whig history and present-centred history

Whig History and Present-Centred HistoryAuthor(s): Adrian Wilson and T. G. AshplantSource: The Historical Journal, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Mar., 1988), pp. 1-16Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2639234 .

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The Historical Journal, 3I, I (I988), pp. i-i6 Printed in Great Britain

WHIG HISTORY AND PRESENT-CENTRED HISTORY*

ADRIAN WILSON Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, Cambridge

and

T. G. ASHPLANT School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Liverpool Polytechnic

Of the many books written by the late Herbert Butterfield, the most influential by far was The whig interpretation of history.' The importance of that essay is not just that it attained the status of a classic in Butterfield's own lifetime, and has continued to be reprinted for over fifty years. Its main significance is that the historical profession in Britain came to accept its polemical terminology. The phrase 'whig history' has long been used as a term of historiographical criticism, in such a way as to imply, firstly, that everyone knows what it means, and secondly, that nobody wants to be 'whiggish'. This usage is much in

accordance with Butterfield's intentions: he succeeded in implanting the term in the professional language of historians.

Yet during Butterfield's lifetime there was next to nothing in the literature by way of reasoned discussion of the argument of The whig interpretation. This collective silence on the part of historians is certainly regrettable; it may also

seem odd, but is in fact a symptom of a more general reluctance. For historians, as one recent commentator has observed, 'are not much given to reflecting at length on the nature of their discipline '.2 Perhaps the very success of Butterfield's book contributed to this. The whig interpretation offered a ready- made answer to certain historiographic issues, and thus helped historians to avoid 'reflecting at length' on those issues. The problem of historiographic anachronism, which is the central theme of the book, could be regarded as already solved; the acceptance of Butterfield's terminology effectively blocked further discussion and debate.

However, since Butterfield's death in 1979, there have appeared some critical appraisals of his work which engage both with his substantive writings and with his historiographic essays and books; and amongst those qualified

* For their help with various aspects of this paper, we wish to thank David Amigoni, Andrew Cunningham, Patrick Curry, Geoffrey Elton, Rob Iliffe, Susan Morgan, Simon Schaffer, and Stephen Yeo. For financial support in this study Adrian Wilson wishes to thank the Wellcome Trust.

1 Herbert Butterfield, The whig interpretation of history (London, I93I); subsequent editions include a facsimile reprint (New York, I965) of the first edition, and a Penguin edition (Harmondsworth, I973). Page references below are to the first edition.

2 John Tosh, The pursuit of history (London, I 984), p. I97.

I 1-2



2 ADRIAN WILSON AND T. G. ASHPLANT

tributes is an essay devoted specifically to The whig interpretation.3 Under the title 'On whiggism', Rupert Hall has broken the silence which surrounds Butterfield's classic, and has offered a sympathetic yet critical appraisal of the work. At last, therefore, debate has opened over The whig interpretation; and Hall's assessment indicates that such debate is long overdue. Hall argues that The whig interpretation is incoherent in the guidance it offers to the historian; once subjected to critical scrutiny, Butterfield's argument is seen to be a blunt and clumsy weapon.4 Similarly, G. R. Elton finds that 'The whig interpretation proves on re-reading to be perilously thin... lacking in substance'. From these appraisals it emerges that historians need a much more sophisticated set of tools than Butterfield offered, if they are to resolve the problems of historiographical anachronism with which The whig interpretation was concerned.

The central purpose of the present paper is to offer a set of such tools. In order to establish the nature of the historian's task, we shall put forward a critique both of the concept of 'whig history' and of The whig interpretation. It will then emerge that the issues with which Butterfield dealt superficially go to the heart of the historian's enterprise. We shall outline our own view of those issues, arguing that 'whig' history is but one specific variety of the general problem which we construe as present-centredness.

I. WHIG HISTORY

The hegemony of the term 'whig history' in historical discussion is in itself surprising. Narrowly construed, it refers to an interpretation of British history, prevalent in whig political and intellectual circles in the mid-nineteenth century, which stressed the growth of liberty, parliamentary rule and religious toleration since the constitutional struggles of the seventeenth century. Butterfield himself in his book already gave it a wider reference, using 'the whig interpretation' to describe ways of understanding political and religious developments in Europe since the Reformation: thus the interpretation of Luther was one of his key examples. Subsequently, though, the notion 'whig history' has been used generically as a critical concept in other fields of history far removed from the political and religious history to which Butterfield first applied it, and within which it had some real if limited reference. Its use has now become merely gestural or loosely analogous, defining neither the source

3 Maurice Cowling, 'Herbert Butterfield Igoo-I979', Proceedings of the British Academy, LXV

(I979), 595-609; A. Rupert Hall, 'On whiggism', History of Science, XXI (I983), 45-59; G. R. Elton, 'Herbert Butterfield and the study of history', The Historical _Journal, XXVII (I984), 729-43 (we quote below from p. 734).

