Whig vs. Tory Interpretations of History

From The Imaginative Conservative, Michael J. Connolly, Professor of History at Purdue University Northwest in Indiana, considers the flaws and limitations of Herbert Butterfield's 1931 study of the Whig view of the interpretation of the past (history), which view emphasizes progress as the preferred and indeed inevitable outcome and the denunciation of anyone in the past who argued against the inevitable progress of civilization. He then explores some themes of the alternative Tory view of the interpretation of the past, which emphasizes order and continuity.

First he argues that Butterfield was still a Whig and had determined that the way to solve the problem of the Whig interpretation of history is to be completely objective:

. . . The question of whether Whiggery and liberalism themselves were to blame goes unexamined. In addition, his preference was for a kind of radical empiricism where the historian studies the past entirely on its own terms. While Butterfield admits that historians cannot perfectly absent themselves from contemporary concerns, he nonetheless pines for an impossible degree of objectivity. Readers of the Whig Interpretation of History can be forgiven for wondering if in Butterfield’s view history has any meaning or moral content whatsoever and if the only possible response to Whig history is a bloodless recitation of facts. . . .

Even Butterfield missed his empirical ideal, when during World War II he back-peddled from his earlier paean to objectivity with ringing defenses of England’s endangered heritage of liberty. History had moral content after all. So, if Butterfield’s antidote to Whiggery falls short, another historical method is needed. It is no use combating Whig history with a kind of historical neutrality of “just the facts,” as it cedes the field to liberals who will rightly claim that objectivity is impossible anyway and continue the triumphant narrative. The Whigs must be met on the historiographical battlefield with opposing interpretive methods. The contrasting force is not the impossible dream of radical objective empiricism, but the Tory interpretation of history with its own values, perceptions, categories, and subsequent narrative.

Then he looks at the Tory interpretation of history as an alternative that has been around for centuries too, and he highlights the Tory emphasis on biography:

The Tory interpretation is not an invention of today, but a genuine school of history that fought against Whig history in the interpretive battles after the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688. Tory historians like the Restoration lawyer Roger North, whose 1706 Examen: Or, An Enquiry Into The Credit And Veracity Of A Pretended Complete History, Showing The Perverse And Wicked Design Of It worked to refute Bishop White Kennett’s Whiggish A Complete History of England, were equally combative as the Whigs and equally full of confident moral judgments based on observations of change over time. The Tory values expressed in their histories contrasted starkly with Whigs and were founded in an alternative vision of how the world works. . . .

As he notes, citing historian Roger Schmidt, the emphasis on biography highlighted the complexity of the past, because as we all know from personal experience, an individual human being is complex and complicated in motive, action, effort, and success. Emphasis on biography also helps us empathize with the person in the past, facing whatever crisis he or she faced: perhaps it help us neither demonize or canonize that person and his or her cause. (Thinking of course of "canonization" outside of the Catholic Church's determination that a saint is worthy of veneration and is in Heaven to intercede for us with God the Father!) 

Please read the rest there. I think these are important issues to consider when so many today think that we know precisely who today is "on the right side of history" and thus censure, censor, or cancel those aren't and think we know absolutely who in the past was "on the wrong side of history" and thus should be censured, censored, or cancelled. Case in point: Saint Junipero Serra. (We should remember that the Catholic Church never teaches that any saint in Heaven is indefectible, just holy, which should be a great consolation to all of us!)

In a comment, Connolly provides the sources he cited:

Michael Gordin, “The Tory Interpretation of History,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, Vol. 44, 4 (2014) 413-423.
Mark Knights, “The Tory Interpretation of History in the Rage of Parties,” Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 68, Nos 1&2 (2005) 353-372.
Wilfred McClay, “Whig History at Eighty,” First Things, March 2011.
Roger Schmidt, “Roger North’s Examen: A Crisis in Historiography,” Eighteenth Century Studies, Vol. 26, 1 (1992) 57-75.

Thomas Babington Macaulay the Whig

I found this resource from the University of Cambridge for prospective undergraduate history majors. One of their topics is "The Whig Tradition" of English history, focused on Thomas Babington Macaulay's The History of England:

This important strand in British historiography derives its name from one of the two main political parties in parliament in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the other party were known as Tories. Whigs tended to stress the importance of parliament, as a counterbalance to the Crown and of the Church of England; Tories were much more deeply attached to the power and authority of Crown and Church.

The Whig view of history grew out of the unprecedented strength and prosperity of mid-nineteenth century Britain, which led the world in scientific and technological development and ruled an empire which stretched from Canada to South Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand and the Caribbean. It is little wonder that the Victorians saw themselves as the heirs to the Romans, but with one important difference: instead of an autocratic emperor, the British had a limited, parliamentary monarchy which, they believed, placed Britain on a higher moral plane; as a result the Victorians tended to revere institutions such as parliament, the Church of England, the legal system, the universities and the monarchy, as components of a perfectly balanced constitution, a model for other countries to follow. When the Victorians asked themselves how they had come to live in such an apparently perfect society, they looked for an explanation to the history of England. . . .

