Whig Interpretation Of History Research Articles

The Pedagogy of Bafflement: Bernard Bailyn's History 2910, Fall 1996

The Pedagogy of Bafflement: Bernard Bailyn's History 2910, Fall 1996

Matthew C. Augustine. Aesthetics of Contingency: Writing, Politics, and Culture in England, 1639–89.

Matthew C. Augustine. <i>Aesthetics of Contingency: Writing, Politics, and Culture in England, 1639–89</i>.

Writings of the Luddites

When I mentioned to a friend that I was going to review this book, he replied: “Luddites? You mean, the Flat Earthers?” There is a distinction, I reminded him, between science and technology, and the Luddites had no problem, qua Luddites, with modern science. They objected to a few machines that were ruining their lives as artisans in the English textile industry. I could have added that Jeffrey Burton Russell's book Inventing the Flat Earth demonstrates that, “with extraordinarily few exceptions, no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century BC onward believed that the Earth was flat” and that even the belief that people had believed the Earth was flat did not arise until around 1870, in a time of controversy between scientists and the general culture over the theory of evolution. My friend is not a historian or scientist (but then neither am I), and I concluded that his remark meant no more than “It's high time you got a cell phone.” When reading an article on historiography and genetics some time later, however, I came across a famous geneticist quoted as saying that, among anthropologists and historians of prehistory, “there are a small number of Luddites who want to break our machines.” He meant that the anthropologists and historians resented the interference of geneticists in their disciplines. But the Luddites held no brief against transmission electron microscopy or carbon dating or microbiome sequencers.Misunderstandings and misapplications of the term Luddites (which, literally, means followers of the English general Ned Ludd, who never existed but was said at the time to live, like Robin Hood, in Sherwood Forest) are regarded as artifacts of something called “Luddite silence.” The Luddites, it has been taught, were more or less illiterate and left no texts to interpret. The aim of Binfield's Writings of the Luddites—an annotated collection of poems, songs, manifestos, and threatening letters written between 1811 and 1817—is to demonstrate that “the Luddites were not silent.” Their opponents constructed the myth of silence by “ignoring, reducing, or rendering curious or impotent those Luddite texts . . . known to exist.” The Luddites’ chief opponents were not engineers, let alone scientists, but “dishonorable capitalist depredators” who were met with “the sturdy self-reliance of a community prepared to resist for itself the notion that market forces rather than moral values should shape the fate of labor.” The myth that “the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver,” and “the ‘utopian’ artisan” were silent resisters of industrial progress was a product, according to E. P. Thompson, of “the enormous condescension of history” to their social class. Writings of the Luddites may be understood as participating in Thompson's project of restoring to view, in Binfield's words, “the existence of a number of English subcultures with constitutive codes of their own.” Herbert Butterfield argued that English society of the Luddite era had become “dangerously diverse” and was only saved from revolution by the encouragement of belief, in all classes and subcultures, in historical progress (“the Whig interpretation of history”). Indeed, an anonymous Luddite letter of 1812 in this collection, addressed to “the principle Magistrate for this District” (Milnsbridge near Huddersfield), avers that “if this Machinery is suffer'd to go on it will probable terminate with a Civil War.”The Luddites lit many fires and destroyed much property in 1811–12, and as I write it is impossible not to think about the storming of the US Capitol on January 6 of this year. But the disaffected intruders of 2021, while contemptuous of science (only a handful wore masks, in a crowd, during a pandemic), clearly adored the technology that “capitalist depredators” had persuaded them they needed to buy. They were all carrying “smartphones,” taking “selfies”—and their leader was in close touch with them on Twitter.

The ideology of progress in nineteenth-century accounts of New Zealand

ABSTRACTBy the nineteenth century, emergent ideas about social development were coalescing into an ideology of progress, the tenets of which were devised largely by British philosophers. The influence of this ideology in shaping perceptions of the non-European world by British writers is explored here in the context of works published about New Zealand in this era. The employment of the ideology of progress added a teleological dimension to representations of New Zealand and its inhabitants, and coincided with the philosophical basis of the Whig interpretation of history that predominated British works in the discipline at this time. Thus, several accounts of New Zealand produced in this period tended to contain predetermined ideological understandings about the form and trajectory of the country’s progress, often at the expense of the ambiguities, contradictions, or tensions identified by historians in the following century. An awareness of this doctrine, and the extent to which it framed the way New Zealand was written about in the nineteenth century, offers another significant basis on which the context and evidentiary value of this source material can be evaluated.

