Herbert Butterfield

Sir Herbert Butterfield (7 October 1900, Oxenhope, Yorkshire – 20 July 1979, Sawston, Cambridgeshire) 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."

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 for 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 1955. 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, 18th century constitutional history, Christianity and history and the theory of international politics. He delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow in 1965. As a deeply religious Protestant, Butterfield was highly concerned with religious issues, but he did not believe that historians could uncover the hand of God in history. At the height of the Cold War he warned that conflicts between self-righteous value systems could be catastrophic:

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.

The Whig interpretation of history

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-17th century into those which remind us of ourselves most and least, or to imagine them as struggling to produce our wonderful selves. They were of course struggling, but not for that. Butterfield argued that the historian must seek the ability to see events as they were perceived by those who lived through them.

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".

In 1944 Butterfield wrote The Englishman and His History in which he stated:

We are all of us exultant and unrepentant whigs. Those who, perhaps in the misguided austerity of youth, wish to drive out that whig interpretation, (that particular thesis which controls our abridgment of English history,) are sweeping a room which humanly speaking cannot long remain empty. They are opening the door for seven devils which, precisely because they are newcomers, are bound to be worse than the first. We, on the other hand, will not dream of wishing it away, but will rejoice in an interpretation of the past which has grown up with us, has grown up with the history itself, and has helped to make the history...we must congratulate ourselves that our 17th-century forefathers...did not resurrect and fasten upon us the authentic middle ages...in England we made peace with our middle ages by misconstruing them; and, therefore, we may say that “wrong” history was one of our assets. The whig interpretation came at exactly the crucial moment and, whatever it may have done to our history, it had a wonderful effect on English politics...in every Englishman there is hidden something of a whig that seems to tug at the heart-strings.

Bibliography

Primary sources

• The Historical Novel, 1924.
• The Peace Treaties of Napoleon, 1806-1808, 1929.
• The Whig Interpretation of History, London: G. Bell, 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

• Bentley, Michael, The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield, History, Science and God, Cambridge University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-1-107-00397-2.
• Coll, Alberto R., The Wisdom of Statecraft: Sir Herbert Butterfield and the Philosophy of International Politics, Duke University Press, 1985.
• McIntire, C. T., Herbert Butterfield: Historian as Dissenter, Yale University Press, 2004
• McIntyre, Kenneth B., Herbert Butterfield: History, Providence, and Skeptical Politics, ISI Books, 2011
• Sewell, Keith C., Herbert Butterfield and the Interpretation of History, Palgrave Macmillan 2005

See also

• Whig history

References

• Bentley, Michael The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield: History, Science and God, Cambridge University Press, 2012.
• Chadwick, Owen "Acton and Butterfield" pages 386-405 from Journal of Ecclesiastical History, volume 38, 1987.
• Coll, Alberto R. The Wisdom of Statecraft: Sir Herbert Butterfield and the Philosophy of International Politics, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1985.
• Elliott, J.H. & H.G. Koenigsberger (editors) The Diversity of History: Essays in Honour of Sir Herbert Butterfield, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970.
• Elton, G.R. "Herbert Butterfield and the Study of History" pages 729-743 from Historical Journal, Volume 27, 1984.
• Reba N. Soffer. History, Historians, and Conservatism in Britain and America: From the Great War to Thatcher and Reagan (2009), chapter on Butterfield
• Thompson, Kenneth W. (editor) Herbert Butterfield: The Ethics of History and Politics, Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1980.
• Schweizer, Karl The International Thought of Herbert Butterfield, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007

External links

• Herbert Butterfield at Yale University Press
• Modern Pioneers: Herbert Butterfield
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