4 Our critique of The whig interpretation will cover similar ground to Hall's general criticisms of that book, though from a rather different standpoint. We have not dealt with Hall's more specific argument, that in the particular field of the history of science, Butterfield's historiographic strictures simply cannot be followed, and that 'whiggism' is unavoidable. The problem of present- centredness in the history of science is examined by Andrew Cunningham, 'Getting the game right: some plain words on the identity and invention of science', Stuidies in History and Philosophy of Science (forthcoming). We shall be referring to this where relevant.



WHIG HISTORY 3

nor the nature of the approach it critizises; while its very repetition blots out the need for a more accurate conceptualization.

Why has the term proved so popular? As we have observed, Butterfield was using it to characterize something broader than a mere fashion or quirk of English political history. Indeed, at one point he claimed that the 'whig principle' lay at the heart of all historiographical error:'

It ... is the very sum and definition of all errors of historical inference. The study of the past with one eye, so to speak, upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history....

Whether this is so or not, it does seem that something similar to 'the whig fallacy' frequently comes into play whenever history is written either by, or on behalf of, a triumphant elite. Still more generally, the past is often seen historiographically as the origin or precursor or anticipation of the present, in such a way as to celebrate and legitimize that present, and history writing of this kind seems to have something important in common with 'whig history', as Butterfield characterized it. Hence those who are seeking to criticize such historiography have often found it useful to refer, almost implicitly, to Butterfield's conception. As a result, the term has passed into the everyday language of historians - often modified to 'whiggish', as if in acknowledgment of the extension of usage which has taken place. That usage is now so widespread that many who routinely use the terms 'whig history' or 'whiggish history' have never read The whig interpretation, and some of them have never heard of that book.6

This easy sway of the term 'whig history' has concealed two major problems in Butterfield's definition and use of it. Firstly, as he employed it, the term ' whig history' embodied the very insularity which it was designed to criticise. Introducing his criticism of the whig approach, Butterfield wrote:' 'It is astonishing to what extent the historian has been Protestant, progressive, and whig, and the very model of the nineteenth-century gentleman.' So 'the historian', as Butterfield generically conceived someone in that role, was English, male, and upper-class. Such contrary traditions as that represented by Alice Clark's Working life of women in the seventeenth century (I919), not to mention the entire panoply of foreign historians, were not very vivid in Butterfield's mind as he battled with his abstraction 'the whig historian' in 1931. Just as Butterfield's complacent Englishness manifested itself in his

Butterfield, The whig interpretation, p. 3'. 6 One particular field in which these terms are in common use is the history of science. In the

case of science, the present does indeed seem superior to the past; science is produced by an elite whose members - the scientists - enjoy great prestige; and its historiography has often consisted in a celebration of the present by means of a conception of inevitable progress. More recently, however, historians of science have been striving to avoid such anachronistic assumptions, and to distance themselves from the associated value judgments. It is not surprising, therefore, that amongst professional historians of science the label of 'whiggishness' is part of everyday discourse.

7 Butterfield, The whig interpretation, pp. 3-4.




general formulation, so his own protestantism was apparent in the very first specific example he gave of how historians should and should not proceed :8

And though a sentence from Aquinas may fall so strangely upon modern ears that it becomes plausible to dismiss the man as a fool or a mind utterly and absolutely alien, I take it that to dismiss a man in this way is a method of blocking up the mind against him.... Precisely because of his unlikeness to ourselves Aquinas is the more enticing subject for the historical imagination....

Here 'ourselves' refers, of course, to protestants; the words of Aquinas need not have struck catholics of the time as strange, simply because his thought had shaped a significant part of their religious teaching. In short, both in defining his target and in the manner of his attack, Butterfield remained to a great extent a prisoner of the very tradition he sought to challenge.

The second problem is revealed by Butterfield's own later substantive writing in the history of science. As Hall has noted, most historians of science who read The origins of modern science (I949; 1957) today find it whiggish- indeed, extremely so. We shall quote just three passages from Butterfield's book which seem to support such a reading:'

The theory of impetus did not solve all problems, however, and proved to be only the half-way house to the modern view....

It may be true to say that Aristotle, when he thought of motion, had in mind a horse drawing a cart, so that his whole feeling for the problem was spoiled by his preoccupation with a misleading example.

Even the great geniuses who broke through the ancient views in some special field of study - Gilbert, Bacon and Harvey, for example - would remain stranded in a species of mediaevalism when they went outside that chosen field. It required their combined efforts to clear up certain simple things which we should now regard as obvious to an unprejudiced mind, and even easy for a child.

We may read such sentences as these with a smile or a frown, and condemn Butterfield at once of the whiggishness against which he had written in I93 I .

But such a judgment would be premature, since there is reason to believe that Butterfield, in writing this work, was consciously striving to produce a history of science which avoided the pitfalls of what he saw as whig history. This can be indicated by three further quotations, taken from the introduction to the book :10

The subject has not been turned into genuine history .., if we construe our history of science by drawing lines straight from one great figure to another.

Its whole shape is distorted if we seize now upon this particular man in the fifteenth century who had an idea that strikes us as modern, now upon another man of the sixteenth century who had a hunch or an anticipation of some later theory....

