The Whig Interpretation of History by Herbert Butterfield

The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) is a classic essay on the distortions of history that occur when historians impose a rigid point of view on the study of the past.

It is not as easy to understand the past as many who have written of it would have us believe.  The historians who look at it from the Protestant, progressive, "19th century gentleman" viewpoint are defined by Professor Butterfield as the "Whig historians."

The Whig historian studies the past with reference to the present.  He looks for agency in history.  And, in his search for origins and causes, he can easily select those facts that give support to his thesis and thus eliminate other facts equally important to the total picture.

The Whig historian tends to judge, to make history answer questions, and to overdramatize by simplification and organization around attractive themes.

The value of history, however, as Professor Butterfield shows, lies in the richness of its recovery of the concrete life of the past.  The true historian studies the past for its own sake.  He sees "in each generation a clash of wills out of which there emerges something that probably no man ever willed," and his creative work is to make the past intelligible to the present by insight and sympathy with the conditions of the past.

All teachers and students of history would benefit from "purchasing and pondering on this intelligent essay."  (Sir Harold Nicolson, English diplomat, author, diarist and politician)

About the author:  Sir Herbert Butterfield (1900-1979) was Regius Professor of History and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge.  As a British historian and philosopher of history, he is remembered chiefly for two books - a short volume early in his career entitled The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) and his Origins of Modern Science (1949).

Over the course of his career, Butterfield turned increasingly to historiography and man's developing view of the past.  Butterfield was a devout Christian and reflected at length on Christian influences in historical perspectives.  Butterfield thought individual personalities more important than great systems of government or economics in historical study.  His Christian beliefs in personal sin, salvation, and providence heavily influenced his writings, a fact he freely admitted.  At the same time, Butterfield's early works emphasized the limits of a historian's moral conclusions, "If history can do anything it is to remind us that all our judgments are merely relative to time and circumstance."  (Wikipedia)