Profile of Herbert Butterfield on Famous Like Me

Herbert Butterfield (October 7, 1900-July 20, 1979) was a British historian and philosopher of history (see philosophy of history) who is remembered chiefly for a slim volume entitled The Whig Interpretation of History 1931.

Butterfield was born in Oxenhope in Yorkshire, and received his education at the Trade and Gramer School in Keighley. He was awarded a MA by Cambridge University in 1922. Butterfield taught at Princeton University (1924-1925) and at Cambridge from 1928 to 1979. He was master (1955-1968), vice-chancellor (1959-1961), and Regius Professor (1963--1968). Butterfield served as editor of the Cambridge Historical Journal form 1938 to 1952. He was knighted in 1968. He married Edith Joyce Crawshaw in 1929, and had three children.

Butterfield's main interests were diplomatic history and historiography. As a Protestant, Butterfield was highly concerned with religious issues, but he not believe that historians could uncover the hand of God in history.

In The Whig Interpretation of History, Butterfield defined "whiggish" history as "the tendency of many historians to write on the side of Protestants and Whigs, to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasize certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present."

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.

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-seventeenth century into those which remind us of ourselves most and least, or the imagine them as struggling to produce our wonderful selves. They were of course struggling, but not for that.

Whiggishness is a too handy

rule of thumb ... by which the historian can select and reject, and can make his points of emphasis,

Butterfield wrote.

Work

• The Historical Novel, 1924.
• The Peace Treaties of Napoleon, 1806-1808, 1929.
• The Whig Interpretation of History, 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.
• George III and the Historians, 1957, revised edition, 1959.
• Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics (co-edited with Martin Wright), 1966.

Reference

• Chadwick, Owen "Acton and Butterfield" pages 386-405 from Journal of Ecclessiastical History, volume 38, 1987.
• Coll, Alberto R. The Wisdom of Statecraft: Sir Herbert Butterfiled 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.
• Thompson, Kennthe W. (editor) Herbert Butterfield: The Ethics of History and Politics, Washington, DC: University Press of American, 1980.

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