I

Herbert Butterfield’s classic of historical method, The Whig Interpretation of History, is universally conceived as a paradigm refutation of teleological histories.Footnote ¹ His academic works, more generally, bear the ambiguous character of upholding the reality of Providence whilst also, so it is generally held, emphasizing the value of ‘technical’, value-free history.Footnote ² The starkest tension in his work is the relationship between the anti-teleological The Whig Interpretation and the patriotic defence of whig, teleological history in The Englishman & His History. J.G.A. Pocock, himself a former student of Butterfield’s, termed this contradiction ‘das Herbert Butterfieldproblem’.Footnote ³ I want to suggest that this perceived tension is much exacerbated by a failure to interpret The Whig Interpretation as in fact displacing one form of teleology and substituting it for another. In short, the book is thought to be a fundamentally negative work. This article rereads the work as a positive account of progress and discerns the political conclusions which are entailed. Michael Bentley writes, in his masterful biography of Butterfield, that:

This is an apt characterization of Butterfield’s reception. The book is thought to constitute a decisive farewell to the great nineteenth century belief in progress, trumpeted especially by ‘whigs’ like Acton, and to herald the advent of a twentieth century scepticism. This reading stands in need of a basic correction. Butterfield emerges, by my analysis, as much more opposed to a morally segregating approach to history (such as Acton’s) than to a belief in progress. Butterfield disdains any tendency to divide the dead into the wicked and the pure, the friends and enemies of progress, and this has been recognized in the scholarship. Nevertheless, recognition of the fact that Butterfield opposes historical narratives which crown a particular cause or political colour has accompanied a failure to recognize that The Whig Interpretation still presents an account of progress. History is on the side of the entire present order, such that no particular party or individual in the present is wholly pleased with it. The present order, even so, is the fruit of progress. There are political consequences to this. Namely, whatever the conditions of progress have been in the past, if any, they must be maintained in the present. If my rereading is correct, so I shall argue, then the tension between The Whig Interpretation and The Englishman & His History is much diminished, if not altogether removed. The books differ in emphasis, and certainly in context, but they do not constitute something worthy of calling ‘das Herbert Butterfieldproblem’.

It must be immediately clarified that I am not seeking to emphasize Butterfield’s belief in providence. The controversy lies in the relationship which Butterfield conceives between the belief in providence and the technical practice of history. Keith Sewell notes that:

Sewell’s views here expressed are representative of the scholarship. Butterfield’s Christianity is noted as real, and perhaps as important, but also as separate from ‘technical history’, such that ‘providence in human affairs … [is] clearly beyond the purview of the technical historian’.Footnote ⁶ I wish to dispute that the ‘technical’ practice of Butterfield’s historian, in their marshalling of detail, is essentially destructive. This is the ruling conception which provides the tension between The Whig Interpretation and both the patriotic history of The Englishman as well as the belief in providence of Christianity and History. By my reading, the argument of The Whig Interpretation is not exactly that the ‘whig’ narrative of progress is foiled by the detailed work of the historical specialist. Instead, the detailed works by specialists yield a non-partisan sense of historical progress and destroy a partisan sense of it. Detail is not the solvent of grand narrative, but only of partisan grand narrative. One might call Butterfield, in a certain sense – and mindful of the anachronism in the term – a non-partisan whig.

This reading of The Whig Interpretation provides a cleaner solution to ‘das Herbert Butterfieldproblem’ than the one widely and presently acknowledged, which is that of Sewell.Footnote ⁷ Sewell claims to have solved ‘das Herbert Butterfieldproblem’ by reframing the argument of The Englishman as being not a defence of the truth of patriotic (falsifications) of history, but as a defence of their usefulness. Bentley accepts the arguments of Sewell.Footnote ⁸ There is some merit to this analysis, and Sewell’s attention to Butterfield’s distinction drawn in The Englishman, between (Actonian) ‘whig historians’ and (useful, patriotic) ‘whig politicians’, is fruitful.Footnote ⁹ I agree with Sewell in his claim that:

The sense in which the ‘Whig historians he attacked in The Whig Interpretation’ are ‘un-Whig’ is that they do not think like whig politicians, whose politics consist in ‘gradualist, empirical, and ameliorating anti-doctrinaire policies’.Footnote ¹¹ I agree with Sewell that these are, broadly, Butterfield’s politics, both in 1931 and in 1944.Footnote ¹² But Sewell still retains the view that The Whig Interpretation firmly rejects all forms of whig history. Sewell recognizes the importance of the historical imagination such that ‘Butterfield’s narratives were in practice based upon his own belief in a “providential order”’ but this is only ‘in practice’.Footnote ¹³ The role of detail in Butterfield is, for Sewell, still essentially destructive of narrative. This forces him to the view that, where providence or progress are implied in Butterfield’s historical narratives, he is making a technical error, or departing into, strictly defined, non-historical writing.