Practicing Democracy: Popular Politics in the United States from the Constitution to the Civil War ed. by Daniel Peart and Adam I. P. Smith

Reviewed by: Practicing Democracy: Popular Politics in the United States from the Constitution to the Civil War ed. by Daniel Peart and Adam I. P. Smith Michelle Orihel (bio) Keywords Whig, Politics, Voting, Democracy, Political parties Practicing Democracy: Popular Politics in the United States from the Constitution to the Civil War. Edited by Daniel Peart and Adam I. P. Smith. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Pp. 304. Cloth, $49.50.) In Practicing Democracy, Douglas Bradburn observes: “American historians have overwhelmingly been Whig historians” (26). The phrase “Whig history” originated in Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History, published in 1931. Whig historians used the past, Butterfield argued, to explain and sanction the triumph of liberal democracy in nineteenth-century Britain. By orienting their studies toward that achievement, historians failed to understand the past on its own terms. In the United States, Whig history manifests itself in the democratization model of development. This model presents the nation as democratizing steadily over time, with democracy encompassing free elections, an expanding electorate, and a two-party system. Andrew Robertson contends that historians of nineteenth-century American politics have especially adopted a Whig perspective (99). Many historians search for the roots of democracy in the early republic, and trace its rise from Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Jackson or Abraham Lincoln. The ten essays in this compelling new volume edited by Daniel Peart and Adam I. P. Smith challenge that Whig trajectory. While Whig histories chart a linear path to democracy, the essays in Practicing Democracy present case studies of uneven development, improvisation, and instability. John L. Brooke conceptualizes historical time as “lumpy and punctuated” rather than “smooth and continuous” [End Page 155] (75). Similarly, Robertson depicts a “tortuous trajectory” of development, one in which “democratic ideology and practices ebbed and flowed” (99). Political participation also varied by ethnicity, sex, race, and class. Irish and German immigrants in New York City, Tyler Anbinder finds, remained largely disengaged from controversies like the Kansas–Nebraska Act that polarized Americans in the 1850s. Instead, immigrants focused on local issues such as schooling that affected them directly. Reeve Huston further stresses “the geographic and temporal unevenness” of democratic practices (55). Illustrating these variations, Daniel Peart demonstrates that during the Era of Good Feelings voter turnout was much higher in Illinois, a frontier state that lacked organized parties, than in Massachusetts, a state where partisanship persisted. This conclusion challenges the standard interpretation of that era as one of political apathy in which partisanship subsided. The era, Peart claims, should be called “the Era of Experimentation,” a label that applies to early republic politics in general (138). Graham A. Peck also highlights this political improvisation. A rapid turnover in officeholding in Illinois, he argues, gave voters numerous opportunities to elect new representatives. In constant dialogue with voters, politicians changed positions on issues to “reflect voters’ interests and judgments” (145). He concludes that the historical category “Second Party System” fails to convey that dynamism. Yet, many historians remain attached to the “Party System” concept, arguing that competitive political parties fueled democratization. Americans inherited this obsession with a two-party system, Bradburn argues, from early modern England: “The men who built the first party politics in the United States were ideological Whigs whose histories of England were filled with sharp dialectical fights between advocates for prerogative power and martyrs for liberty,” from the Parliamentarians and Royalists of the Civil War to the Whigs and Tories thereafter (40). This legacy, Bradburn maintains, shapes “the way too many American historians still write the history of their country” (41). Whig historians begin their inquiries with the two-party system, and then look backward to explain its origins and development. In his study of the movement to consolidate the city and suburbs of Philadelphia in 1851, Andrew Heath stresses that looking backward can be deceptive. Previous historians have seen consolidation as foreshadowing the urban machine politics of the late nineteenth century, but Heath argues that if one “look[s] forward from [End Page 156] . . . 1851, . . . the rise of boss rule does not seem preordained” (224). Instead, the consolidation movement reflected the reform and anti-party sentiments of elite Philadelphians in the 1850s, a group more...

