(Part I – including a background to this series; Part II)

Part the Third: Great Men & Whigs

Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.

Thomas Carlyle

The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.

Friedrich Hegel

The history of our country during the last hundred and sixty years is eminently the history, of physical, of moral, and of intellectual improvement.

Lord Macaulay

It is part and parcel of the Whig interpretation of history that it studies the past with reference to the present.

Herbert Butterfield

Much of the history which emerged in Europe after about 350 C.E. was the story of kings, popes, and battles. To some extent this made a great deal of sense. History, as a discipline, generally holds written records to be the most important. And the most easily accessible written records were court records, accounts of battles, memoirs and so forth. In addition, a lot of histories were commissioned by rulers in order to celebrate their accomplishments. The idea that history could best be told through the lens of political and – to a lesser extent – religious rulers continued through the middle ages, the early modern period and into the nineteenth century.

While the nineteenth-century Enlightenment did encourage scholars to try and separate truth from myth (I’ll have more to say about the concept of “objective” history in a future essay), it did little to disabuse historians of the idea that history could best be told through the stories of “great men.” This idea probably reached its apotheosis in the arguments of Thomas Carlyle expressed in the quote above. Carlyle practiced what he preached in such works as Frederick the Great. He also adopted many of the racial views of the day. Carlyle himself fell into significant posthumous disrepute after World War II when it emerged that Joseph Goebbels had been a fan and had read excerpts of Carlyle’s work to Hitler.

Carlyle: a great man (?) who wrote about great men

Great Man history persisted as a dominant approach to history well into the twentieth century and is still widely read. That said, although Great Man history is biography, not all biography is necessarily Great Man history. Jumping into the twentieth century briefly, modern scholars have worked diligently to recover the stories of more obscure lives in order to provide a sharply different perspective on events. Two excellent examples of this are Allen Greer’s highly regarded account of the seventeenth-century Mohawk saint Kateri Tekakwitha and Peter Mancall’s superb story of the anti-Puritan Thomas Morton.

Somewhat related to Great Man theory is Whig history. Defining Whig history is a little like Justice Stewart defining pornography. Perhaps the best, brief, definition is the final quote above by the late English historian Herbert Butterfield.

Herbert Butterfield

Butterfield’s short 1931 work The Whig Interpretation of History was written for the express purpose of criticizing Whig history. The slipperiness of the term was highlighted by E.H. Carr in his 1961 What is History? Although commending Butterfield’s work in many ways, Carr noted that Butterfield “did not… name a single Whig except Fox, who was no historian, or a single historian save Acton, who was no whig”.

Other historians have since argued that, by the time Butterfield wrote Whig Interpretation, Whig history had “died at the Somme, Passenchendale, and the myriad slaughter-houses of World War I, along with the youth of Europe.” In other words, the sunny view of human progress noted by Macaulay (above) did not survive the trenches.

Hard to hold onto that Whig view…

So, having said all that, what was Whig history and why should we care? Let me take a shot at the former then make a couple of observations about the latter.

Whig history, like providential history (and Marxist history for that matter) is history with a trajectory. That is, history is moving along some kind of, essentially, predestined pathway. While Judeo-Christian authors saw history unfolding according to God’s plans, the Whigs saw history being moved by a pursuit of liberty (variously defined). Thus, Whig history is progressive in the non-political sense of the word. The great Whig historian Thomas Macaulay (& others) emphasized the triumph of Protestantism over Catholicism, of Britain over France, of parliamentary rule over monarchy, of (Anglo-American) civilization over (Native American and Highland Scots’) savagery (manifest destiny fits in here).

Thomas Macaulay; “The church is the handmaid of tyranny and the steady enemy of liberty.”

Whig history also tends toward grand, sweeping narratives that are beautifully written (more than one modern historian, while decrying the Whig approach, has lamented the loss of style). If modern histories are like driving from New Jersey to California using only local streets and state highways, Whigs make the trip on I80.

Of course, like any approach to history rooted in a narrow interpretation, Whig history had to ignore a lot of events and actors. In American Whig history, Native Americans are glossed over as savages removed by the inevitable progress of history. The British slave trade and American slavery are often completely absent from Whig accounts. In part, obviously, this was because it was hard to square the idea of liberty with the practice of slavery. But it was also because, to many Whigs, slavery was a blip, something that didn’t fit in the narrative structure.

Probably the quintessential Whig history is Macaulay’s History of England. In America, Francis Parkman (particularly in the multi-volume France and England in North America) and George Bancroft (especially his seven-volume History of the United States) are usually considered to be Whig historians.

Francis Parkman, “The growth of New England was a result of the aggregate efforts of a busy multitude, each in his narrow circle toiling for himself, to gather competence or wealth. The expansion of New France was the achievement of a gigantic ambition striving to grasp a continent. It was a vain attempt.”
George Bancroft, “In 1688 England contracted to the Netherlands the highest debt that one nation can owe to another. Herself not knowing how to recover her liberties, they were restored by men of the United Provinces.”

While Whig history is long gone from the academy, it does tend to live on, in part, in our national conversations. Americans do tend to hold on to this idea of liberty (and/or justice) as being the animating factors in history. To some extent, this idea was behind American misadventures in the middle east in the last 25 years. And, until recently, it was rhetorically embraced by the two main groups in American politics.

Enough for now. Up next…umm, I’m not sure exactly (I have more to write, just not sure what order it will be in).