It is much better to read the contrast, in The Englishman, between the ‘whig historians’ and the ‘whig politicians’ as a contrast between partisan historians and those non-partisan historians who, applying medicine to the political community, emphasize the continuity of a shared past with a shared present. This emphasis on continuity is certainly starker in The Englishman, and the obviously pertinent background of the Second World War can play the role of accounting for this emphasis, but the distinction between partisan and non-partisan history belongs to The Whig Interpretation. An argument for non-partisan, progressive history, in The Whig Interpretation, can intelligibly become an emphasis upon patriotic history, under the pressures of 1944. The common point is that the present public order is not the inheritance of a partisan past but the piecemeal gift, over centuries, of the whole of a people. This is a fruit of progress, and it is threatened by partisan histories which serve partisan politics. If a body politic comes to see its historical progress in terms of an abstract idea, then it may change its politics accordingly and thereafter cease to progress. Partisan historiography is, for Butterfield, an existential threat to the state. Reversibly, non-partisan historiography serves a real political purpose. One ought to read The Englishman as a patriotic simplification of the position argued in The Whig Interpretation, in the context of the war, but not as advocating for merely useful falsification.

In this article I offer a close reading of The Whig Interpretation and then seek to demonstrate the plausible continuity it has with The Englishman. I recognize that my analysis faces the accusation of being an exercise not of history so much as of close reading. This is a fair criticism so far as it goes. However, the perceived contradiction between The Whig Interpretation and The Englishman is not the product of a misuse of context to be corrected. The Whig Interpretation is thought to advocate an anti-teleological position per se, by the plain reading of the text, and not in the light of any context. Nevertheless, in order to avoid the accusation of anachronism – of my new reading jarring with the surrounding works of Butterfield – I offer first a survey of the literature on these works. Far from my rereading of The Whig Interpretation creating fresh tensions between Butterfield’s other works, as anachronistic readings are wont to do, it alleviates them. By my reading, not only do Butterfield’s works look more integrated, but The Whig Interpretation can be seen to edge from the field of historical method into that of positive political thought. In that book, Butterfield offers an historical argument for what one may call a non-partisan ‘whig’ politics: of facilitation, amelioration of political tensions, and of a balancing between reaction and revolution.

II

Butterfield’s The Peace Tactics of Napoleon, 1806–1808 (1929), as is widely agreed upon in the scholarship, emphasized the role of personality, as opposed to policy, as the driver of historical change. This did not mean that diplomats and states lacked policies. It meant that the question of why policies were adopted, and of how they impacted affairs, required a description of the involved personalities and their interaction. As is also widely recognized in the scholarship, this kind of person-focused historiography was a realization of the imperative of Butterfield’s first book, The Historical Novel (1923).Footnote ¹⁴

The point of disagreement, in understanding The Peace Tactic, concerns the significance of the historical process to which the interplay of personalities gives rise. In short, scholars are split on whether Butterfield’s narrative is suffused with teleology. For Alberto Coll, Butterfield’s narrative history was a complex and intricate story of the interactions of personalities. It constituted an historical process, but it did not have direction. ‘The subtlety of the historical process’ lay in its ‘unpredictability’ such that, for Coll, Butterfield’s ‘ways of history’ were to be contrasted with that of ‘the moralistic, progress-oriented historians’.Footnote ¹⁵ In other words, Coll’s account of The Peace Tactics is continuous with his (orthodox) interpretation of The Whig Interpretation, to which the works of 1923 and 1939 ‘led’.Footnote ¹⁶

Coll’s views are shared by Ian Hall and by C.T. McIntire. Butterfield’s The Peace Tactics is a personality-anchored narrative of complexity, which vision is directed, in The Whig Interpretation, against teleological narrative and consequently against politically-motivated historiography.Footnote ¹⁷ Complexity is conceived to be the opposite of teleology. Corresponding to their interpretation of The Peace Tactics, all three historians understand Butterfield’s emphasis on the historical imagination, in The Whig Interpretation, to be an effort at grasping the personalities of the past, rather than (as I understand it) the glimpsing of direction in history.Footnote ¹⁸

Bentley and Sewell agree, in opposition to Coll, Hall, and McIntire, that The Peace Tactics does, in fact, follow a teleological arc. But whereas Sewell conceives this to form a deliberate even if allusive component of the book,Footnote ¹⁹ Bentley reads the various instances of blatantly teleological writing as merely ephemeral, and as being simply the unfortunate hangover of Harold Temperley’s influence.Footnote ²⁰ In consequence, Bentley does not feel pressed to change the orthodox reading of The Whig Interpretation. Moreover, it does not bring him to reconsider the book as being more than a tale of the complexity of historical process, pivoting on the involved personalities. Bentley’s view winds up being much the same as McIntire, Hall, and Coll’s – his only caveat being that Temperley, rather than giving Butterfield a healthy helping of Rankean method,Footnote ²¹ blemished the work with his un-Rankean eccentricities. For Bentley, then, The Whig Interpretation was a graduation from Temperley into a purer Rankeanism: namely, history purged of indulgent teleological flourish.