Central to the Whig interpretation of history was the long conflict between Crown and Parliament that dominated the seventeenth century. While they regretted the bloodshed of the Civil War and the execution of King Charles I, the Whigs saw the defeat of the Crown and its subjugation to Parliament as essential to the establishment of a free society. However, in 1660 the Stuart monarchy returned. King Charles II, and especially his Catholic brother, James II, seemed to pose a formidable threat to the supremacy of parliament and appeared to be trying to establish Catholic autocratic rule in England. How, in the crucial year 1688, parliament was able to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat and lay the foundations for the prosperity of Victorian Britain was the story that the Whig writer and administrator Thomas Babington Macaulay set out to tell in his History of England.

Macaulay was a firm believer in the superiority and moral integrity of Britain's institutions. As a member of the government of British India he had dismantled the previous education system by which British administrators learned about the history, languages and culture of India, in favour of an entirely western curriculum, declaring scornfully that there was more value in a shelf of western authors than in the whole literary culture of the east. He applied much the same bumptious self-confidence to his reading of English history, which he sought to relate in an engaging style that, he hoped, would make his book as popular a read as the latest novel. In that aim he certainly succeeded.

The site then offers an excerpt from Macaulay and analyses his method, language, and use of sources. Other topics are addressed on this site, including the discipline of social history, different views the Crusades, etc.

Catholics, the English Reformation, and Liberty

Bruce P. Frohnen, Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative and Professor of Law at Ohio Northern University College of Law, writes about Catholics, the English Reformation, and the idea and ideal of liberty:

Were it true that only England provides a true history of liberty’s growth prior to the time of modern revolutions, that would be tragic from two points of view. It would show that there is in fact something “anti-liberty” about Catholicism, as Protestants often have claimed. Further, it would seem to excuse the sometimes quite oppressive and even violent treatment of Catholics by English authorities and by those who wish to follow in their footsteps today. Catholics should not need to be reminded that the English government going back to Henry VIII, and coming forward even into the twentieth-century, has been hostile toward Catholicism and Catholics. The martyrdom of numerous priests and bishops such as St. John Fisher, the sacking of the monasteries, and laws forbidding the saying of Catholic mass and even decreeing execution for priests lasted for centuries. Catholics were disenfranchised until the nineteenth-century and even in the twentieth-century social disabilities were common (e.g. J.R.R. Tolkien, being Catholic, was not allowed to dine with his Protestant colleagues at Oxford). A central justification of these injustices was that Catholics were “loyal to a foreign prince” who sought enslavement of both souls and bodies, imposing the tyrannous hierarchy of Catholicism. Even on the continent, the story often was repeated that Popes ruled their “estates” as tyrants and sought only to expand their temporal authority in order to force reconversions to their faith and re-establish a kind of absolute rule over the bodies and minds of the people. What is more, it has been this vision of Catholicism as intrinsically hostile to human liberty that has fed into an anti-Catholic sentiment in portions of the American public that has damaged religious liberty and constitutional government itself.

If true, the charges leveled at the Catholic Church and her people would be damning, indeed. Were it true that only the particular cultural institutions and developments of Protestant England, along with, perhaps, those of Protestant Holland, could produce political liberty then Catholicism would be riven by internal contradictions. Catholics recognize that, while salvation is the ultimate, highest good, liberty also is a real human good and freedom aids greatly in the development of the human person. If their religion were hostile to liberty, then, they would have to choose between salvation and freedom. Thankfully, ordered liberty is not a purely English phenomenon and Catholicism is entirely consistent with ordered liberty, not merely in theory, but also in historical practice. My purpose, here, is to examine some of the reasons for Americans’ focus on English liberty. Some of these reasons are accidental and some genuinely important. They are worth exploring for what they can tell American Catholics about ourselves and about the requirements for ordered liberty.

It is best to begin with accidental reasons. Most Americans know little about medieval and early modern history of any kind. What is more, the further one strays from English history (which has a great deal written about it, almost all of which is, well, in English) the less knowledge there is. This is not just a matter of self-centered disinterest—such “multiculturalist” arguments make just as much sense in regard to Italy or medieval Germany as in regard to Africa and the Far East, which is to say, none. It is natural and right that people know most about their own history; they always should know more than they do, but that goes for all times and all fields. American culture is predominantly British, in the wide sense, and so our historical knowledge tends to focus on Great Britain and its center, England.

