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Herbert Butterfield
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Sir Herbert Butterfield (October 7, 1900 – July 20, 1979) was a British historian and philosopher of history who is remembered chiefly for a volume early in his career entitled The Whig Interpretation of History (1931).
Biography
Butterfield was born in Oxenhope in Yorkshire, and received his education at the Trade and Grammar School in Keighley. He was awarded an MA by Cambridge University in 1926. Butterfield was a fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey in the 1950s and at Cambridge from 1928 to 1979.
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Encyclopedia
Sir Herbert Butterfield (October 7, 1900 – July 20, 1979) was a British historian and philosopher of history who is remembered chiefly for a volume early in his career entitled The Whig Interpretation of History (1931).
Biography
Butterfield was born in Oxenhope in Yorkshire, and received his education at the Trade and Grammar School in Keighley. He was awarded an MA by Cambridge University in 1926. Butterfield was a fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey in the 1950s and at Cambridge from 1928 to 1979. He was Master of Peterhouse (1955-1968), Vice-Chancellor of the University (1959-1961), and Regius Professor of Modern History (1963--1968). Butterfield served as editor of the Cambridge Historical Journal from 1938 to 1952. He was knighted in 1968. He married Edith Joyce Crawshaw in 1929, and had three children.
Work
Butterfield's main interests were historiography, the history of science, eighteenth-century constitutional history, Christianity and history, and the theory of international politics. As a Protestant, Butterfield was highly concerned with religious issues, but he did not believe that historians could uncover the hand of God in history.
The Whig Interpretation of History
In The Whig Interpretation of History, Butterfield defined "whiggish" history as essentially teleological: "the tendency of many historians to write on the side of Protestants and Whigs, to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasize certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present."
He had in mind especially the historians of his own country, but his criticism of the retroactive creation of a line of progression toward the glorious present can be, and has subsequently been, applied more generally. A given "whig interpretation of history" is now a general label applied to various historical interpretations.
He found Whiggish history objectionable because it warps the past to see it in terms of the issues of the present, to squeeze the contending forces of, say, the mid-seventeenth century into those which remind us of ourselves most and least, or the imagine them as struggling to produce our wonderful selves. They were of course struggling, but not for that.
Butterfield wrote that Whiggishness is too handy a 'rule of thumb ... by which the historian can select and reject, and can make his points of emphasis'.
Interestingly, after 'The Whig Interpretation of History' he continued to write history with a whiggish style. He stated that in fact it was too hard not to portray any historiography Whiggishly.
Quote
“The greatest menace to our civilization is the conflict between giant organized systems of self-righteousness - each only too delighted to find that the other is wicked - each only too glad that the sins of the other give it pretext for still deeper hatred.”
Bibliography
- The Historical Novel, 1924.
- The Peace Treaties of Napoleon, 1806-1808, 1929.
- The Whig Interpretation of History, 1931.
- Napoleon, 1939.
- The Statecraft of Machiavelli, 1940.
- The Englishman and His History, 1944.
- Lord Acton, 1948.
- Christianity and History, 1949.
- George III, Lord North and the People, 1779-80, 1949.
- The Origins of Modern Science, 1300-1800, 1949.
- History and Human Relations, 1951.
- Reconstruction of an Historical Episode: The History of the Enquiry into the Origins of the Seven Years' War, 1951.
- Liberty in the Modern World, 1951.
- Christianity, Diplomacy and War, 1952.
- Man on His Past: The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship, 1955.
- Moral Judgments in History, 1959.
- George III and the Historians, 1957, revised edition, 1959.
- Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics (co-edited with Martin Wight), 1966.
- The Origins of History, ed. A. Watson, London, 1981.
Works on Herbert Butterfield
- McIntire, C. T., Herbert Butterfield: Historian as Dissenter, Yale University Press, 2004
- Sewell, Keith C., Herbert Butterfield and the Interpretation of History, Palgrave Macmillan 2005
See also
External links
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