It is not sufficient to read Galileo with the eyes of the twentieth century or to interpret him in modern terms - we can only understand his work if we know something of the system he was attacking....

8 Ibid. pp. 9-IO.

9 Herbert Butterfield, The origins of modern science (I957 edn), pp. I3, I4, 2. 10 Ibid. pp. viii-ix.



WHIG HISTORY 5

These formulations, with their clear echoes of the prescriptions of The whig interpretation of history, demonstrate that Butterfield was convinced that in The origins of modern science he had both faced and solved the problem of whiggishness as this presented itself in the history of science. If we do not now read The origins of modern science in this way, this points to a problem in our understanding of Butterfield's use of the concept 'whig interpretation'.

It seems likely that it would require an exercise of research in itself to recover just what Butterfield intended by publishing The whig interpretation of history, and indeed what he meant by the very term 'whig history'. Cambridge folklore has it that the book was a veiled attack on G. M. Trevelyan, Regius Professor of History from 1926; but Butterfield himself denied this rumour. The roots of his attack on 'whig history' certainly include the wider crisis of British liberalism after the Great War of I9I4-I8, and the concerns of the book should doubtless be placed in that context. Its argument cannot be grasped sympathetically without an understanding of Butterfield's own tory Methodist beliefs, and in particular his conception of a Divine Providence acting through history but in ways virtually invisible to historical research. Moreover, any juxtaposition of The whig interpretation with The origins of modern science would have to take into account the question as to how Butterfield became interested in the history of science at all. The answer to that question would probably involve an examination of his relationship with Marxism. Butterfield published a critical essay on 'History and the Marxian method' in Scrutiny (1933); it was a group of Marxists who set up the Cambridge committee for the history of science in 1936; and it was on behalf of this committee that Butterfield delivered, in 1948, the lectures which were printed as The origins of modern science the following year. Meanwhile, we should also remember, Butterfield was fighting a running battle with Namier and his school over eighteenth-century English political history; and part of his weaponry in this struggle was the cache of personal papers of Charles James Fox which G. M. Trevelyan himself donated to Butterfield at the same time that The whig interpretation was published. Throughout this complex career, Butterfield went on believing the theses of The whig interpretation. To some degree, then, that essay needs to be set in the context of his whole life - no simple task.11

Although such a sympathetic reconstruction of Butterfield's thought would be highly desirable, there are other ways of coming to grips with The whig interpretation which do not depend on the undertaking of that exercise. We can certainly ask what guidance the book offers to the historian who is concerned to avoid the errors of anachronism against which it was written. And if we find that that guidance is weak or incoherent, then we are forced to one or other of two possible inferences. On the one hand, we may infer that the weaknesses

" See Ved Mehta, Fly and thefly-bottle (Harmondsworth, I963), pp. i98-215; the appraisals by Cowling and Elton cited in note 3 above; Michael Hobart, 'History and religion in Herbert Butterfield', Journal of the History of Ideas, XXXII (I97I), 543-54; Joseph Needham and Walter Pagel (eds.), Background to modern science (Cambridge, I938); Butterfield, Origins of modern science (London, I949), Introduction (p. vii). Butterfield's I933 essay (Scrutiny, i) was reprinted as 'Marxist history' in his History and human relations (London, I 95I), pp. 66-IOO.




of Butterfield's argument give the historian licence to practise some degree of whiggish interpretation. On the other hand, we may conclude that some more rigorous set of methodological tools is needed; that the last word against anachronistic history has not been said by Butterfield, passionate in this cause though he was; that the problem needs to be reconsidered from some different standpoint. It is over this choice that we take a different stand from Hall. However, it will now become apparent that as to the merits and faults of Butterfield's classic essay, we are in substantial agreement with Hall's critique. We shall therefore take his analysis as the starting-point for our own observations on Butterfield's argument.

Butterfield's fundamental belief was that the historian should tell the historical story in as much detail as possible. Thus,'2 'the historian... explains the French Revolution by discovering exactly what it was that occurred; and if at any point we need further elucidation, all that he can do is to take us into greater detail, and make us see in still more definite concreteness what really did take place'. This belief underlay what Hall has criticized as Butterfield's 'specious inductivism', his assumption that 'the "concrete facts"... assemble themselves a-theoretically into "explanations"', his 'analogy between the historical process and a microscope with a zoom-lens system'." Here Hall has accurately identified a fundamental strain in Butterfield's thought. The picture of the historian as microscopist is no caricature; Butterfield himself made just this comparison at one point in The whig interpretation."4 In addition, this same belief underlies one of Butterfield's central criticisms of whig history, that its error is an error in 'abridgement'. In Butterfield's view, historical writing consists precisely in some abridgement of the plenitude of the historical record, an abridgement which is both necessary and inherently perilous. The difference between bad (whig) history and good history is that whig history employs an illegitimate principle for such abridgement. The 'whig fallacy' employs 'a certain organization of the whole historical story'; and such organization itself consists precisely in 'selection '.15