Sewell stands isolated in the scholarship for his view of Butterfield’s surrounding works about The Whig Interpretation. For him, the 1931 work contradicts not only The Peace Tactics but also Napoleon (1939) and The Statecraft of Machiavelli (1940).Footnote ²² (While Coll has also discerned a serious tension between The Whig Interpretation, as a text which conceives historical detail to hold purely negative import, and Butterfield’s thought, he conceives this to solely apply to Butterfield’s later work, post-1945.)Footnote ²³ Sewell’s position is founded on his reading of The Peace Tactics as putting forward a refined form of teleological argument. My own position can be understood as a development on his. I completely agree with his reading of The Peace Tactics, and with his carrying over of this interpretation to Napoleon and The Statecraft of Machiavelli. I disagree with his understanding, shared with the rest of the literature, that The Whig Interpretation is a fundamentally negative work. As I understand it, The Whig Interpretation provides the theoretical outline and justification of the refined teleology which his surrounding narrative works realized. The demonstration of this point is the burden of this present article.

For Sewell, the historical narrative of The Peace Tactics is not only hostile to simplistic Whig histories, such as Acton’s, but it possesses a positive political argument. The argument is that statecraft, if it is to be successful, must practise an ‘anti-revolutionary gradualism’, characterized above all by ‘flexibility’.Footnote ²⁴ Napoleon’s downfall is presaged by his overconfidence, which results in an inflexible foreign policy. In other words, Butterfield conceives Napoleon’s downfall to be fated by virtue of his hubris, because of ‘his idea of a providentially ordered historical process that cannot be challenged with impunity’.Footnote ²⁵

Sewell reads Napoleon as a more emphatic version of The Peace Tactics.Footnote ²⁶ What is centrally important to grasp – as Sewell does – is that Butterfield’s historical narrative cannot be said, as Bentley writes, to have ‘lacked a problematic’, but it instead puts forward a politically-loaded account.Footnote ²⁷ In short, Sewell sees the point of Butterfield’s teleology. History is structured by the interplay of personalities. It is inflexibility and tyrannical will, as opposed to tact and flexibility, which loads the dice of time against one. As a corollary to this, Sewell recognizes the intimate connection between The Statecraft of Machiavelli and the two works on Napoleon. Where the canary in the arc of Napoleon’s story is the ameliorating Talleyrand – whose alienation from Napoleon signals the beginning of his fated downfallFootnote ²⁸ – the flexible Guicciardini and inflexible Machiavelli form a parallel pair in the 1940 work.

Napoleon’s inflexibility is founded upon hubris. And Butterfield’s narrative works, of The Peace Tactics and Napoleon, are designed to show the folly of hubris. In other words, the narrative positively commends Butterfield’s gradualist politics by showing the fateful cost of an overbearing statecraft.Footnote ²⁹ Conversely, it is Guicciardini’s understanding of historical change, as a complex interplay of personalities, which brings him to commend the kind of flexibility in statecraft which Machiavelli does not.Footnote ³⁰ In other words, it is as though Guicciardini had read The Peace Tactics of Napoleon or Napoleon, and applied the lessons to his politics. Machiavelli, on the other hand, takes precisely the view of history which The Whig Interpretation attacks. And he founds his inflexible statecraft upon it, just as Napoleon is at first like Guicciardini and later, from Tilsit onwards, like Machiavelli.Footnote ³¹ Machiavelli and Napoleon each adopt, in the language of The Whig Interpretation, the politics of the ‘general proposition’, with its attendant partisan-whig view of the past.

Sewell’s reading of Napoleon and of The Statecraft of Machiavelli is a continuation of his view of The Peace Tactics. It is not too strong to suggest that much of the scholarship has found these later texts less than significant. If The Peace Tactics ‘lacked a problematic’, as Bentley writes, then, even if such a charge is not levied at the 1939 and 1940 works, they are thought to be merely tangential to Butterfield’s purposes. Bentley and McIntire treat the work as merely a distraction from Butterfield’s set task of working on George III and Fox.Footnote ³² Coll and Hall tacitly brush past it, in the view that, while Butterfield wrote on statecraft and international relations, the works of interest to this area were all written post-1945.Footnote ³³ In fact, Coll flatly writes, of Napoleon, that ‘Butterfield surprisingly said very little about the political or philosophical implications of Bonaparte’s statecraft, focusing instead on Napoleon as a man’.Footnote ³⁴ Coll and Bentley briefly mention The Statecraft of Machiavelli to note how Machiavelli is shown to have founded political thought on bad history, but, consistent with the rest of their analyses, there is no mention of history providing a positive justification of statecraft.Footnote ³⁵ In short, Coll does not see the point of Butterfield’s use of historical narrative, whereas Sewell does.

