Whig Tradition Research Articles

The Scottish Enlightenment and the Remaking of Modern History

AbstractThis article offers a new interpretation of the history-writing produced in Enlightenment Scotland. It argues that after the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 was blamed on Scotland's ‘feudal’ institutions, Scottish jurists and historians began to interrogate what it meant to become 'modern'. Instead of accepting the Whig claim that England provided the ideal model for social and political development, they subsumed English history into a broader debate about whether and how modern Europe had emerged from its feudal past. By reconstructing this debate, the article shows how Scots rewrote European history in ways that subverted the English whig tradition while rejecting universal or ‘cosmopolitan’ explanations of social progress. In doing so, the article reopens the question of how the Scottish Enlightenment shaped British imperial culture across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The Whig Tradition and Commonwealth History

The Whig Tradition and Commonwealth History

Resisting Whig History: Putting the Australian New Left in Perspective

The theoretical insights associated with the Australian New Left contribute to enriching our understanding of the intricacies of Australian history. Two of the most influential works associated with the movement, A New Britannia and Class Structure in Australian History, are compared to enable a consideration of both objective and subjective accounts of class. This paper has three parts. First, it identifies the historic context of history written in Australia within the Whig tradition of the Old Left. Second, it examines how debates within the British New Left came to influence discussions in the Australian New Left. Finally, it suggests that McQueen provided foundations to the theoretical approach to class undertaken inClass Structure in Australian History. It is argued that class remains an important and necessary abstraction in order to engage with the relationship between existing political economic structures and social subjects.

Daniel Defoe and the Whig Tradition in Satire

This essay uncovers the forgotten Whig tradition in satire and reconsiders Daniel Defoe's relationship to that tradition. Recent scholarship on Whig literary culture has ignored or denied the existence of a Whig tradition in satire beyond the Carolean libels of authors such as Andrew Marvell and his followers. This essay traces the reception history of those libels. Defoe rejected libel as an appropriate model for Whig satire and instead imbued his satires with panegyric strains, designed to encourage moral reformation. Defoe's most ambitious verse satire, Jure Divino, was his last attempt to forge this new kind of Whig satire grounded in equal parts praise and blame.

History of Education Research in Australia

History of education research has flourished in Australia since the 1960s. However, fewer university appointments in recent years suggest that a decline will soon occur. Nevertheless, research over the previous fifty years has produced much excellent work, following three significant historiographical trends. The first is the dominant Anglo-Empirical Whig tradition, which has concentrated on conflicts between church and state over schooling, and the founders and establishment of schools and public school systems. The second arose from social history, shifting the focus of research onto families, students and teachers. However, the concentration on the social class relations of schooling was eventually overtaken by substantial studies into gender relations. In more recent times, cultural studies and the influence of Foucault have been responsible for new research questions and research, marking a new historiographical trend. A survey of topics for which more research is required concludes the editorial, not least of which is the history of Indigenous education.

‘Barons’ Wars, under Other Names’: Feudalism, Royalism and the American Founding

SUMMARYThe Machiavellian Moment was largely responsible for establishing what remains the dominant understanding of American Revolutionary ideology. Patriots, on this account, were radical whigs; their great preoccupation was a terror of crown power and executive corruption. This essay proposes to test the whig reading of patriot political thought in a manner suggested by Professor Pocock's pioneering first book, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law. The whig tradition, as he taught us, located in the remote Saxon past an ‘ancient constitution’ of liberty, in which elected monarchs merely executed laws approved by their free subjects in a primeval parliament. This republican idyll, whigs believed, was then tragically interrupted by the Norman Conquest of 1066, which introduced feudal tenures and monarchical tyranny. Did patriot theorists accept this narrative? The answer, I shall argue, is strikingly mixed. By the early 1770s, appeals to the ‘ancient constitution’ had become less common in patriot writing. And by the end of the 1770s, many patriots had absorbed a completely different understanding of the feudal past—one pioneered by Royalist historians of the seventeenth century and then adapted by Scottish historians of the eighteenth. This shift reflects a broader transformation in patriot political and constitutional theory.