Appropriately enough, given this diagnosis, Butterfield's own corrective for whig history was 'historical research', the detailed investigation of a particular episode or issue. No doubt he was generalizing from his own experience; that is, from having written The peace tactics of Napoleon i8o6-8 (published in I929) - a book whose title indicates a narrowness of focus within which, no doubt, abridgement was at a minimum. Against this conception of bias-free 'historical research' Hall counterposes a compelling argument. He asks us to imagine a work of 'cross-sectional history', with a limited chronological focus (i66o-i670) and a well-constrained substantive topic (the problem of vital heat), and observes that16

the possible range of data is infinite; selection must be made, and since it would be absurd for selection to be random, it must be made in accord with certain principles,

12 Butterfield, The whig interpretation, p. 72. 13 Hall, 'On whiggism', p. 5I' 14 Butterfield, The whig interpretation, p. 2I. 1 Ibid. pp. 24, 25. 16 Hall, 'On whiggism', p. 52.



WHIG HISTORY 7

that is a pattern.... The cross-sectional historian might consider [religious views] of relevance to [vital heat] .... But other cross-sectional ramifications present themselves in endless rows....

This example effectively undermines Butterfield's argument for the immunity- from-whiggishness of 'historical research', by showing that 'selection' has to be at work in the constitution of any and every piece of investigation; and that such selection is necessarily based upon some prior pattern or set of principles.

In fact, Butterfield's 'inductivism' and his innocence concerning the nature of historical research reflected a series of elisions which, we want to suggest, systematically obscured the real nature of historical knowledge and inference. Again, Hall has given a valuable pointer to this, in the following observation :17

'Butterfield was careless in his use of the word "history", giving it many connotations, such as: the past, the records of the past; a historian's narrative of the past; or ... the process of historical writing.' We would wish to distinguish the various meanings of 'history' still further by expanding Hall's last phrase to 'the processes of historical research and writing'.

This habit of Butterfield's was no mere verbal sloppiness: the very words of The whig interpretation demonstrate that Butterfield systematically confounded the several entities which Hall has rightly distinguished. It will be worth attending this phenomenon, since the space which Butterfield thereby closed is the very space which we are concerned to open up in this paper. The most convenient way of approaching the matter is to consider the formulation Butterfield gave to the concrete meaning of historical research. Logically, the historian must be engaged in inferring some account of the past from the evidence about the past provided by the surviving relics of the past."8 But not for Butterfield; in his eyes, research was a process of direct contact with the past :9

when... engaged upon... research... as we come closer to the past... we cannot save ourselves from tumbling headlong into it and being immersed in it....

a movement towards historical research ... is [a movement towards] ... an actual vision of all the chances and changes which brought about the modern world.

The key to the fact that Butterfield could make this fundamental category- mistake is provided by another passage, which suggests that this 'immersion in this past' was the way he experienced historical research, or at least desired to experience it :20 ' the historian's passion for manuscripts and sources is ... the desire to bring himself into genuine relationship with the actual ... the desire to see at first hand how an important decision comes to be made...'.

Thus Butterfield assumed that the past was contained in its relics, so that in the act of reading the relics the historian was 'tumbling into' the past, was

17 Ibid. p. 59, note 7. 18 For a definition of the precise meanings we give to the terms 'evidence' and 'relic' in this

context, see the discussion of terminology in section ii below. " Butterfield, The whig interpretation, pp. I4-I5, 69-70. 20 Ibid. p. 73.




indeed seeing it 'at first hand'. The corollary of this was that written history, when judiciously composed, would in its turn reproduce the past. And Butterfield said as much :21 ' In reality the process of mutation which produced the present is as long and complicated as all the most lengthy and complicated works of historical research placed end to end, and knit together and regarded as one whole.' It thus becomes apparent how Butterfield could deploy the 'specious inductivism' correctly identified by Hall, and how as the corollary of this he saw historical writing as simple abridgement. The past is ready for the historian, assembled in the sources; to read those sources is at once to see the real nature, to enter the real complexity, of the past; and what the historian does is to reproduce that complexity in his/her act of writing. The historical record constitutes a sort of plenum; it is the task of the historian to enter that plenum, to inhabit it, and return to the present with an accurate picture of its nature.

Curiously, at one point Butterfield embarked upon an altogether more sophisticated and accurate formulation :22

Even before we have examined the subject closely, our story will have assumed its general shape.... Given this original bias we can follow a technical procedure which is bound to confirm and imprison us in it; for when we come, say, to examine Martin Luther more closely, we have a magnet that can draw out of history the very things that we go to look for.... It matters very much how we start upon our labours....

Here, and here alone. Butterfield indicated that the historian might in fact pursue research (as distinct from writing) which constituted a self-confirming process. Yet the insight remained entirely local. It pertained only to the whig historian: the full passage from which we have quoted concerns not the historian in general, but the historian who has begun with the 'underlying assumption' of the whig approach. And elsewhere, as we have seen, Butterfield wrote of 'historical research' as an automatic corrective t.o the 'whig fallacy'. Moreover, even within the passage we have just quoted, we find Butterfield's usual naivety as to the relationship between the past, its relics, and the researcher: a presupposition is a 'magnet that can draw out of history the very things that we go to look for', as if 'history' is in front of the researcher and available for extraction.