Readings of The Whig Interpretation itself universally agree on two points: it was an attack on Acton, who is the emblematic ‘whig’, and this attack was an employment of historical complexity as a solvent of (Actonian) teleology. The most common interpretation is that Butterfield levied Ranke’s technical history – history ‘for its own sake’ – against Acton’s anachronistic, partisan moralism. Bentley, McIntire, Coll, and Hall all take this view.Footnote ³⁶ While Coll takes the view that Ranke does not have to be read solely as a technical historian, he does not conceive this side of Ranke to have been important to Butterfield before the late 1940s.Footnote ³⁷ Sewell, who is the only scholar I have found to not see The Whig Interpretation’s attack as an application of Rankean objectivism, nevertheless does not dissent from the orthodox reading. For Sewell, Butterfield knew of the non-objectivist side to Ranke, but, in 1931, ‘Butterfield’s association of general propositions with Actonian moralism apparently inhibited his reflections at this point’.Footnote ³⁸

My intervention in the scholarship on Butterfield is very simple. The Whig Interpretation is not a purely negative book. It does advance a conception of teleological progress. This is a progress which is emergent from the interplay of personalities. Moreover, the attempt to override the wills of others, in an effort either of reaction or revolution, leads to a fateful downfall, as it did to Napoleon. In other words, I understand what Sewell took to be the point of The Peace Tactics, Napoleon, and The Statecraft of Machiavelli, to be given a theoretical outline and justification in The Whig Interpretation. Far from my new reading jarring with the existing corpus of work, it integrates it. My intervention can be summarized in a single point. The meaning of historical detail, in The Whig Interpretation, is not acidic towards narrative but is instead intimating of a fateful direction. It is precisely this direction with which the wise statesman seeks to co-operate. The fate embedded in historical narrative is the teacher of political moderation.

The new solution which this reading provides to ‘das Herbert Butterfieldproblem’ is that the patriotic historiography commended, in The Englishman, is the commendation of narrative which does not show progress to be the fruit of heroes vanquishing the wills of villains, as Machiavelli construed history. This would arm a contemporary partisan politics, of one party overbearing the other. Instead, patriotic history shows progress to be the fruit of interaction, and therefore tacitly commends a statecraft characterized by flexibility and gradualism. This is ‘patriotic’ because it does not divide the nation but unites it, in a consensus which serves and also partially disappoints both ‘whig and tory’.

My rereading of The Whig Interpretation does not involve the levying of a new context, so much as a changed conception of Butterfield’s relationship to his interlocutors. Acton still looms large as the target of The Whig Interpretation. This is unchanged. Butterfield’s relationship to Ranke now looks to be more subtle, however. Butterfield does deploy historical detail against grand narrative, but it is partisan narrative which is the target. The detail is not wholly positivistic, then, but instead it intimates a sense of progress. This sense of progress is indeterminate. One cannot form a concrete conception thereof, such as would arm any contemporary politics. This looks to be much closer in sympathy to how Sewell, and recently George G. Iggers, have understood Ranke’s work.Footnote ³⁹

There is a final interlocutor to consider, Lewis Namier, who is often mischaracterized as wholly ‘Other’ from Butterfield. Bentley is right to write that ‘this is a mistake’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Butterfield’s challenge to the whig orthodoxy followed the challenge which Namier had levied in The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (1929). For Namier, the conception of political change as a game between parties was flatly incorrect. He writes, famously, that ‘the political life of the period [at the accession of George III] could be fully described without ever using a party denomination’.Footnote ⁴¹ That with which Namier replaces the parties, as the subject matter for the historian’s explanation, is ‘the details’, and ‘the reader […] must not mind the time spent over details’.Footnote ⁴²

Butterfield, in making the subject matter of history the interactions and interplay between actors, is similarly displacing the role which party has played in traditional whig history. For Bentley, Butterfield is ‘egged on’ in his ‘attack on whig platitudes’ by Namier’s work.Footnote ⁴³ Butterfield sought ‘to extend Namier’s vision’ by integrating the role of ideas.Footnote ⁴⁴ This role was not the simple vision of progress and anti-progress, as in classical whig history – which conception Namier had replaced – but that ideas ‘developed a significance not always intended by its manipulators’.Footnote ⁴⁵ In other words, history is not to be understood as the victory of whig over tory, but nor is the structure of politics the only subject matter. Rather, change emerges from the clash of ideas, towards such a conclusion as nobody intends.

My only disagreement with Bentley’s conception of Butterfield’s reception of Namier lies in the sense of this emergent direction. The details of history, for Butterfield, intimate a progress to which the statesmen can rejoin themselves, in a posture of gradualist politics, or against which they can set themselves at their peril.

