Robert McHenry: Whig History and Whig Biography
I’ve been reading A History of Histories by the British historian John Burrow. It’s a survey of how the writing of history has changed – dare I say evolved? – over the millennia since Herodotus set down much of what we know of the ancient world. In a nutshell, our ideas of what counts as history and what purposes are served by writing about it have changed a good deal. For more detail, I highly recommend the book.
One small matter that struck me was the notion of “whig history.” It’s a phrase I’ve encountered before and understood to mean a kind of triumphalist point of view in the writing of history: the notion that all of history has been preparing for and aimed at the present state of things. The phrase was introduced by Herbert Butterfield in the 1930s to describe, pejoratively, a certain tendency to complacency in histories written in the 19th century, the heyday of the reformist Whig Party.
Burrow makes a simple but profound observation that had escaped me: Narrative history is almost inevitably whiggish to some degree. It’s not a matter of triumphalism or partisanship so much as the unavoidable consequence of the fact that the historian, whenever he is writing, occupies the unique present moment and is highly apt to pick out from the nearly infinite number of incidents and accidents of the past those that appear to bear a particular relevance to that present. In other words, whatever his specific interest may be, the historian will have somewhere in the back of his mind the question “How did we get to now from then?”
From that question it is a very short step to the conviction that, given all that appears to have been pointing to it, the present moment in all its circumstantiality was the inevitable result. I mentioned a remarkably transparent example of this kind of thinking in a blog post some time ago, from which I quote:
A charming example of this last mode of intellection can be found in the article “Government” that James Mill, father of the more famous John Stuart, wrote for an early edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. In it he began from first principles and, step by painstaking step, deduced the ideal form of government, which – what were the odds? – turned out to be a constitutional monarchy with a bicameral legislature, part elected and part hereditary!
The whig view of history comes in two flavors, one teleologically directed and one not. Think of the difference as analogous to that between Intelligent Design and natural evolution.
Burrow’s own gentle reminder of the danger in seeing history this way is this:
We have the advantage of hindsight, but historians have learned to be wary of overexploiting this. One has usually only to utter the dreaded word “whig” to induce a sudden modesty; one of the advantages of hindsight is to have learned not to abuse it.
This sort of distortion is a natural consequence of looking backwards down the tunnel of time, where all contingency has apparently been dissolved in the concreteness of what actually happened. I’m wondering if this is not related also to the fact that we itinerant consciousnesses are located in space in such a way that everything else always appears to have been laid out around us. Copernicus et al. have managed to shake us loose from the illusion that the Earth lies at the center of the universe, but each of us individually continues to stand at the center of the world as lived. This gives us a grandstand view of much that is of interest, but it can lead us into unsound conclusions about what is truly important.