One might expect that in his chapter on 'The art of the historian', Butterfield would come to deal more directly with the process of historical research, inference and writing. It was here that he acknowledged that the historian was not merely an observer or a passive transcriber of information but an active subject who constituted his/her object of study. Yet the portrait Butterfield painted of the historian's activity left the matter in the deepest obscurity.23 On the question of research he contrasted the 'purely scientific' work of the historian (the simple extraction of facts from the sources) with what he called the 'historic sense'. This was 'a kind of awareness that only

21 Ibid. p. 22. 2 Ibid. pp. 26-7. 23 Ibid. chapter 5 (pp. 90-106); we quote from pp. 92-3.



WHIG HISTORY 9

comes through insight and sympathy and imagination'; to put it to work was ' an art . .. something like divination'. These 'resources' of our 'humanity' enable us to discover: '[the] innuendo [of] our documents'; 'the overtones in history and in life'; 'the human side of our subject'; 'significances' as distinct from facts.

These are surely incoherent gestures: Butterfield expressly refrained from any explicit formulation of either the working, or the objects, of the 'historic sense'. Furthermore, Butterfield made contradictory statements about the role and scope of imaginative sympathy in the art of the historian. Here, when discussing this issue directly, he suggested that 'the whig historian has performed this part of his function admirably, but ... for ... only one side of the historical story': that is, that the whig historian has exercised his imaginative sympathy only on behalf of such heroes as Luther. Yet throughout the earlier chapters of the book Butterfield had argued that whig history necessarily distorts the motives even of its own heroes.24

What is striking is the dichotomy Butterfield was positing here, between the researching of 'facts' and the discovering of 'significances'. The one activity was too simple to require any elaboration: historical facts are simply waiting to be found. By contrast, the other activity was imbued with mystery: it could be indicated by hints and gestures, but never described or defined. In neither case was there anything useful that could be said about the work of the historian, which remained a craft mystery.

As for historical writing - which he portrayed as 'the art of abridgement' - Butterfield's positive pronouncements were again brief and delphic :25

the abridgement... must be an exposition in some form or other of complexity.... [The] problem of abridgement .. is... the organic question of how to reduce details without losing the purport and tenor of the whole. All abridgement is a kind of impressionism ... and it implies the gift of seeing the significant detail and detecting the sympathies between events, the gift of apprehending the whole pattern upon which the historical process is working.... It is the selection of facts for the purpose of maintaining the impression - maintaining, in spite of omissions, the inner relations of the whole....

Just as with research, so with writing: Butterfield could only gesture towards what was required. And once again the ubiquitous formulation emerged: good writing was based upon good selection, selection from that plenum of history which made up the historical record.

We may fairly assume that Butterfield was writing genuinely from his own experience, conveying what the problems of historiography felt like to him. But it is clear that he had not reflected on that experience in such a way as to offer any convincing guide to other historians. And perhaps this is why, in Hall's words,26 'The whig interpretation ... fails to give any positive idea of what real, non-whig history may be ... [It] is a negative essay. It tells us what history should not be, not what it might be.' Butterfield could offer no concrete

24 See particularly ibid. chapter 3 (pp. 34-63); and also pp. 27-8, 78-82. Ibid. pp. I02-3. 26 Hall, 'On whiggism', pp. 49, 50.



IO ADRIAN WILSON AND T. G. ASHPLANT

alternative because, as we have tried to show, he had not theorised the tasks of the historian. His essay was designed to a different end: to evoke a certain sensibility towards the past, the sensibility which studies the past 'for the sake of the past', which delights in the concrete and the complex, which 'goes out to meet the past', which searches for 'unlikenesses between past and present'.27 It is this sensibility which is displayed in The whig interpretation as the counter, the alternative, the antidote to whig history. But this leaves us with one sensibility battling it out against another; Butterfield bequeathed no logical criteria of choice. As a result, his arguments fail to persuade Hall. Against Butterfield's critique of the whig concepts of filiation and progress, Hall evokes an alternative vision of the historian's purpose :28

The need in the human consciousness to search for ancestry and continuity is deep.... The question is put, and the questioner will find an answer somewhere; if academic historians are silent he or she will seek an answer in other ways.... Academia does not exist solely for the sake of delighting and gratifying itself.

This very different sensibility is just as valid as that which Butterfield sought to elicit. If one wishes, as we do, to go beyond such a confrontation of differing sensibilities, then one will have to develop a different framework of historiographic critique, and above all a framework of historiographical method. In the remainder of this paper we shall argue that the problems of what Butterfield identified as 'whig history' arise from the structural position of the historian in studying the past, and are more accurately and fruitfully defined as problems of present-centredness.