III

Early in The Whig Interpretation, Butterfield lays out his argument in the following terms:

Butterfield might be read, here, as arguing for an amoral account of the past, the amorality of which entails that history is neither ‘on the side of Protestants and Whigs’ nor ‘the ratification if not the glorification of the present’. This is the orthodox interpretation of The Whig Interpretation. Close attention to the work as it develops, however, suggests that Butterfield is primarily concerned with giving credit to Catholics and tories too, as opposed to simply divesting Protestants and whigs of credit by way of dismantling the notion of credit altogether. Rather than seeking to ‘ratify old party-cries’, he is seeking ‘to find the unities that underlie the differences and to see all lives as part of the one web of life’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Butterfield seeks to avoid a partisan account of the past and with it the endorsement of a partisan politics in the present. This is not, in other words, a rejection of partisan history through the deployment of an unpurposive, amoral account.

The partisan historian in question ‘very quickly busies himself with dividing the world into the friends and enemies of progress’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Butterfield’s principal solvent, deployed against such an account, is historical detail. ‘Whig’ accounts of ‘the contest of Luther against the popes, or that of Philip II and Elizabeth, or that of the Huguenots with Catherine de’ Medici’,Footnote ⁴⁹ are ‘corrected to some extent by the more concentrated labours of historical specialists’.Footnote ⁵⁰ There is, Butterfield argues, a disjuncture between the historian of detail and the historian of generalities. In the specialized areas of research, the ‘Whig’ view is weakened by empirical reality. Nevertheless, ‘these exceptions are lost indeed in that combined process of organisation and abridgement by which we reach our general survey of general history’.Footnote ⁵¹ That is, ‘all our deference to research brings us only to admit that this needs qualifications in detail’.Footnote ⁵² Butterfield writes of this misreading as the tendency to read the present into the past. He writes:

Of pivotal importance is the nature of ‘the present’ which such a history supports. Critically, it is a vision of the present which is Protestant and whig. Following this, the ‘line of causation’ thus drawn across the past plays a normative, partisan function of organizing contemporaneous political purposes. That is, Protestant and whig (which one might perhaps foreshorten as ‘liberal progressive’) politics are credited by the mirror of the past, such that it becomes ‘easy to believe that Clio herself is on the side of the whigs’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Butterfield therefore writes of the function of such histories in present politics:

In other words, the whig historian is a kind of upstart philosopher king. He seeks an empirically unconditioned ‘general proposition’, clean of any and all ‘accidents of a particular historical episode’, by way of which ‘judgement of values … the historian’ may conduct present politics. On the orthodox reading of The Whig Interpretation, Butterfield dispels this partisan weaponization of history through an empiricist deployment of detail contra universal propositions. Detail may be deployed to render implausible the ‘line of causation’ of whig history, as a Humean antidote to rationalist politics. Close attention, however, indicates that Butterfield’s primary qualm is with the understanding that ‘Catholics and tories have perpetually formed obstruction’ (to progress). Corollary to this, Butterfield dissents from an account of progress which takes it to be a determinate concept: one which may be ‘pondered apart from the accidents of a particular historical episode’. Instead, Butterfield defends a non-partisan account of progress.

Regarding the view that ‘Catholics and tories have perpetually formed obstruction’, Butterfield argues that change must be thought of as ‘emerging from the clash of both Catholic and Protestant’, rather than from one party (viz. the Protestants) being victorious.Footnote ⁵⁶ That is, rather than seeing history as a series of struggles between ‘the friends and enemies of progress’, of ‘progressive fighting reactionary’, one ought to generally see ‘two parties differing on the question of what the next step in progress is to be’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Rather than being the product of a partisan position, the modern world is:

Two significant points follow from this view of progress as being emergent: progress is not predictable and thus not reducible into a determinate concept (viz. ‘a line of causation’ with its attendant ‘general proposition’); progress is a non-partisan reality, since it cannot be said to be owed to one group and not another. Butterfield, moreover, does not conceive of the emergent progress as amoral. That is, Butterfield does not dissent from the language of progress per se, and consistently writes of historical change in the language of ‘achievement’. Whilst it follows from the dismissal of whig history that it is anachronistic to conceive past Protestants as on the side of present liberal politics, Butterfield writes of the error regarding Catholics and tories as not only a vilifying misconception, but as a denial of a genuine, positive contribution. Regarding the crediting of Luther as harbinger of progress:

Catholics and Tories are conceived as being ‘gravely maltreated’ in the claim that they ‘have contributed nothing to the making of the present day’. In other words, ‘the making of the present day’ is a matter of progress, as opposed to mere change. This does not mean that the result is predictable. Therefore:

It is clear, however, that Butterfield himself does not take such an attitude to modernity. The language of achievement is repeated:

There is no sense, here, that Butterfield is dissenting from the reality of ‘liberty’ as an achievement of progress. Importantly, ‘our gratitude’ is not directed towards the ‘friends’ of progress, and diverted from its ‘enemies’, but instead ‘to those conjunctures and accompanying circumstances’. This is co-extensive with Butterfield’s employment of the first-person plural, since progress is thus not co-opted in political partisanship. Progress, then, is a reality which eludes a determinate conception. For this reason, it may not itself be disentangled (viz. abstracted) from the concrete details through which it is seen. Conversely, the concrete details of history are not the solvent which the historian deploys against all sense of progress. Rather, they are the myriad details through which movement is discerned.

