Dispelling ‘<i>das Herbert Butterfieldproblem</i>’: A Rereading of <i>The Whig Interpretation of History</i>

Abstract Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) is universally received as sceptical of ‘whig’ teleology in historical accounts and, therefore, of politically charged narratives of history. This view stands in need of a basic correction. Butterfield’s work targets teleological accounts which involve a determinate conception of progress such as would arm a partisan politics. He calls this the politics of the ‘general proposition’. Nevertheless, he does defend a conception of progress involving an indeterminate concept. The historian finds, intimated in the detail of the past, that progress is the fruit of interactions between opposing parties. The imperative for the statesman in the present, then, is to facilitate such interactions. In short, The Whig Interpretation of History is a positive work of political thought. Looked at this way, Butterfield’s later, controversial work, The Englishman &amp; His History , does not appear to be in contradiction with the earlier book so much as a polemical expression of it. The two books together present what may be called Butterfield’s politics of historiography. Histories which present progress as a straight line, to be co-opted by one party, encourage precisely the political action which impedes progress. Butterfield, in short, is still a kind of ‘whig’.