Christians, Muslims and the State in Twentieth-Century Egypt and Indonesia

Surveys of the historical relationship between Christianity and other faiths often suggest that through a process of theological enlightenment the churches have moved from crusade to cooperation and from diatribe to dialogue. This trajectory is most marked in studies of Christian-Muslim relations, overshadowed as they are by the legacy of the Crusades. Hugh Goddard’sA History of Christian-Muslim Relationsproceeds from a focus on the frequently confrontational inter-communal relations of earlier periods to attempts by Western theologians over the last two centuries to define a more irenic stance towards Islam.1 For liberal-minded Western Christians this is an attractive thesis: who would not wish to assert that we have left bigotry and antagonism behind, and moved on to stances of mutual respect and tolerance? However laudable the concern to promote harmonious intercommunal relations today, dangers arise from trawling the oceans of history in order to catch in our nets only those episodes that will be most morally edifying for the present. What Herbert Butterfield famously labelled ‘the Whig interpretation of history’ is not irrelevant to the history of interreligious relations. In this essay I shall use the experience of Christian communities in twentieth-century Egypt and Indonesia to argue that the determinative influences on Christian-Muslim relations in the modern world have not been the progressive liberalization of stances among academic theologians but rather the changing views taken by governments in Muslim majority states towards both their majority and minority religious communities. Questions of the balance of power, and of the territorial integrity of the state, have affected Christian Muslim relations more deeply than questions of religious truth and concerns for interreligious dialogue.

The William Petty problem and the Whig history of economics

The term ‘Whig interpretation of history’ was applied by Herbert Butterfield to a particular current within English historiography, an outstanding characteristic of which was its tendency to praise revolutions provided they had been successful, the particular successes to which he referred being those of Protestants and Whigs over Catholics and Tories. He also acknowledged that his critique ‘possibly’ gave the phrase an ‘extended sense’ applicable to any current in historiography characterised by equivalently crude teleology and decontextualisation. It is with reference to this possible ‘extended’ sense that the phrase has gained currency in critical currents within the history of the natural and social sciences. The present case study of the secondary literature on the English writer William Petty (1623–87) argues that, while the two senses are of course conceptually distinct, they are nevertheless very much part of the same story if we are to explain how it has come about that the distortions indicated in the extended sense have become so deeply rooted in the economics mainstream’s portrayal of its own history.

The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield: History, Science and God, by Michael Bentley

Does any academic historian deserve a full-scale biography? If the question is purely one of eminence, then Herbert Butterfield, whose The Whig Interpretation of History (1931; rev. ante, xlviii [1933], 174–5) enjoys ‘classic’ status and who, as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge (1963–8), can be said to have reached the peak of his profession, is worthy. If the question, however, turns on whether or not the life of any historian warrants a full-length monograph, even Butterfield’s claims look less convincing. Research, writing, and redrafting on a scale that enabled him to publish three books simultaneously in October 1949, and the relentless round of committees, backbiting, and petty disputes, through which he ascended to the positions of Master of Peterhouse (1955–68) and Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University (1959–61), provide material for a skilled SCR lunch-time raconteur rather than the narrative fuel for a biography. The teetotal Butterfield apparently required sixty cigarettes and frequent doses of ginger beer each day to sustain him through his life, and so too would readers of his biography if it were not for the fact that Michael Bentley’s account combines the commonplace with tantalising snapshots of its subject’s more intriguing historical thought.

The History of Information Science and Other Traditional Information Domains: Models for Future Research

It has been said that the historian is the avenger, and that standing as a judge between the parties and rivalries and causes of bygone generations he can lift up the fallen and beat down the proud, and by his exposures and his verdicts, his satire and his moral indignation, can punish unrighteousness, avenge the injured or reward the innocent. —Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) Historians of the traditional information domains—libraries, archives, and museums as well as conservation and information science—could be more effective in punishing unrighteousness, avenging the injured, and rewarding the innocent if they had better tools. This article aims to help them develop these tools not by honing their satirical abilities or teaching them how to become more at one with their moral outrage but instead by drawing their attention to several scholarly literatures that offer insights into information history: the history of information technology, social informatics, and business and economic history of technology. I identify nine themes from these literatures that seem ripe for exploration in the history of information science but first examine the boundaries between information science and various other information domains. This article benefits from two recently published literature reviews that provide good overviews of the existing literature on the histories of information science and technology. 1 However, these reviews were retrospective works meant to review existing literature; the goal here is prospective, to suggest avenues for future research.

