Biography
Butterfield was born on 7 October 1900 inWork
Butterfield's main interests were''The Whig Interpretation of History''
Butterfield's book, '' The Whig Interpretation of History'' (1931), became a classic for history students and is still widely read. Butterfield had in mind especially the historians of his own country but his criticism of the retrospective creation of a line of progress toward the glorious present can be and has subsequently been applied generally. The " Whig interpretation of history" is now a general label applied to various historical interpretations. Butterfield found the Whig interpretation of history objectionable because it warps the past to see it in terms of the issues of the present and attempts to squeeze the contending forces of the past into a form that reminds us of ourselves. Butterfield argued that the historian must seek the ability to see events as they were perceived by those who lived through them. Butterfield wrote that "Whiggishness" is too handy a "rule of thumb... by which the historian can select and reject, and can make his points of emphasis". He also wrote about how simple pick-and-choose history misses the point, "Very strange bridges are used to make the passage from one state of things to another; we may lose sight of them in our surveys of general history, but their discovery is the glory of historical research. History is not the study of origins; rather it is the analysis of all the mediations by which the past was turned into our present". In 1944, Butterfield wrote in ''The Englishman and His History'' that,We are all of us exultant and unrepentant whigs. Those who, perhaps in the misguided austerity of youth, wish to drive out that whig interpretation, (that particular thesis which controls our abridgment of English history,) are sweeping a room which humanly speaking cannot long remain empty. They are opening the door for seven devils which, precisely because they are newcomers, are bound to be worse than the first. We, on the other hand, will not dream of wishing it away, but will rejoice in an interpretation of the past which has grown up with us, has grown up with the history itself, and has helped to make the history... we must congratulate ourselves that our 17th-century forefathers... did not resurrect and fasten upon us the authentic middle ages... in England we made peace with our middle ages by misconstruing them; and, therefore, we may say that "wrong" history was one of our assets. The whig interpretation came at exactly the crucial moment and, whatever it may have done to our history, it had a wonderful effect on English politics... in every Englishman there is hidden something of a whig that seems to tug at the heart-strings.
''Christianity and History''
Butterfield's 1949 book ''Christianity and History'', asks if history provides answers to the meaning of life, answering in the negative: * "So the purpose of life is not in the far future, nor, as we so often imagine, around the next corner, but the whole of it is here and now, as fully as ever it will be on this planet." * "If there is a meaning in history, therefore, it lies not in the systems and organizations that are built over long periods, but in something more essentially human, something in each personality considered for mundane purposes as an end in himself." * "I have nothing to say at the finish except that if one wants a permanent rock in life and goes deep enough for it, it is difficult for historical events to shake it. There are times when we can never meet the future with sufficient elasticity of mind, especially if we are locked in the contemporary systems of thought. We can do worse than remember a principle which both gives us a firm Rock and leaves us the maximum elasticity for our minds: the principle: Hold to Christ, and for the rest be totally uncommitted." Butterfield and his Anglo-Catholic contemporary, Christopher Dawson, have been referred to as prominent "providential" historians.''The Origins of Modern Science''
According toPrizes and accolades
In 1922, Butterfield was awarded the University Member's Prize for English Essay, writing on the subject of English novelistBibliography
*'' The Historical Novel'', 1924. *''The Peace Tactics of Napoleon, 1806-1808'', 1929. * ''The Whig Interpretation of History'', London: G. Bell, 1931. *''Napoleon'', Duckworth, Great Lives series, 1939. *''The Statecraft of Machiavelli'', 1940. *''The Englishman and His History'', 1944. *''Lord Acton'', 1948. *''Christianity and History'', 1949. *''George III, Lord North and the People, 1779-80'', 1949. *''The Origins of Modern Science, 1300-1800'', 1949. *''History and Human Relations'', 1951. Contains the essay "Moral Judgments in History". *''The Reconstruction of an Historical Episode: The History of the Enquiry into the Origins of the Seven Years' War'', 1951. *''Liberty in the Modern World'', 1951. *''Christianity in European History'', 1952. *''Christianity, Diplomacy and War'', 1953. *''Man on His Past: The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship'', 1955. *''George III and the Historians'', 1957, revised edition, 1959. *''International Conflict in the Twentieth Century'', 1960. *''History and Man's Attitude to the Past'', 1961. *''The Universities and Education Today'', 1962. *''The present state of historical scholarship'', 1965. *''Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics'' (co-edited with Martin Wight), 1966. *''Magna Carta in the Historiography of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries'', 1969. *''The Discontinuities between the Generations in History'', 1971. *''The Politicization of Society: Essays'', 1979. *''The Origins of History'' (edited by A. Watson) (1981). His final thoughts on history, emphasizing the role of religion. *''Essays on the History of Science'' (edited by Karl W. Schweizer, 2005) *''The International Thought of Herbert Butterfield'' (edited by Karl W. Schweizer and Paul Sharp, 2006)See also
Notes
References
*Bentley, Michael ''The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield: History, Science and God'', Cambridge University Press, 2012. *Chadwick, Owen "Acton and Butterfield" pages 386-405 from ''Journal of Ecclesiastical History'', volume 38, 1987. *Coll, Alberto R. ''The Wisdom of Statecraft: Sir Herbert Butterfield and the Philosophy of International Politics'', Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1985. *Elliott, J.H. & H.G. Koenigsberger (editors) ''The Diversity of History: Essays in Honour of Sir Herbert Butterfield'', Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970. * Elton, G.R. "Herbert Butterfield and the Study of History" pages 729-743 from ''Historical Journal'', Volume 27, 1984. * Reba N. Soffer. ''History, Historians, and Conservatism in Britain and America: From the Great War to Thatcher and Reagan'' (2009), chapter on Butterfield *Thompson, Kenneth W. (editor) ''Herbert Butterfield: The Ethics of History and Politics'', Washington: University Press of America, 1980. * Schweizer, Karl, ''The International Thought of Herbert Butterfield'', Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007 * Schweizer, Karl, ed. Herbert Butterfield: Essays on the History of Science, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005Further reading
*Bentley, Michael, ''The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield, History, Science and God'', Cambridge University Press, 2011. . * Coll, Alberto R., ''The Wisdom of Statecraft: Sir Herbert Butterfield and the Philosophy of International Politics'', Duke University Press, 1985. * McClay, Wilfred M., ''Whig History at Eighty: The Enduring Relevance of Herbert Butterfield and His Most Famous Book'', 2011. * McIntire, C. T., ''Herbert Butterfield: Historian as Dissenter'', Yale University Press, 2004 * McIntyre, Kenneth B., ''Herbert Butterfield: History, Providence, and Skeptical Politics'', ISI Books, 2011 * Sewell, Keith C., ''Herbert Butterfield and the Interpretation of History'', Palgrave Macmillan, 2005External links