This view may be expressed from loosely three different positions. One may speak of history as progress; of the details; or of the two in tandem. Firstly, history is conceived as constitutive of interactions rather than an indomitable force. That is:

‘Those very vicissitudes’, namely the fruitful interactions, are written of in terms of an agency. That is, because progress is a reality, the language of moral agency is unavoidable, but not in a manner divorced from the details, such as ‘the whig historian’ imagines progress ‘in spite of so many vicissitudes’. On this account, history is a kind of moral agent, and the whig historian – in making detail their enemy – is a kind of anti-historian:

By ‘our constitution’, Butterfield refers to the present order which has emerged from the interactions (which are) constitutive of history. History is, then, at once the myriad interactions, irreducible into ‘an unfolding logic’ and best described as a ‘process’, as well as a kind of agent. ‘Our constitution’, which is a good thing (and thus a proper object of ‘gratitude’), is history’s ‘product’: ‘time is so to speak having a hand in the game, and the historical process itself is working upon the pattern which events are taking’. History, then, ‘is actually embodied in the British constitution and similarly in the modern world’.

Corollary with this view, progress, considered simply in terms of itself, is a denial of history and simply lacks all empirical content. Whilst progress does, then, transcend details – ‘as part of the one web of life’ – it cannot be sensibly (that is, with any empirical content) spoken of in terms of itself:

In this sense, ‘time is [only] so to speak having a hand in the game’.Footnote ⁶⁵ One cannot form a determinate conception of ‘time’ (viz. progress). So Butterfield writes: ‘To whom do we owe our religious liberty? We may ask how this liberty arose, but even then it takes all history to give us the answer’.Footnote ⁶⁶ That is to say, Butterfield conceives of us owing the past, but this past cannot be reduced to a force. It is, in this sense, the past in its entirety which we owe.

Both progress qua progress, and detail qua detail, are for this reason empty. ‘The deep movement’ has no empirical content, and detail is insufficient without its sum. Butterfield’s debt to Ranke is, at this point, at its most clear. The historian is to work from detail, but not merely to pile it up as a heap of facts. Rather, the historian must employ the ‘historical imagination’:

Butterfield writes again:

The debt to Ranke in the above is clear, provided one recognizes Ranke to be a German idealist and not an English empiricist.Footnote ⁶⁹ For Butterfield, details are to be imaginatively ordered such that one attains to ‘the purport and tenor of the whole’. The detail is the vehicle through which the historical imagination attains to such an understanding. Detail has, in Ranke’s language, a spiritual (Geistliche) significance such that it ‘intimates’ (to use Wordsworth’s term) a significance beyond itself.Footnote ⁷⁰ Details are not, then, selected ‘in accordance with some abstract principle’; instead, they in some (Geistliche) way suggest it themselves. Concomitantly, the progress which is discerned – viz. ‘the inner relations’ of ‘the whole pattern upon which the historical process is working’ – cannot be grasped as an essence separate from (its constitutive) accidents. In language reminiscent of Kant’s first Critique: the idea of progress is a transcendental idea which is ‘merely intelligible’.Footnote ⁷¹ One cannot know it, like a determinate cognition (Vorstellung), but only gain an intimation through the historical imagination playing upon the manifold details.Footnote ⁷² (This is akin to Kant’s ‘aesthetic idea’, where the idea is nearly given adequate formulation – that is, an intuition adequate to the concept – through the imagination’s ‘rapid spread over objects’ in aesthetic experience.) Since it cannot then be grasped concretely, it cannot yield decisive political direction. The historian, in short, cannot be a philosopher king in Plato’s authoritarian sense. More strongly, the historian destroys the possibility of philosopher kings appealing to history.

IV

Progress may not be discerned as a determinate concept. That is, it cannot be thought of abstractly, but only sensed, by the historical imagination, through historical details. There is no sense, however, in The Whig Interpretation, that the historical imagination is not rational; it is a form of thinking. It does not follow, moreover, that nothing politically significant may be said of progress, simply because it is not a determinate concept. For Butterfield, progress is the fruit of clashes of wills, and not of abstract rationality. History consists not in a series of changes, the logic of which may be abstractly understood, like necessary causes, but instead changes are the offspring of ‘mediation’.Footnote ⁷³ In other words, change is internal to the institutional order, because it is conditioned by all of the existing personalities; its logic cannot be externally grasped.