II. PRESENT-CENTRED HISTORY

Butterfield was consistent in arguing that the 'whig fallacy' had something to do with the relation between the present and the past. His claim was that (with our emphases added) :29

It is part and parcel of the whig interpretation of history that it studies the past with reference to the present... Through this system of immediate reference to the present day historical personages can easily and irresistibly be classed into the men who furthered progress and the men who tried to hinder it.... The whig historian stands on the summit of the twentieth century and organises his scheme of historyfrom the point of view of his own day.

What we would point out is that Butterfield moved here between two different formulations. The first and dominant formulation was that the whig fallacy arose from 'the principle of direct reference to the present'. The most characteristically Butterfieldian rendering of this first formulation was 'with one eye on the present'.30 The second formation was rather different.

27 Butterfield, The whig interpretation, pp. i6, 92, I7. 28 Hall, 'On whiggism', pp. 53, 54. 29 Butterfield, The whig interpretation, pp. I I-I 3. This passage is quoted by Hall, 'On whiggism',

p. 46. 3 Butterfield, The wvhig interpretation, p. 3I.



WHIG HISTORY

According to this characterization of the problem, it was the 'point of view' of the present that was at work.

The distinctiveness of this second formulation can be brought out if we recast it into Butterfieldian metaphor. History written from the point of view of the present amounts to history written with both eyes in the present. 'With both eyes': that is, with the whole observing apparatus. 'In the present': that is, constrained by the perceptual and conceptual categories of the present, bound within the framework of the present, deploying a perceptual 'set' derived from the present. And this, we want to argue, is the fundamental cause of the 'whig fallacy'; this is at once the reason that it arises at all and the reason it is so pervasive; this is the mainspring of a major pattern of historiographical error.

The term we use to describe this condition is present-centredness. By using this term, we seek to capture the fundamental epistemological point that what any observer sees is a function of the position from which that observer observes; or, more accurately in this context, what any would-be-knower construes is a function of that would-be-knower's construing 'position'. What 'whig history' exemplifies is that a historian's position in the present can lead that historian to misunderstand, and so to misrepresent, the past he/she is studying. This is not just a matter of imposing anachronistic value judgments and moral judgments. Nor is it just a matter of being unfair to the losers in the story. It also involves (as Butterfield observed) distorting the activities even of the whig historian's own heroes. Thus what is wrong with whig history concerns not merely values or moral judgments but also the substantive accuracy of the story. And the reason for this is that the whig historian observes, researches, and writes from a present-centred viewpoint.

But what does it mean to describe a historian as 'present-centred'? Is this to say anything more than the commonsense observation that the historian lives in the present, but studies the past? In what way does the historian's position in the present matter? The researching and writing of history is a conceptual operation: it necessarily involves interpretation, even in the seemingly simple act of description. And interpretation takes place within a certain framework; it involves the making of assumptions, the using of words, the posing of questions. Thus the attempt to recognize or classify the past, let alone to understand it, depends essentially on the framework of the historian. Now the critical problem for the historian is whether the framework he/she is using is appropriate to the past he/she is studying. The case of whig history demonstrates that it is perfectly possible for a historian to work with inappropriate categories, with anachronistic assumptions and expectations, in short with a present-centred mental 'set', and so to produce history which distorts the past. As we shall see, this problem is by no means confined to classical whig history. But the advantage of whig history as an illustration of our argument is that it presents these problems in a form with which most historians are familiar.

What the example of whig history serves to illustrate is a far wider set of problems inherent in the activities of each and every historian. Although it



I2 ADRIAN WILSON AND T. G. ASHPLANT

may seem to the historian as if his/her enterprise is simple and unproblem- atical, in fact, there are major difficulties inherent in the very project of writing history at all. This is not how it appears to the working historian, sitting for example in the Round Room and perusing the document which has finally appeared from the bowels of the Public Records Office. On the contrary, provided that the historian has mastered the script and the basic format of such a document, all appears to be transparent: the labour of reading, interpreting, note-taking may be arduous, but it hardly seems to pose an epistemological problem. Yet this seeming naturalness of the historian's work conceals fundamental difficulties concerning the relationship between the historian, the document in question, and the past society from which it derives.

To begin to understand these difficulties, it is necessary to develop an appropriate terminology. Hence we distinguish systematically between several terms commonly used interchangeably by historians - with the effect, we believe, of eliding crucial stages in the process of historical research and writing.

We refer to all surviving material traces of the human past as relics of the past. Such relics include both free-standing human artefacts, and natural features marked or modified by human impact (earthworks, quarries, tracks, etc.). A major category among these relics comprises texts of all sorts - inscribed, written or printed. These have traditionally constituted a large proportion of those relics of the past which historians have chosen to work with.

