WHIGGISH HISTORIOGRAPHY

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'Whig historiography' perceives the past as a teleological progression toward the present. In general, Whig historians look for and favour the rise of constitutional government and personal freedoms in any historical period. The term is often used pejoratively to denote any historian that adopts such positions, but it also connotes a specific set of British historians who embodied ''Whig'' ideals ideals. Its antithesis can be seen in certain kinds of cultural pessimism.

Contents

Origins

The nature of Whig history

Whig Historians

Criticism

Contemporary historiography

Presentism

History of science

As teleology

See also

Notes

External links

Origins

The category was coined by the Roman Catholic British historian Herbert Butterfield in 1931 in his small but influential book ''The Whig Interpretation of History''. 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 and the aristocracy.
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 historiography. 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.)

The nature of Whig history

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 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;

★ 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.
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 abridge history, selecting only those events that have some bearing on the present.

Whig Historians

Sir William Blackstone's ''Commentaries on the Laws of England'' and Henry Hallam's ''Constitutional History of England'' reveal many Whiggish traits. The Liberal politician Thomas Macaulay 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^[1] ''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.

Criticism

Preoccupation with the undermining of the 'whiggish' was one aspect of the post-World War I re-evaluation of European history in general. Herbert Butterfield wrote, from one side, a celebrated critique of the so-called ''Whig interpretation of history''. Marxist historiography in particular has emphasised the underside of Whig history, rejecting its assumptions about political 'progress' and promoting a less elitist perspective on the past.
While the "whig interpretation" that Butterfield criticized has lost favor among most academic historians, Whiggish views of the past continue to influence popular understandings of political and social development. Aspects of the whig interpretation are apparent in films, television, political rhetoric, and even history textbooks. ^[2]
Despite its shortcomings, Whig history remains valuable as entertainment and as a means of understanding the beliefs of their authors. Even the flaws of Whig history are instructive, as they reveal what liberal Britons believed about politics. In addition, Whig history offers an epic tale of dramatic struggles that provide dramatic narratives, even if these fall short of more rigourous academic standards.

Contemporary historiography

From "Whiggism and Criticism: Thoughts on Amar and Historiography," by Jason Kuznicki:

If budding historians show up at grad school with any significant Whiggishness about them, these tendencies are scoffed quickly out of existence. Even undergrads soon learn which way the wind blows in the academy. And by at the third year at the latest, most of them are scoffing, too.
Perhaps Jean Bethke Elshtain put it best: “Somewhere along the line, the idea took hold that, to be an intellectual, you have to be against it, whatever it is. The intellectual is a negator. Affirmation is not in his or her vocabulary.”

Presentism

Whiggishness is often now identified with ''presentism'', in general terms reasoning from the premise that the current state of affairs is to some extent its own justification, and also justifies and is justified by the historical path that led to it; which thus must be read in terms of its future 'goal' (anachronistically, therefore). So formulated, it is a simple fallacy.

History of science

These terms are often used now in the history of science.^[3] For example Nick Jardine writes:^[4]

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, in the 1960s and ’70s, the period of consolidation of the history of science as an academic discipline, the attacks on ‘Whiggishness’ (which sometimes appears as ‘Whiggism’ in this era of isms), ‘triumphalism’ and ‘hagiography’ were of a piece with a general repudiation, in favour of more professional and disinterested approaches, of the didactic and often moralistic writings that had dominated the field right up to the 1960s.

Historians' rejection of Whiggishness has been criticized by some scientists for failing to appreciate the temporal depth of scientific research.^[5]

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.

See also

★ Historiography

★ Presentism

★ Whiggishness

★ Chronological snobbery

★ Schools of History

★ Great man theory

★ Ethnocentrism

★ Classical liberalism

Notes

1. ''Historiography'' (second edition, 1994), p.251.
2. James A. Hijiya, "Why the West is Lost," ''The William and Mary Quarterly'', 3rd Ser., Vol. 51, No. 2. (Apr., 1994), pp. 276-292.
3. ''In a sense 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.''[1]
4. Nick Jardine, "Whigs and Stories: Herbert Butterfield and the Historiography of Science," .''History of Science'', 41 (2003): 125-140, at p. 127.
5. Edward Harrison, "Whigs, prigs and historians of science", ''Nature,'' 329 (1987): 213-14.[2]

External links

★ Text of ''The Whig Interpretation of History''

★ James A. Hijiya, "Why the West is Lost"

★ 2003 article ''Catholic Whiggery''