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Whig history

Overview

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 constitution

Constitution

A constitution is a set of rules for government—often codified as a written document—that establishes principles of an autonomous political entity. In the case of countries, this term refers specifically to a national constitution defining the fundamental political principles, and establishing the...

al 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.

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Encyclopedia

Constitution

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe. It is an island country, spanning an archipelago including Great Britain, the northeastern part of Ireland, and many small islands...

historians. Its antithesis can be seen in certain kinds of cultural pessimism

Cultural pessimism

Cultural pessimism is a variety of pessimism, as formulated by what is nowadays called a cultural critic.-Contemporary proponents:Towards the end of the 20th century, cultural pessimism surfaced in a prominent way. The very title of Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western...

Name

The British historian Herbert Butterfield

Herbert Butterfield

Sir Herbert Butterfield was a British historian and philosopher of history who is remembered chiefly for two books -- a short volume early in his career entitled The Whig Interpretation of History and his Origins of Modern Science .- Biography :Butterfield was born in Oxenhope in Yorkshire, and...

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

Parliament of the United Kingdom

The Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is the supreme legislative body in the United Kingdom and British overseas territories. It alone has parliamentary sovereignty, conferring upon it ultimate power over all other political bodies in the UK and its territories...

, who opposed the Tories

Tory

Toryism is a traditionalist political philosophy, which grew out of the Cavalier faction in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. It is most prominent in Great Britain, but also features in some parts of The Commonwealth — particularly in Canada...

, 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 goal-directed, hero-based, and transhistorical narrative. The abstract noun Whiggishness is sometimes used as a generic term for Whig history

Historiography

Historiography is the history of history, the aspect of history and of semiotics that considers how knowledge of the past, either recent or distant, is obtained and transmitted...

. It should not be confused with Whiggism as a political ideology, and has no direct relation to either the British

British Whig Party

The Whigs are often described as one of the two original political parties in England and later the United Kingdom from the late 17th to the mid-19th centuries. The Whigs' origin lay in constitutional monarchism and opposition to absolute rule...

or American Whig

Whig Party (United States)

The Whig Party was a political party of the United States during the era of Jacksonian democracy. Considered integral to the Second Party System and operating from 1833 to 1856, the party was formed in opposition to the policies of President Andrew Jackson and the Democratic Party...

parties. (The term Whiggery
Whiggery
Whiggery may mean:* Whiggism, support for the principles of the British Whig Party of the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century* Whiggishness, a more cosmic attitude on progress, liberalism, and the arrow of time in history....

is ambiguous in contemporary usage: it may either mean party politics and ideology, or a general intellectual approach.)

Characteristics

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;
Viewing the British parliament
Parliament of the United Kingdom
The Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is the supreme legislative body in the United Kingdom and British overseas territories. It alone has parliamentary sovereignty, conferring upon it ultimate power over all other political bodies in the UK and its territories...

ary, constitutional monarchy
Constitutional monarchy
A constitutional monarchy is a form of government in which a monarch acts as head of state within the parameters of a written , unwritten or blended constitution...

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 hero
Hero
A hero , in Greek mythology and folklore, was originally a demigod, their cult being one of the most distinctive features of ancient Greek religion...

es, who advanced the cause of this political progress, or villain
Villain
A villain is an "evil" character in a story, whether a historical narrative or, especially, a work of fiction. The villain usually is the antagonist, the character who tends to have a negative effect on other characters...

s, who sought to hinder its inevitable triumph.

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. 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.

Roger Scruton

Roger Scruton

Roger Vernon Scruton is an English conservative philosopher, writer, activist and composer. He is currently a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.-Biography:...

, in his A Dictionary of Political Thought (1982), takes the theory to be centrally concerned with progress

Progress

Progress indicates generally forward moving and may refer to:-Science:*Progress , a main object of philosophy of history...

and reaction

Reactionary

Reactionary refers to any political or social movement or ideology that seeks a return to a previous state . The term originated in the French Revolution, to denote the counter-revolutionaries who wanted to restore the real or imagined conditions of the monarchical Ancien Régime...

, with the progressives shown as victors and benefactors. Cannadine 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.

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'".