In referring to the historian's use of relics of the past, we draw a distinction between the terms 'source' and 'evidence'. This distinction is intended to register two different stages of the historian's involvement with the relics of the past. Those portions of the relics of the past which historians turn to in investigating the past, we refer to as sources. Which relics are treated as sources changes over time. In part, new interests constitute different relics as sources.31 In part, new techniques allow further relics to be employed as sources.32 And, in addition, new interests and techniques allow relics which have been examined as sources for one set of questions to be re-examined as sources for another set.33 In each case, the treatment of certain relics as sources involves the historian making assumptions about how the investigation of these relics can serve to further the chosen line of historical enquiry. In other words, the very act of defining any relics of the past as sources for a given historical enquiry already imports the presence of the historian. A source does

31 This has happened on a large scale with the development of social history. For instance, the John Johnson collection of printed ephemera in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, which was originally assembled to record varieties of printing practice, is now increasingly used for the contents of its handbills and flysheets.

32 Thus radiocarbon dating permits organic materials to be examined as a source for questions of ancient chronology; ultra-violet light enables an erased or over-written manuscript to be read.

3 For instance, the rise of labour history and women's history has involved challenging the claim that there are no sources from which such histories could be written.



WHIG HISTORY

not exist in and of itself; it is created by the historian's focusing on some relic of the past.

We refer to (parts of) the sources as evidence only when they are deployed within a historian's argument. In this way, we wish to stress the forensic aspect of the term - that evidence is always for some argument, and adduced by some historian. Evidence, then, is a term defining a use to which certain relics of the past have been put. Some relics having been previously selected as sources, that is as bodies of potential evidence, the historian has subsequently extracted certain aspects of, or items from, those sources as evidence for particular parts of the argument. So the term evidence refers to a stage in the processing of relics of the past at which they are integrally entwined in the historian's categories.

To refer to relics of the past simply as sources is to omit the historian's intervention in focusing on a certain limited portion of those relics. To refer to sources, in whole or in part, as evidence is to elide the essential role of the historian in extracting parts of the sources as evidence for a case. The term ' evidence' used in that way is crucially misleading. It implies that the sources, or that part of them being referred to, by themselves constitute evidence for something; whereas in fact they can only ever do so within the context of the historian's argumentation.

In short, the historian is using, as sources of evidence about the past, relics of the past which are the product of human activities (both individual and institutional) of the past. The interpretation of these relics demands a comprehension both of the category-systems which shaped the human activities through which these relics were created, and of the uses which those activities implied for these relics. As we shall now see, such a comprehension is by no means easily attained; indeed, there are powerful pressures working against the historian's attaining it.

The activities which produced the given relics were shaped and structured by the category-systems of the past. Now it cannot be known at the outset of any historical enquiry whether the category-systems underlying those relics to be employed in the enquiry are the same as the category-system of the historian. And certainly the questions which structure the historian's enquiry, and which indeed have defined these particular relics of the past as a source of potential evidence for that enquiry, derive from the present. Hence there is a gap between questions posed within one category-system, and sources of evidence generated within what was quite possibly another category-system. The danger is that unless the historian is first aware of that gap, and explores its nature, then he/she will misinterpret such relics as offering direct answers to his/her questions, when in fact they cannot do so. It is clear that this procedure, left uncorrected, would lead to misunderstanding.

This problem is not confined to the realm of historical enquiry, although it presents particular difficulties there. All human communication, even in a shared present, involves a degree of negotiation between different category- systems. The need becomes many times greater in investigating the past. The



I4 ADRIAN WILSON AND T. G. ASHPLANT

historian normally uses his/her understanding of language as the principal working tool or device for reading/interpreting a relic of the past. In everyday life, we use language in conversation and in correspondence: here there is a living interlocutor or correspondent who can answer back, argue, explain, query, and so on. However, in historical research there is no analogue to this interchange.34 How, then, are we to notice the difference between the two situations, between the two sets of uses of our linguistic skills? We may be pulled up short by brute incomprehension. Or again, we may find that 'a sentence from Aquinas strikes us' as bizarre. But this will point us to a difficulty only if we are prepared to be sympathetic. And all too often, our misunderstanding is enfolded upon itself in such a way as to be experienced as comprehension - as, for instance, when a sentence or paragraph from (say) William Harvey strikes us as modern, advanced, sensible, scientific, experimental, correct. Through resting content with this perception, and setting aside what we do not understand or agree with as backward, irrational and superstitious, we fall into an impenetrable present-centredness, as Butterfield did in The origins of modern science.

Just as each and every relic of the past was constituted within a category- system of its own society, so too it originally had a use in what was once the present. The historian in examining such a relic has a use to which he/she is putting (or intending to put) that relic. And each of these uses is associated with an underlying pattern of activity. One pattern of activity underlies the use which the relic originally had; another pattern of activity underlies the use to which the historian is now putting it. Now it is almost never the case that these two uses are the same. On the contrary, the normal state of affairs is that the historian is putting the given relic to a use for which its actual creators did not intend it and could not have intended it. Thus the historian uses police files to reconstruct the motives and social profiles of revolutionary crowds; uses parish registers to discover the mean age at marriage; uses Newton's Principia to elucidate the nature of scientific method. Hence the activity of the historian is not merely independent of the activities which produced the given relic; rather, the activity of the historian is systematically at odds with those activities.

