:Herbert Butterfield: Historian as Dissenter

Abstract

While most of today's history graduate students would recognize Herbert Butterfield as the author of The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), few would have read it, and likely none could name the title of any other work by the same man. C.T. McIntire sets out to establish that Butterfield's influence extends far beyond his famous warning against “presentmindedness.” In the process, he provides the first full-bodied evaluation of Butterfield and his work based on unrestricted access to his private papers. The author warns at the outset that this is an “intellectual biography,” conspicuously disregarding his subject's personal life except as it affected the trajectory of Butterfield's work. True to his word, Mclntire devotes only two paragraphs to the 1954 suicide of Butterfield's son. Early exposure to Harold Temperley led to Butterfield's first academic publication on the minutiae of Napoleonic diplomacy. This research experience ensured that Butterfield would henceforth champion “technical” or “scientific history” as the benchmark for investigations of the past. Here was a technique he maintained was free of religious, ethnic, and ideological partisanship. The great irony was that, from 1929 until his retirement in 1968, Butterfield never authored another book that fit his description of scientific history. He spent the last fifty years of his life assuring colleagues that he was working on the definitive life of Charles James Fox, a volume that never quite materialized. Butterfield's sense of guilt at this professional lapse is a recurrent theme of McIntire's study.