A list of Tory historians in the 1700s would include Edward Gibbon

Edward Gibbon

Edward Gibbon was an English historian and Member of Parliament. His most important work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788...

and William Mitford

William Mitford

William Mitford , English historian, was the elder of the two sons of John Mitford, a barrister and his wife Philadelphia Reveley.-Youth:...

; both were famous for their histories of Ancient Rome and Greece respectively.

The Whig historians

Paul Rapin de Thoyras

Paul de Rapin

Paul de Rapin , sieur of Thoyras , was a French historian writing under English patronage....

's history of England was published in 1723 and became "the classic Whig history" for the first half of the eighteenth century. Rapin claimed that the English had preserved their ancient constitution against the absolutist tendencies of the Stuarts. However Rapin's history was replaced as the standard history of England in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century by that of David Hume

David Hume

David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, economist, historian and a key figure in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment...

. Hume challenged Whig views of the past and the Whig historians in turn attacked Hume but they could not dent his history. In the nineteenth century, however, Whig historians now sought to incorporate Hume's views that had lasted for the previous fifty years. These historians were members of the New Whigs based around Charles James Fox

Charles James Fox

Charles James Fox was a prominent British Whig statesman whose parliamentary career spanned thirty-eight years of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and who was particularly noted for being the arch-rival of William Pitt the Younger...

and Lord Holland

Lord Holland

An unqualifed mention of Lord Holland could refer any of the holders of the following titles:* Earl of Holland, created in the Peerage of England in 1624, became extinct in 1759....

which were in opposition until 1830 and so "needed a new historical philosophy". Fox himself intended to write a history of the Glorious Revolution

Glorious Revolution

The Glorious Revolution, also called the Revolution of 1688, was the overthrow of King James II of England in 1688 by a union of Parliamentarians with an invading army led by the Dutch stadtholder William III of Orange-Nassau who, as a result, ascended the English throne as William III of England...

of 1688 but only managed the first year of James II's reign. He died before he could complete it and this fragment was published in 1808. Sir James Mackintosh

James Mackintosh

Sir James Mackintosh was a Scottish jurist, politician and historian. He is said to have been one of the most cultured and catholic-minded men of his time . His studies and sympathies embraced many interests...

now sought to write the Whig history of the Glorious Revolution (and beyond, to 1789) but he too did not manage to complete it, reaching the accession of William and Mary in 1689. It was published in 1834 as the History of the Revolution in England in 1688. 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.

Sir William Blackstone

William Blackstone

Sir William Blackstone was an English judge, jurist and professor who produced the historical and analytic treatise on the common law entitled Commentaries on the Laws of England, first published in four volumes over 1765–1769...

's Commentaries on the Laws of England
Commentaries on the Laws of England
The Commentaries on the Laws of England are an influential 18th century treatise on the common law of England by Sir William Blackstone, originally published by the Clarendon Press at Oxford, 1765-1769....

(1765-69) and Henry Hallam

Henry Hallam

Henry Hallam was an English historian.-Life:The only son of John Hallam, canon of Windsor and dean of Bristol, Henry Hallam was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, graduating in 1799...

's Constitutional History of England (1827) reveal many Whiggish traits. According to Arthur Marwick

Arthur Marwick

Arthur John Brereton Marwick was a professor in history. Born in Edinburgh, he was a graduate of Edinburgh University and Balliol College, Oxford.- Career :...

, Hallam was the first Whig historian.

The Liberal

Liberal Party (UK)

The Liberal Party was one of the two major British political parties from the mid 19th century until the rise of the Labour Party in the 1920s, and a third party of varying strength and importance up to 1988, when it merged with the Social Democratic Party to form a new party which would become...

politician Thomas Macaulay

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay PC was a British poet, historian and Whig politician. He wrote extensively as an essayist and reviewer, and on British history...

was one of the most popular and perhaps the most famous historian of the Whig school, although his work did not feature in Butterfield's 1931 book. According to Ernst Breisach "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:

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

William Stubbs

William Stubbs was an English historian and Bishop of Oxford.The son of William Morley Stubbs, a solicitor, he was born at Knaresborough, Yorkshire, and was educated at the Ripon Grammar School and Christ Church, Oxford, where he graduated in 1848, obtaining a first-class in classics and a third...