The Future of Military History: A Glass Half Full

The Future of Military History:A Glass Half Full David R. Stone (bio) Herodotus never met a tall tale he didn't like. Reflecting on the resurgence of Herodotus at the expense of the more rigorous Thucydides, one historian has suggested that "his prestige and importance have been enhanced in our generation as a result of the growing popularity of the history of culture and the gradual eclipse of the long-popular episodical military and political type of history which prevailed from Thucydides until . . . our era."1 Yet another example, it would seem, of contemporary academia's flight from the political and military history that really matter. The problem, however, is that this is Harry Elmer Barnes describing the embattled state of military history as of 1937. In the forum on the state of military history in the November 2009 issue of this publication I found much to agree with. The authors' descip-tions of the quality and rigor of today's scholarship, the productive interplay between academics, military practitioners, and the general public, and the range of careers possible for military historians all rang true. Most importantly, their collective command not to curl up into a fetal position but instead to do good work and build connections to a variety of audiences, inside and outside of academia, is self-evidently wise advice. We should all heed Robert Citino's call to "leave no conference unattended, no journal article unsubmitted, no ACLS Fellowship application unsent, and no opportunity to 'show the flag' within the broader profession unseized." On the other hand, however, I found much to question in laments about the poor prognosis for military history in academia. I've heard plenty of anecdotes about graduate students not getting jobs and retiring senior military historians not being replaced, but hard evidence of the field's decline is thin on the ground. Brian Linn suggests, and Dennis Showalter agrees, that military history is declining in academia, but that the growth of the field outside academia compensates for this. There are certainly burgeoning opportunities outside academia, but I deny that military history is dying within it. My central point, which fits with Roger Spiller's argument in his contribution, is that complaints about the current state of military history need to be treated as good historians treat all such claims: in context.2 Put simply, things are tough all over, and the good old days weren't so good. First, some temporal perspective—the first duty of the historian. Complaints about the state of military history often involve comparisons, explicit or implicit, to some unspecified golden age in the past. Dennis Showalter opens his essay with the claim that "military history is marginalized in today's academy" (emphasis mine). But military history has always been marginal; unfortunately, the golden age of military history never existed. The history of history is rife with pronouncements on the decrepit state and dim future of the serious study of war and military affairs. On the eve of World War I, R.M. Johnston of Harvard University remarked at the American Historical Association's annual meeting on the "disrepute" of traditional military history.3 In 1930 Robert Livingston Schuyler wrote of the "present studied neglect of military history," which "seems to be under about as dark a cloud as the great man theory." 4 Theodore Ropp, who as a teacher did a great deal to shape military history in the United States, complained in 1949 that "advanced research in the history of war can be done in only a few places."5 Sir Herbert Butterfield, famous for his Whig Interpretation of History, took the "neglect of military history" as a matter of course.6 A study of the historical profession in the early 1960s, well before the cultural revolution and the poisoning effects of the Vietnam War, found that only 4% of U.S. colleges offered courses in military history.7 Click for larger view View full resolution An illustration from The Histories of Herodotus, trans. by Henry Cary (D. Appleton and Company, 1904). So the glorious past of military history isn't necessarily so glorious. Knowledgeable observers have conceded this; John Lynn's essay "The Embattled...

Methodism, Science and the Natural World: Some Tensions in the Thought of Herbert Butterfield

It is no longer a name that everyone knows. At the height of his fame as historian and broadcaster, Herbert Butterfield (1900–1979) reached into homes and schools through his varied activities and established a public reputation far beyond Cambridge University, where he spent the entirety of his working life from 1923 to his retirement in 1968, and among people who knew nothing of his small and idiosyncratic college, Peterhouse, to which he had arrived as an undergraduate in 1919 and with which he would be associated for the rest of his career. The Chair of Modern History at Cambridge, which he held from 1944 to 1963, and the Regius Chair to which he was relocated for the remaining five years of his professional life, offered major platforms for one determined to communicate to a wider audience. His tenure of the Mastership of his college after 1955 offered another by lending him the possibility of hosting individuals and colloquia. Through less than a dozen major works of history — The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) and Christianity and History (1949) come at once to mind as the best-regarded — Butterfield established a persona considerably more influential than a fairly modest literary production might imply. Only when one stands back from that oeuvre and examines its internal consistencies does it become clear that it engenders in the reader a certain discomfort. For if his thought does not often become mired in outright contradiction, it frequently displays moments of inner tension.

