Butterfield's Tories: ‘High Politics’ and the Writing of Modern British Political History

Abstract

The writing of modern British political history flounders in a sorry state of confusion. Even its current practitioners are both dissatisfied with the state of the art, and uncertain as to how it should proceed. Peter Clarke, for example, writing in I98I, described no less than 'three accounts of the political process', all of which he found flawed in some way or other. In this he was not alone. Another political historian, Michael Bentley, the author of Politics without democracy (I 984), in attempting to respond to his own question 'What is political history?', enumerated four answers. These were contradictory rather than complementary, and ranged from a view of political history as a branch of constitutional history to a belief that it was the study of a discrete area of human behaviour. One practising historian has gone so far as to speculate that 'confusion as to the role of the historian of nineteenth century politics may be a major cause of the comparative lull in research into the exercise of power at that time'.' It is certainly a disquieting comment that Peter Clarke now writes intellectual history. Traditionally modern British political history was written as the story of the rise of the liberal institutions of the British state. The high points of this narrative were the series of reform acts which paved the way for the emergence of British democracy, and it heroes were the politicians, primarily liberal, who were responsible for these statesmanlike gestures: Grey, Gladstone and Lloyd George. Admittedly, after the tirade of Sir Herbert Butterfield in his essay The whig interpretation of history and Namier's pointilliste analysis of politics,2 the fashionableness of this genre has declined, but it has not altogether withered away. George Watson, for example, attempted a defence of this whiggish story in a recent issue of Encounter, while the Conservative M.P. for Cambridge, Robert Rhodes James, still writes as though the advent of democracy was the most significant event in British society in the twentieth century.3 The most successful challenge to this school of historical writing, however, came from social historians, but