Politically speaking, then, Butterfield’s statesman is to seek to facilitate these sorts of ‘clashes’, which one might call productive disagreements. Implicitly in The Whig Interpretation, this is not an inevitability, and it may be impaired or altogether abrogated by the (partisan) dominance of a single group. That is, the politics of the ‘general proposition’ is a political threat, and not simply an historian’s aberrancy. In The Englishman, the advocate for ‘whig history’ is emphatically non-partisan (unlike the ‘whig history’ of The Whig Interpretation), and there is an attendant emphasis upon the danger of partisan politics: rationalist progressivism, based upon a misconception of progress, and ‘die-hard-ism’, which is a resistance to progress.Footnote ⁷⁴ Far from The Whig Interpretation and The Englishman being antipodal works, then, they complement each other. Put directly, patriotic history is a kind of antidote to whig history. Rather than separating the past into ‘friends and enemies’, and legitimizing partisan politics, it does the opposite and commends a politics which is progressive in the proper, indeterminate sense. Patriotic history is, if my reading of The Whig Interpretation is correct, not historically erroneous, if perhaps simplistic.

Butterfield begins The Englishman with a celebration of the fact that, in England, ‘the past, like the spent part of a cinematograph film, is coiled up inside the present’.Footnote ⁷⁵ This, importantly, is not an inevitability but an achievement, contingent upon the fact that: ‘we [Englishmen] have been wise, for we have taken care of the processes which serve to knit the past and the present together’.Footnote ⁷⁶ This ought to be read as the opposite of partisan ‘whig history’ which Butterfield cautions against in The Whig Interpretation. The past is conceived as begetting the present, in the sense that the arrangements of the present are ‘the result of interaction; they are precipitated by complex history’. The present owes the whole of the past for itself, rather than the actions of partisan heroes, such as might be abstracted into a general principle of action. It is a political-historiographical achievement to illuminate this truth because it not only avoids partisan politics but positively commends a non-partisan politics. Butterfield writes that whig politicians, unlike whig historians:

The achievement of these whig politicians is their ability to turn historical change into conceivably ‘the common heritage of Englishmen’: ‘the heritage of both whig and tory’. So far as I understand this, it is their writing of the past as being the non-partisan heritage of the (whole) nation. This attitude to the past entails ‘an alliance with Providence’, because progress is – as The Whig Interpretation, on my reading, argues – the fruit of ‘interplay’ and not of a partisan political force. To represent the past in this way is to encourage the kind of non-partisan politics which is a ‘co-operating with the forces of history’. To depict historical changes as non-partisan – to have them ‘pass, so to speak, into a conjuror’s hat, precisely because they become the property of all’ – is not unhistorical. It is, perhaps, a simplification, but it cannot be said to be opposed in essence to the argument of The Whig Interpretation, that progress is the fruit of ‘whig and tory’ interaction. Butterfield provides an example of such an attitude to the past, regarding seventeenth century English attitudes to political liberties:

What is really central, here, is that the ‘ancient custom’ of the middle ages should have been present in the Stuart period, but on terms which suited the Stuarts. In other words, the Stuarts – ‘our 17th-century forefathers’ – simplified a nevertheless real relationship. The element of truth is the fact that, for Butterfield, a body politic changes in relation to itself. On the other hand, the relation is oversimplified. It is politically-unifying for an age to think of itself as the inheritor of an unproblematically continuous past, and in consequence to see the past in terms which are somewhat anachronistic. Even so, Butterfield’s account of progress and of mediated change is such that this thinking is better called a convenient simplification than simply false. The non-partisan function of patriotic history is supported by the non-partisan historical reality: that the present owes every party of the past. It is instructive to consider his offered counter example, of a nation where they have not moved with history. This is equivalent to a nation which has not, in Butterfield’s sense, progressed. Their view of the past has not changed, because they have not changed. Butterfield continues:

Precisely in resisting change, the French nation increasingly destroyed their chances of progress and made inevitable the pseudo-progress of an abstract, ‘general proposition’. The sort of politics which France practised, first rigid tradition and second a merely abstractly conceived progress, are the twin opposites of Butterfield’s commended emergent change.

One may analyse the nature of progress in terms of a necessary empirical conditioning of politics’ direction. In other words, change is emergent from the institutional order – which is to say of ‘clashes’ within the body politic – and this means that it is possible to (simplistically or otherwise) emphasize continuity of the whole of the past with the whole of the present. It is possible, in an historical work, ‘to tie up the threads and reconstitute the customs which linked the past with the present’. There is, then, ‘the transmutation of custom’, by which there is ‘the continuity of our history’. For this reason Butterfield can write, with self-evident sincerity, that:

On account of change, then, being internal to a body politic, its institutions in turn contain ‘the past, lying fold upon fold within them’. There is a cumulating heritage of past orders, and this constitutes a storing up (and here it seems natural to allude to Burke’s conceptions) of knowledge. This is a doctrine of progress, and one which enjoins a sort of soft Burkeanism. Change is to continue in the manner of non-partisan emergence. This is a political doctrine intelligibly at home with the notion, in The Whig Interpretation, that ‘we transfer our gratitude to those conjunctures and accompanying circumstances’ of change, and not to one party position.