The Human Costs of Economic Growth

Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 395 + xxiv pages, hardcover, $76, paper, $34.95. The great debate of social science for the last two centuries at least has been how to account for the extraordinary economic growth of the modern world. We all know the basic picture. The overwhelming majority of authors have argued that the story is that of the rise of the West. There have been, however, two opposing versions of this narrative. One is the Whig interpretation of history, which argues that it has been a story of steady social, intellectual, and moral progress whose explanation lies in some particular characteristic of the West (often just of England). In this version, the world is reaching its summit of progress today. The second version is Marxism, which has argued that the rise of the West is part of a larger story of steady dialectical and conflictual historical development. In this version, the present West-dominated world order will inevitably be superseded by another phase of historical development, in which capitalism will be replaced by communism This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website , where most recent articles are published in full. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Beyond the Whig history interpretation of history: lessons on ‘presentism’ from Hélène Metzger

During the second half of the twentieth century, historians of science have shown a considerable interest in ‘presentism’, a term first applied to the kind of history of science in which past knowledge is judged to celebrate and legitimize modern science. Taking Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig interpretation of history as a point of reference, ‘presentism’ has been usually associated with ‘Whig history’ or ‘Whiggish history’. Nevertheless, Butterfield’s essay is one of many approaches to this question. In this article, I examine Hélène Metzger’s La méthode philosophique dans l’histoire des sciences, a major theoretical contribution of ‘presentism’. I argue that the papers she published in the 1930s are among the most important critical reflections on ‘presentism’ written by a historian of science before 1950. Through this examination, I demonstrate that Hélène Metzger‘s ideas can provide historians of science with a useful set of tools to reflect upon ‘presentism’, beyond the narrow definition of the latter as ‘Whig history’.

KEITH C. SEWELL. Herbert Butterfield and the Interpretation of History. (Studies in Modern History.) New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2005. Pp. xii, 280. $74.95.

Written by a young Cambridge historian, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) remains a well-known book. Its author, however, is less well known and often poorly understood. The problem is not the lack of biographical material; Herbert Butterfield is the problem. Or is he? The Whig Interpretation argues that historians must resist the temptation to see the present as the ratification of the past; they must write against the narrative of onward and upward progress; they must eschew value-laden general propositions; and they must study the past for its own sake and on its own terms. Past-mindedness, not present-mindedness, is the historian's ideal: “The chief aim of the historian,” Butterfield wrote, “is the elucidation of the unlikeness between past and present” (p. 32). Later he would refer to his insistence on value-free or non-interpretive historical writing as technical history. Of course, technical history is elusive. We can never abstract ourselves from ourselves. We can never shelve our sustaining assumptions or our present preoccupations and anxieties. As it had to be, technical history was elusive to Butterfield as well. Although J. G. A. Pocock was referring specifically to the contradiction between the anti-progressivism of The Whig Interpretation and the Whig form of progressivism in The Englishman and His History (1944) when he referred to das Herbert Butterfieldproblem, he could have been referring to Butterfield himself. The centrality of Butterfield's Christian faith to his life and to his work points to an obvious inconsistency, or problem: historical writing cannot be both technical and Christian. Not a systematic thinker, Butterfield failed to resolve the tension inherent in a body of work that spanned some five decades.

Does Film History Need a Crisis?

At a conference in 1980s, sponsored by American Historical Association, that brought film historians together with scholars of U.S. history, one of latter commented privately that he found some of former rather whigish.' This was not a Harry Potterism avant la lettre; rather, it was a reference that most historians would easily recognize. The term derives from a small polemical book, The Whig Interpretation of History, by British historian Herbert Butterfield, published in 1931. Butterfield defined object of his critique as the tendency in many historians ... to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasise certain principles of progress in past and to produce a story which is ratification if not glorification of present.2 Butterfield's viewpoint has had a remarkably long run in general historiography; as recently as 2002, it was described as historiographical orthodoxy.3 However, historian at conference was not directing his remark at an interpretation that treated cinema's past as a story of progress; by 1980s, an antiteleological stance had become a cinema studies axiom. Instead, what seemed whigish in this person's estimation was an account of revolutionary success, progress, and ratification (if not glorification) offered by film historians of their own historiographic achievements. Shortly after conference, I recounted this anecdote to a class in film historiography, and offered some additional perspectives. Film historians, I suggested, had not yet fully recognized that practice of historiography is fundamentally dialogic. Historical discourse is constantly being transformed through historians' commentaries and critiques on work of other past and present historians. The historian, as Michel de Certeau puts it, effaces error.... The territory that he occupies is acquired through a diagnosis of false. .... His work is oriented toward negative.4 Present-day film historians had excelled in detecting what they regarded as error in their predecessors and had staked out significant new territories in historical interpretation. What was naturally difficult to accept, however, was that inherent dialogism of their discipline would in turn subject their work to critique. The transformation of historiography would continue, I suggested to class, and in several decades' time emerging film historians would ask new questions about past and debate new perspectives that were likely to be substantially different from those that scholars of 1980s had valorized. Film historiography almost certainly would have moved on to territories as yet uncharted. Several decades have now passed since those incidents. Has my prediction been borne out? A fence-sitting answer would have to be yes and no. If my own thoughts to class had drawn implicitly on Thomas Kuhn's model of paradigm

