Butterfield, Elton, and what historians are for

Earlier this week, while recharging my batteries back home in the mountains with Christmas, friends, and family, I read a good short piece at The Critic titled “What are historians for?” What immediately got my attention was the picture of Herbert Butterfield, a now lesser-known but influential historian and philosopher of history. His Whig Interpretation of History was an especially strong influence on me at a crucial time in my growth.

The author, Jack Nicholson, begins with latter day historian David Cannadine as an example of a historian trying to create a “usable past” for pragmatic political purposes (on this side of the Atlantic, compare Joe Biden’s court historians Jon Meacham, Michael Beschloss, and company, who have provided both dubious history-flavored PR for the administration as well as even more dubious historical raw material with which to browbeat opponents).

For contrast, and for a glimpse of the historian’s proper purpose, Nicholson reaches back to invoke first Geoffrey Elton and then, more pointedly, Butterfield. A sample:

Another historian, Herbert Butterfield, remarked just over fifty years ago: “Sometimes I wonder at dead of night whether, during the next fifty years, Protestantism may not be at a disadvantage because a few centuries ago, it decided to get rid of monks.” He saw the emerging postmodern condition which we still grapple with, and the way in which Western civilisation and the Protestant world in this country, specifically, was beginning to wane. Elton saw many “faiths”, many ideologies, people divided. Butterfield feared the absence of monks who would bear witness to objective truth for others. 

It could be that the task of the historian remains in effect to be like a monk. That is what Butterfield and Elton seemed to be driving at in their life’s work—and now we are fifty years down the line. Within the five decades which have elapsed, Britain’s growth problems have not been resolved nor its constitutional dilemmas, and politicians offer quick-fix solutions. Others suggest that we should be tearing down statues and denouncing our forebears. Do something. Anything.

Historians should tell us, if anything, to stop and think. We should be challenged and humbled by the past before acting. 

Compare Butterfield’s words of warning from The Whig Interpretation of History:

[T]he chief aim of the historian is the elucidation of the unlikenesses between past and present . . . It is not for him to stress and magnify the similarities between one age and another, and he is riding after a whole flock of misapprehensions if he goes to hunt for the present in the past.

Fortunately, there are plenty of historians who resist the easy, facile, superficial comparisons and quick-fix propositions, but it is the others who are in demand—for soundbites, for specious comparisons, for fuel for grievance politics, for dodges, excuses, and rationalizations of radical change. In other words, that’s what sells.

Reading Nicholson’s whole short piece, and if you can’t be an Elton or a Butterfield, at least seek them out.

I discovered Elton during my graduate school historiography survey and was intrigued by how angry he made more postmodern or deconstructionist classmates—those who didn’t believe there was such a thing as objective truth. I recommend his book The Practice of History. I’ve written about Butterfield a few times here before, on the foolishness of having “faith in human nature” here and on presentism here. And to be fair to Cannadine, I am only familiar with him from his volume on George V in the Penguin Monarchs series and Victorious Century, volume eight in the Penguin History of Britain, so I cannot say whether he has been accurately represented or was simply a handy example for Nicholson.