The substance of this inheritance is that the institutions of a body politic provide an empirical-conditioning of political direction – as opposed to a politics governed by an abstract ‘general proposition’ – which ensures ‘greater elasticity in the face of those crises which are beyond prediction than do the paper-constructions of yesterday’. That is, such orders are epistemically superior to the political order of the ‘general proposition’. Lastly, through their non-partisan origins and thus natures, they ‘provide also the basis for at least a minimum of national unity’.

One might call the central argument of The Englishman that such histories that do ‘tie up the threads again’ are of crucial political importance. Butterfield must not, however, be taken to be endorsing a useful lie, but instead as developing the implications of The Whig Interpretation. The reason for the truth of such patriotic history is precisely because institutional orders do ‘preserve somewhat in the present all the previous stages of their being’, such that the non-partisan accent of patriotic history is entirely appropriate. This reading is made possible, and I think necessary, once The Whig Interpretation is understood to be putting forward a case for non-partisan teleology. If the role of detail is reframed from a destructive to a productive reality, then Butterfield’s attitude to ‘whiggism’ becomes much more interesting than a simple binary of bad historiography and good politics. The shortcoming of patriotic history may be spoken of as a simplification, in the sense of an abridgement for political ends,Footnote ⁸¹ but it is not an essential falsification.

V

The Kantian distinction between cognition and mere thinking, alongside his corollary conception of imaginative judgement intimating transcendence from the myriad, looks to be a ready tool for approaching Butterfield’s conceptions of progress, the ‘general proposition’, and of detail. If my analysis is correct, then this may well indicate a lingering influence of Ranke on Butterfield, albeit a Ranke understood in terms of Kantian Idealism rather than Humean positivism. The question of Butterfield’s relationship to Ranke is, however, tangential to my basic purpose of reframing The Whig Interpretation as being, in a specific sense, not sceptical of teleology.

There are other contexts involving Butterfield which may now look different. Butterfield’s relationship to the ‘Peterhouse Right’ – especially to its figurehead, Maurice Cowling – is a long-standing dispute,Footnote ⁸² and the pertinence of detail in history may now be seen to be a parallel question. Whether The Whig Interpretation has a positive political point, or simply a negative one, seems to hinge upon the question of what detail is for historical explanation. In Butterfield, detail adverts to the complexity of historical change, but it does not carry a scepticism to progress in itself. One might read The Whig Interpretation in loosely Oakeshottian terms: taking the displacement of government by the ‘general proposition’ as displacement of ‘rationalism in politics’ and its mechanical conception of reason; and its replacement with a soft Burkeanism of non-abstractly conditioned change.Footnote ⁸³ That is, Oakeshott’s conception of politics as ‘conversation’ and incrementally changing ‘idioms of activity’, as opposed to ‘rationalism’, is hardly foreign to Butterfield’s of emergent change. Cowling’s famously industrious deployments of detail in his high political trilogy,Footnote ⁸⁴ as well as his rhetoric of detailed complexity in his two acerbic books of 1963, might change their aspect from mere negativity if detail has a more than destructive purpose in The Whig Interpretation. Rather than seeing the dominant political influence on Cowling as Oakeshott,Footnote ⁸⁵ Cowling’s work might be additionally thought of as redeploying Butterfield’s twin conception of detail and progress to his own political purpose. Lastly, Butterfield’s emphasis upon individual persons, as the interlocutors out of which historical change emerges, can be given theological articulation. Certainly his emphasis upon individual persons looks to be a doctrine at home in his Methodist faith. McIntire has remarked that:

These are speculations which I hope may spark interest and future research, but I do not substantiate them here. My aim has been principally to reframe the orthodox reading of The Whig Interpretation. What is clear, from this article, is that the message of The Whig Interpretation is not, as Elton said, ‘in essence plain enough’. Whilst some historians, particularly Bentley, have found Butterfield’s work to be a source of continuing interest, it must be acknowledged that others have conceived it to be a kind of textbook. Elton remarks that it ‘deserved and probably required hammering home’ as a worthy and wholesome text for undergraduates but, one hears in the sub-text, he had no need to read it himself.Footnote ⁸⁷ This simplistic reading of the book is no longer tenable.

Butterfield emerges, by my analysis, as a more integrated thinker than the present orthodoxy allows. The Whig Interpretation takes on the aspect of something approaching political theory in a positive sense. His conception of historical detail in The Whig Interpretation, if my reading is correct, tends towards a kind of anti-rationalistic politics of intersubjectivity. This may be legitimately expressed as non-partisan, and to that extent as ‘patriotic’. as The Englishman is rightly deemed. In short, there is no need to look upon The Whig Interpretation and The Englishman as presenting what the German-speaking world saw in The Wealth of Nations and A Theory of Moral Sentiments. There is no ‘Herbert Butterfieldproblem’.