Annabel Patterson. &lt;italic&gt;Nobody's Perfect: A New Whig Interpretation of History&lt;/italic&gt;. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2002. Pp. ix, 288. $27.50

Journal Article Annabel Patterson. Nobody's Perfect: A New Whig Interpretation of History. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2002. Pp. ix, 288. $27.50 Get access Patterson Annabel. Nobody's Perfect: A New Whig Interpretation of History. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2002. Pp. ix, 288. $27.50. David Spadafora David Spadafora Lake Forest College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 109, Issue 3, June 2004, Pages 860–861, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/109.3.860 Published: 01 June 2004

Nobody's Perfect: A New Whig Interpretation of History by Annabel Patterson

Nobody's Perfect: A New Whig Interpretation of History by Annabel Patterson

Nobody's perfect: a new Whig interpretation of history

Is history driven more by principle or interest? Are ideas of historical progress obsolete? Is it unforgivable to change one's mind or political allegiance? Did the 18th century really exchange the civilizing force of commercial advantage for political conflict? In this account of liberal thought from its roots in 17th-century English thinking to the end of the 18th century, Annabel Patterson tackles these important historiographical questions. She rescues the term Whig from the low regard attached to it; denies the primacy of self-interest in the political struggles of Georgian England; and argues that while Whigs may have strayed from liberal principles on occasion (nobody's perfect), nevertheless many were true progressives. In a series of case studies, mainly from the reign of George III, Patterson examines or re-examines the careers of such prominent individuals as John Almon, Edmund Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Erskine, and, at the end of the century, William Wordsworth. She also addresses a host of secondary characters, seeking to reshape our thinking about both well-known and lesser figures of the time. Tracking a coherent, sustained and adaptable liberalism throughout the 18th century, Patterson overturns common assumptions of political, cultural and art historians. She aims to deliver fresh insights into the careers of those who called themselves Whigs, their place in British political thought, and the crucial ramifications of this thinking in the American political arena.

Some pair-wise classifications employed in historiography

Various pair-wise classifications have been employed in historiography, the most recent being Waterman's distinction between intellectual history and the history of economic analysis. Other dichotomies are rational reconstruction and historical reconstruction, the context of discovery and the context of justification, internal history and external history and relativist and absolutist accounts. In the 1930s Butterfield differentiated the Whig interpretation of history from the non-Whig approach. Another dichotomy which has a much older history is the distinction between text and context. Perhaps the oldest dichotomy of all is the distinction between particulars and universals. An attempt is made to show the age-old controversy between nominalism and universals provides a common thread to the dichotomies discussed in this paper.

Is there a whig canon? the case of susanna centlivre

In his bookProfessional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670–1740, the author attempted a historical sociology of a period's imaginative writing in terms of the marketplace and incipient professionalism. Very recently, however, and partly in response to his argument, attempts have been made to refigure the history of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century poetry in terms of “Tory” and “Whig” traditions, having their points of departure in 1660 and 1688 respectively. His account is thought to overemphasise the market to the exclusion of continuing patronage links supporting a group of Whig writers that he is considered to neglect or undervalue. In this article, the author argues that the Whig/Tory polarisation is an oversimplification of a much more complex dimension of “cultural” rather than “partisan” politics, and uses the writing career of an undoubted Whig, Susanna Centlivre, to illustrate the point that she has far more in common culturally with her so-called “Tory” opponents than with the Whig writers who might be considered her natural allies. Those who valorise this group of Whig writers appear to valorise uncritically the underpinning assumptions of a Whig interpretation of history, in ways that the author sees as problematic.