The historiographer Herbert Butterfield wrote a book against what he called “the Whig Interpretation of History.” For him this meant the kind of history in which the past is always and only considered with reference to the present. The historian is that arbiter and judge of the past whose moral judgments separate the wheat from the chaff, all according to the infallible normativity of the present. The absolutizing of the present (and relativizing of the past) has numerous consequences: most basically, anachronism; but also the diversion of readers from actual historical process, failure to seek to understand those judged to be against the side which seems to have come to fruition in the present, and ultimately the brandishing of an unearned and unattainable moral adjudication of the past. Whig history manifests itself, particularly, in general histories. The specialist, because of her immersion in “irrelevant” details, is less likely to be misdirected by the importuning present, whereas the the general historian has the overwhelming tendency to represent the past so selectively in terms of the present that his account actually becomes a lie. Butterfield proposes that historians bear in mind the fact that as far as we can tell, lost in the complexity of its process, the whole of the past leads to the whole of the present. Consequently much of the blather about causes, especially when one person, one event, or one movement in the past are connected (as by a direct and traceable chain) to some person, event, or movement in the present — such blather is inherently false.

The true historian should be motivated, says Herbert Butterfield, by a love of the past for its own sake. Apart from this passion, whig history remains a constant danger. A polemic urge is behind much of whig history. Butterfield writes,

Behind all the fallacies of the whig historian there lies the passionate desire to come to a judgment of values, to make history answer questions and decide issues and to give the historian the last word in a controversy. He [the whig historian] imagines he is inconclusive unless he can give a verdict; and studying Protestant and Catholic in the 16th century he feels that loose threads are still left hanging unless he can show which party was in the right. He wishes to come to a general proposition, that can be held as a truth demonstrated by history, a lesson that can be taken away and pondered apart from the accidents of a particular historical episode; and unless he can attain to something like this he feels that he has been working at a sum which had no answer, he has been wasting himself upon mere processes, he has been watching complication and change for the mere sake of complication and change. Yet this, which he seems to disparage, is precisely the function of the historian. The eliciting of general truths or of propositions claiming universal validity is the one kind of consummation which it is beyond the competence of history to achieve.

The reason I recount all this to you, gentle readers, is that I am troubled by it. If Butterfield is right — if the past is misused when we approach it for the sake of the present — then when the present forces us to act, the past can no longer be a resource. To bring the force of this problem to bear, let me ask a pointed question: is the quest for the historical origins of the neo-liberal order an instance of whig history? One hopes not. All radical critiques of society fail if they are not allowed to question the past  about the present.

All of which leads me to the following proposal: perhaps history for the sake of critique is of a different order than history as such. Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism is a great example of this I think. Perry Anderson makes it clear in the foreword to the book that he is not presuming to offer an original history, nor to provide a marxist narrative of the past based solely on the more detailed studies of other original marxist histories. In other words, he is using history (any history characterized by “intrinsic solidity and intelligence”) to contribute to what he calls the “the science of historical materialism,” announcing his intentions from the start, and allowing that his narrative takes place at a level secondary to original historical research and writing. Having just finished Butterfield, I was glad to read the following very un-Whiggish passage in Anderson’s book:

Maximum awareness and respect for the scholarship of historians outside the boundaries of Marxism is not incompatible with rigorous pursuit of a Marxist historical enquiry: it is a condition of it. Conversely, Marx and Engels themselves can never be taken simply at their word: the errors of their writings on the past should not be evaded or ignored, but identified and criticized. To do so is not to depart from historical materialism, but to rejoin it. There is no place for fideism in rational knowledge, which is necessarily cumulative; and the greatness of the founders of new sciences has never been proof against misjudgments or myths, any more than it has been impaired by them. To take ‘liberties’ with the signature of Marx is in this sense merely to enter into the freedom of Marxism.

What will be interesting to see, now that the idea of whig history has entered my critical apparatus, is whether Anderson’s secondary narrative is a legitimate harnessing of the richness of detail of good history writing, or if it’s just another skewed example of general history with a misleadingly hopeful foreword.

I’m sure I’ll have more to say on this subject as my historiography class delves into historical materialism after Spring Break.