic); the historian of rabbits will see a rabbit
36 Ibid.
37 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford,
investigations, I953),
II, xi (I 94).
 ADRIAN WILSON AND T. G. ASHPLANT

(or no rabbit); and so on, again ad infinitum, for the number of possible
historians is also infinite.
It may help to convey our conception if we distinguish explicitly between
our concept of present-centrednessand the seemingly similar American terms,
'present-mindedness' and ' presentism '.38 Both of these terms are to be preferred
to Butterfield's 'whig history', on the grounds that they are free from its
parochialism. But epistemologically they have no more content than does
'whig history' itself. 'Presentism' is simply too vague to admit of a specific
gloss, but is in fact taken to be the same as 'present-mindedness'. What
'present-mindedness' refers to is precisely that 'system of reference to the
present' which was Butterfield's main formulation of 'whig' history. Here,
then, the emphasis is on the places to which the historian directs his/her
attention, the directions in which the historian's mind goes. We are drawing
attention to something much more fundamental, though linked: the position
from which the historian is attending, the categories in which the historian is
thinking, reading, researching, writing.
We have argued: (i) that Butterfield correctly identified a pervasive pattern
of anachronism in historical writing; (2) that nevertheless he failed to define
the nature of this error adequately, or to specify a satisfactory remedy; (3) that
the error in fact arises from present-centredness, that is to say that the position
of the historian within the perceptual and conceptual categories of the present
constrains and tends to distort his/her construal of the past; and (4) that
present-centredness is inherent in the process of historical research, and hence
that historical inference is inherently problematical. In a subsequent article,
we will consider other varieties of present-centred history than the whig
variant identified by Butterfield, and we will argue that present-centredness is
a condition not solely of individual works of historical writing, but of the very
structure of the discipline itself. In the light of this we will consider how
historians do, and how they should, tackle the problem of understanding the
past through its surviving relics.

38 R. L. Schuyler, 'Some historical idols', PoliticalS'cience David Hull,

Qziarterly,
XLVII (I932);
'In defense of presentism', History and Theory, xviii (I979), I-I5; Tosh, Pu11suitof history, pp.
I I9-25.