There is, not surprisingly, a somewhat more sinister aspect to our ignorance of the middle ages and the sources of liberty in particular, one that applies to England as well as the continent and has ideological origins and results. The assault on courses in Western Civilization and on the study of Western history has hit hardest in the area of European history before the modern era. Americans for generations have learned increasingly little about the medieval world, becoming more and more ignorant of the development of their culture and civilization. This ignorance has allowed for ideological fantasies to gain more than a foothold on university campuses and even in the public mind.

Read the rest there. In many ways Frohnen is reflecting on the effects of the Whiggish interpretation of history, which has read into the past the defeat of Catholicism as the prerequisite for modern freedom. See Butterfield's study of this pattern of reading victory into the past: The Whig Interpretation of History. In my opinion, the best antidote to this ignorance of the medieval period is to read the works of Christopher Dawson and Regine Pernoud.

Butterfield's Whig Interpretation of History

This is the book I'd ordered at Eighth Day Books--Butterfield's famous analysis of The Whig Interpretation of History.

It seems that many of the books I've been reading lately--from Chesterton's The Well and the Shallows, to a novel my husband just got me started on (Michael O'Brien's Father Elijah) and even Newman's "The Second Spring" sermon I quoted from on Monday--are talking about progress. What is progress? When or how do we know that we have progressed? What if we doubt that we have progressed at all?

The whig method of writing history, as Butterfield describes it, is all about the historian accepting our current state as progress and then interpreting the past as the prelude to the progress we've achieved. It's reading the past through the lens of the present and using the present to find signs of the progress we've achieved in the past.

This kind of history always assumes that we have achieved greater moral clarity, more civilized forms of government and legislation, a freer society, etc--and therefore we can look back on the past to point out moral failures and crimes. It does not try to understand the past but identify those people or events that aided the progress that has created our morally superior world and also those that tried to hold back progress.

Butterfield uses the example of Reformation History under the whig theory throughout his essay: Protestantism defeated Catholicism and so now we have a better world. If Catholicism had won, we would be stuck in the Middle Ages, because of course the Catholic Church would always have prevented progress! It would have always been against science, freedom, development of peoples, etc. One might almost think that Butterfield was a Catholic from the way he defends the Catholic Church from this view of history, but no, he was a Methodist.

What Butterfield proposes for the historian to do is find out and tell--like a travel guide for people who will never travel to the places she describes--what life was like in the past. He wants the historian to describe the past, not judge it for its influence on the present.

According to this article from First Things, Lord John Acton was Butterfield's target:

In this respect, Butterfield found particular fault in the writings of Lord Acton, a historian whom he otherwise greatly admired, but against whom much of the argumentative force of Whig Interpretation was directed. That Acton was himself a notable member of that shrinking band of believing Christian historians, and a Catholic to boot, and that Butterfield himself was a Whig by default, only adds further ironies to the mix.

The tendencies Butterfield resisted were illustrated in Acton’s 1895 inaugural address on assuming the Regius chair. In that address, Acton issued a rebuke to one of the chief characteristics of historicism: its insistence on confining the historian’s moral judgment to the specific historical contexts in which the actions under review took place. Acton embraced historicism as a method but drew a line against its tendency toward relativism. Instead, he offered a ringing defense of the historian as moral arbiter, urging his audience “never to debase the moral currency or lower the standard of rectitude, but try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong.”

In other words, as we might say today, the historian should not hesitate to impose his values on the past. And Acton was in no doubt about the general direction of history’s movement: “I hope . . . this will aid you to see that the action of Christ who is risen on mankind whom he redeemed fails not, but increases; that the wisdom of divine rule appears not in the perfection but in the improvement of the world; and that achieved liberty is the one ethical result that rests on the converging and combined conditions of advancing civilization. Then you will understand what a famous philosopher said, that History is the true demonstration of Religion.”

While Butterfield was thinking of Acton when he wrote this, I was thinking of Thomas Cahill as I read it. He seems to be our time's great Whig historian. As he writes his "Hinges of History" series, he is, as one reviewer said of the latest volume, on the Renaissance and the Reformation, writing about the past to find traces of the present. The book is

essentially a search through history for characters presenting features that appear “modern” to the searcher. He then provides lively biographical vignettes that emphasize these features, and (as it were) announces—“Voila, modernity in the Renaissance (or Reformation).” . . . In the end, Heretics and Heroes is not an attempt to understand, or explain, the past from the perspective of the people of the past. It is a history of progress towards us, or, rather, towards those of us who are truly modern, in the right way. It is a peculiar kind of hagiographical enterprise—the scouring of history to find the people that are most like us. 

The First Things article points out some of the weaknesses of Butterfield's study, but with books like Heretics and Heroes still around, it's clear that we need to be reminded of its lessons.