What enhances this problem is that in the natural act of reading, the historian is necessarily, though perhaps unconsciously, assigning some activity to the person/people/institution in the past that produced the given relic. Unless the historian attends to the discrepancy of uses which is involved, it is likely that he/she will assign the wrong activity. As Skinner has shown for the history of ideas, and as Cunningham argues for the history of science, the nature of the activities thus imputed is a function of the historian's initial framework of enquiry.35 In writing a book, a sixteenth-century author is assumed by the historian of ideas to be contributing to political thought; in

34 Oral history constitutes at least a partial exception to this rule. 35 See Quentin Skinner, 'Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas', History and

Theogy, viii (I969), 3-53; and Cunningham's paper cited in note 4 above.



WHIG HISTORY I5

carrying out an experiment, an eighteenth-century natural philosopher is assumed by the historian of science to be practising science. These assumptions once made, the activities and their authors are hacked about until they fit into the procrustean bed prepared for them: here a superstitious survival, there an idea ahead of its time. The butchery completed and the carcass trimmed, the historian can press on relentlessly, content that everything does indeed fit into the initial framework.

This analysis demonstrates that the very position of the historian - as an observer in the present making use of the relics of the past - leads directly to misunderstanding. The degree and the form of misunderstanding can vary enormously; but there can be no mistaking the fact that it is from such misunderstanding that historical research begins. Thus the problem formulated (for the history of ideas) by Quentin Skinner as 'Meaning and Understanding' might be better expressed as 'Meaning and Misunderstanding'.36

Unless the historian attends to this problem, two pervasive dangers present themselves. The first of these is that the historian will simply find in the past what he/she is looking for, namely what fits his/her initial categories. This is the simplest form of what Butterfield characterized as the whig error. Alternatively, and more subtly, the historian may search for what fits these categories, and fail to find anything which so fits; construe this failure as indicating the absence of the phenomenon in question; and then erect this absence into a substantive finding. These two errors, though seemingly opposite in character, are but two sides of the same coin. In the former, that which fits the categories of the present is singled out, while the rest of the past is discarded; in the latter, the past is seen simply as the negation, the absence, of the presence. In either case, the past is subordinated to, forced to fit, the categories of the present.

The reason that such distortions can occur is not confined to historical interpretation, but is a property of human perception, interpretation and inference at large. What any human observer 'sees' is a function not simply of the object(s) that observer is observing, but also of the observer's own categories, assumptions, values, expectations, hypotheses, preconceptions, purposes, interests, attitudes. The most obvious way of illustrating this, in the specific context of historical research and inference, is that two different historians can look at the same document, the same source, and see radically different things. Knowledge, then, is constructed. What makes this possible is the complexity and diversity of meanings which can be inferred from any so- called 'text'. To adapt a famous philosophical example, we would be well advised to regard every historical relic (document, text, building) as a duck-rabbit-cow-pig-elephant-table-mountain- and so on, ad infinitum.3 The historian of ducks will see a duck (or no duck -in which case that historian ignores this particular relic); the historian of rabbits will see a rabbit

36 Ibid.

37 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford, I953),

II, xi (I 94).



ADRIAN WILSON AND T. G. ASHPLANT

(or no rabbit); and so on, again ad infinitum, for the number of possible historians is also infinite.

It may help to convey our conception if we distinguish explicitly between our concept of present-centredness and the seemingly similar American terms, 'present-mindedness' and ' presentism '.38 Both of these terms are to be preferred to Butterfield's 'whig history', on the grounds that they are free from its parochialism. But epistemologically they have no more content than does 'whig history' itself. 'Presentism' is simply too vague to admit of a specific gloss, but is in fact taken to be the same as 'present-mindedness'. What 'present-mindedness' refers to is precisely that 'system of reference to the present' which was Butterfield's main formulation of 'whig' history. Here, then, the emphasis is on the places to which the historian directs his/her attention, the directions in which the historian's mind goes. We are drawing attention to something much more fundamental, though linked: the position

from which the historian is attending, the categories in which the historian is thinking, reading, researching, writing.

We have argued: (i) that Butterfield correctly identified a pervasive pattern of anachronism in historical writing; (2) that nevertheless he failed to define the nature of this error adequately, or to specify a satisfactory remedy; (3) that the error in fact arises from present-centredness, that is to say that the position of the historian within the perceptual and conceptual categories of the present constrains and tends to distort his/her construal of the past; and (4) that present-centredness is inherent in the process of historical research, and hence that historical inference is inherently problematical. In a subsequent article, we will consider other varieties of present-centred history than the whig variant identified by Butterfield, and we will argue that present-centredness is a condition not solely of individual works of historical writing, but of the very structure of the discipline itself. In the light of this we will consider how historians do, and how they should, tackle the problem of understanding the past through its surviving relics.

38 R. L. Schuyler, 'Some historical idols', Political S'cience Qziarterly, XLVII (I932); David Hull, 'In defense of presentism', History and Theory, xviii (I979), I-I5; Tosh, Pu11suit of history, pp. I I9-25.



whig history and present-centred history

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