, the constitutional historian and influential teacher of a generation of historians. According to Reba Soffer
George Kitson Clark

George Kitson Clark

George Sidney Roberts Kitson Clark was an English historian, a specialist in the nineteenth century.-Historian:He is known as a revisionist historian of the Repeal of the Corn Laws. G. D. H...

writes

Criticism

Undermining 'whiggish' narratives was one aspect of the post-World War I

World War I

World War I , also known as the First World War, the Great War, and the War to End All Wars, was a global military conflict which involved most of the world's great powers, assembled in two opposing alliances: the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance...

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

Presentism (literary and historical analysis)

Presentism is a mode of historical analysis in which present-day ideas and perspectives are anachronistically introduced into depictions or interpretations of the past...

and teleological bent.

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. P. B. M. Blaas has argued that Whig history itself had lost all vitality by 1914. According to Victor Feske, there is too much readiness to accept Butterfield's classic definition from three years later as definitive.

In the history of science

It has been argued that the history of science

Historiography of science

The historiography of science usually refers to the study of History of Science in its disciplinary aspects and practices and to the study of its own historical development...

is "riddled with Whiggish history". 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. From this whiggish perspective, Ptolemy

Ptolemy

Claudius Ptolemaeus , known in English as Ptolemy , was a Roman citizen of Greek ancestry. He was a mathematician, astronomer, geographer, astrologer and a poet of a single epigram in the Greek Anthology. He lived in Egypt under the Roman Empire, and is believed to have been born in the town of...

would be criticized because his astronomical system placed the Earth at the center of the universe while Aristarchus

Aristarchus

* Aristarchus , on the moon* Aristarchus of Samos , Greek astronomer and mathematician* Aristarchus of Samothrace , Greek grammarian* Aristarchus of Tegea , Greek writer...

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

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." The science historians' rejection of whiggishness has been criticized by some scientists for failing to appreciate the temporal depth of scientific research.

As teleology

In The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1986, see anthropic principle

Anthropic principle

In physics and cosmology, the anthropic principle is the collective name for several ways of asserting that physical and chemical theories, especially astrophysics and cosmology, need to take into account that there is life on Earth, and that one form of that life, Homo sapiens, has attained...

for details) John D. Barrow

John D. Barrow

John David Barrow FRS is an English cosmologist, theoretical physicist, and mathematician. He is currently Research Professor of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge...

and Frank J. Tipler

Frank J. Tipler

Frank Jennings Tipler III is a mathematical physicist and cosmologist, holding a joint appointment in the Departments of Mathematics and Physics at Tulane University.-Life:...

identify Whiggishness (Whiggery) with a teleological principle, of 'convergence' in history to liberal democracy

Liberal democracy

Liberal democracy is the dominant form of democracy in the 21st century. During the Cold War, liberal democracies were contrasted with the Communist People's Republics or "Popular Democracies", which claimed an alternative conception of democracy...

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.

Popular understandings of human evolution

Human evolution

Human evolution, or anthropogenesis, is the origin and evolution of Homo sapiens as a distinct species from other hominids, great apes and placental mammals...

and paleoanthropology

Paleoanthropology

Paleoanthropology, which combines the disciplines of paleontology and physical anthropology, is the study of ancient humans as found in fossil hominid evidence such as petrifacted bones and footprints.-Nineteenth century:...

may be imbued with a form of "whiggishness". See, for example, the celebrated scientific illustration, The March of Progress
March of Progress (illustration)
The March of Progress — or simply March of Progress — is one of the most famous and recognizable scientific illustrations ever produced. A compressed presentation of 25 million years of human evolution, it depicts 15 human evolutionary forebears lined up as if marching in a parade from left to...

(1965). Most portrayals and fictionalized adaptations of the Scopes Trial

Scopes Trial

The Scopes Trial was an American legal case that tested the Butler Act, which made it unlawful, in any state-funded educational establishment in Tennessee, "to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and...

, such as in Inherit the Wind

Inherit the Wind (play)

Inherit the Wind is a play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee. The play, which debuted in 1955, is a parable that fictionalizes the 1925 Scopes "Monkey" Trial as a means to discuss the then contemporary McCarthy trials. -Background:...

(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

Pulitzer Prize for History

The Pulitzer Prize for History has been awarded since 1917 for a distinguished book upon the history of the United States. Many history books have also been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography...

in 1998.