Race, Writing, and Don Juan

MARK CANUEL Race, Writing, and DonJuan T here are many ways in which lord byron’s narrator defends the cause of slavery’s abolition in Don Juan. We frequently read the speaker’s pronouncements of political allegiance to the cause of William Wilberforce, the greatest parliamentary leader on behalf of abolition and the “moral Washington of Africa”; in the same vein, the speaker vilifies false Christian “bigots” who make their “pure creed” into the “sanction” for slavery’s “ill.”1 In this essay, however, I want to show that Byron’s op­ position to slavery and the slave trade is a great deal more complicated than we might think ifwe were merely to take at face value the poet-narrator’s claims to be “born for opposition” (15.22). While generally voicing sup­ port for abolition (a support that Byron openly expressed elsewhere), Don Juan nevertheless depends upon a subtle yet profound logic that insistently privileges the purity and beauty of white bodies. This is not because the poem merely expresses a racist ideology, but rather because its inter­ twined configurations ofpolitical and aesthetic value are inseparable from a self-consciously constructed racial hierarchy. Byron is fully aware ofthis hi­ erarchy’s artificiality, but this awareness cannot detract from the sway of race over the poem, and from the sway ofrace within a cultural history that the poem brilliantly and comically instantiates and endorses. The work of David Theo Goldberg has shown how conceptions of rights (which include rights expounded upon in abolitionist discourse) have been historically inseparable from raced conceptions of the political subject. Such conceptions have aimed at discriminating between those sub­ jects who are, and those who are not, capable of civilization and selfgovernment .2 Helen Heran Jun has continued this line of argument to show how even recent twentieth- and twenty-first-century views of citi­ zenship depend upon exclusionary understandings of racial difference.3 1. George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don Juan, canto 14, stanza 82; canto 15, stanza 18. All references to the poem are from Jerome J. McGann, ed., Complete Poetical Works, 7 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980-1993), vol. 5; hereafter cited in the text by canto and stanza. 2. Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Oxford: WileyBlackwell , 1993), 14-40. 3. Jun, Race for Citizenship: Black Orientalism and Asian Uplift from Pre-Emancipation to Neoliberal America (New York: New York University Press, 2011). SiR, 54 (Fall 2015) 303 304 MARK CANUEL Such accounts, and others like them, collectively show how attempts at lib­ eral inclusiveness depend upon still deeper inequalities; to some extent, they therefore might lead us to see why Byron’s poem could appear to be politically progressive in some respects, even while it compromises or com­ plicates its commitments in others. Still more than even these accounts al­ low, however, I wish to show how and why white bodies are so crucial for the poem’s aesthetic project. It turns out that the crux of Byron’s Don Juan—its celebrated ability to represent “life’s infinite variety” (15.19)— depends upon the preeminence ofwhite flesh. Whiteness is the ground for registering gorgeous articulations of features on the body’s alabaster sur­ faces; whiteness is the condition for capturing the seductive altering hues that demarcate mood and solicit desire. Simultaneously, and most impor­ tant, the white body is analogized at key moments to the poet-narrator’s own work—printed on white “foolscap”—as ifpoetic composition and the raced subject were finally inseparable. By exploring the dynamics of race in the poem’s political aesthetics, I embark on a discussion that merges with a long-standing interest, among many ofByron’s critics, in his political or ideological affiliations. For a few readers, Byron adheres to the most traditional of values. Malcolm Kelsall argues that, in the Whig tradition, he upholds “aristocratic oligarchy”;4 Marilyn Butler, though acknowledging his sympathies with less conserva­ tive causes, also sees him as a “liberal” who is only “superficially rebel­ lious.”5 The vast majority of critics take his rebellions more seriously, how­ ever. From the time of the poem’s appearance, Byron and his publisher John Murray feared prosecution...

De la epidemiología psiquiátrica a la psicología positiva. Historia de la trayectoria científica de María Martina Casullo

La presente investigación de carácter historiográfico examina un momento particular de la trayectoria científica de María Martina Casullo (1940-2008). En primer lugar, se revisan sus estudios sobre los factores de riesgo en adolescentes, realizados a partir del año 1985 desde una perspectiva epidemiológica-preventiva. En segundo lugar, se analiza cómo dichos estudios epidemiológicos sobre depresión, riesgo suicida y malestar psicológico en adolescentes fueron el puntapié inicial para el análisis de los procesos salugénicos o protectores que impedían que las personas enfermaran aún frente a situaciones ambientales adversas. Finalmente, se concluye que estas investigaciones constituyen el principal antecedente del campo, que posteriormente Casullo definiera como psicología salugénica o positiva, en la Argentina a finales del siglo XX. De esa manera, se cuestiona críticamente la tendencia naturalizada y whig que no se ha interesado en hallar las condiciones ideológicas y políticas de la emergencia de la psicología positiva.

Martin Wight, Western Values, and the Whig Tradition of International Thought

Martin Wight is often regarded as a disengaged historian of international thought who avoided commentary on contemporary events and shunned opportunities to contribute to discussion over policy. This article argues that this interpretation is mistaken. It argues instead that Wight was deeply concerned with the practice of international relations, as well as the theory, and sought repeatedly to find and use different means to influence British foreign policy and world politics more generally. To that end, it concentrates on one particular effort: Wight's attempt to construct a set of Whig or Western values that he believed should guide the conduct of practitioners.

Martin Wight and the Whig Tradition of International Thought and Practice

Martin Wight wrestled in his work on international relations with both the historiographical utility of the concept of traditions and the nature of particular traditions. But Wight retained throughout a special concern with one tradition of thought and practice, best known to later interpreters of his work as the Grotian or rationalist but identified in many of his own writings as the Western or tradition. This paper examines Wight's characterisation of the Whig tradition, its composition and content, and especially the ways in which it was shaped by Wight's engagements with one of the more neglected members of the English school, Herbert Butterfield, as well as with Harold Laski. It argues that Wight's understanding of a tradition was strongly influenced by Butterfield's earlier evocations of Whiggish historiography and Whiggish political practice, and especially with his distinction between Whiggism as bad history but good politics. The paper reconnects the advent of international theory in the hands of the British Committee to the wider postwar concern with establishing a Western tradition of political thought and practice defensible in the face of domestic anti-liberal critics and foreign totalitarian alternatives.

RELUCTANT REVOLUTIONARIES: MODERATE LIBERALISM IN THE KINGDOM OF SARDINIA, 1849–1859

ABSTRACTIn the 1850s, the Piedmontese ‘moderate’ liberals created a peculiar political culture, suited to the twofold task of strengthening representative institutions at home and justifying Piedmont's Italian mission. Inspired by both the whig tradition and the French Doctrinaires, the moderates elaborated arguments advocating elite government and countering democracy. Gioberti, Balbo, Carutti, Mamiani, and Boncompagni shared five theses: (1) natural (and/or divine) laws are both the ultimate source of right and wrong in politics and the guarantee of gradual progress; (2) only the citizens who understand the natural order should rule; (3) ‘democracy’, that is popular sovereignty and universal suffrage, is inherently wrong; (4) granted that citizens' attitudes play an important role in politics, certain virtues are required by representative government; and (5) moderatism was imbued with Burkeanism, meaning that it endorsed a realistic, prudent approach to politics, that much was made of Italian and especially Piedmontese history and traditions, and that mere constitutional machinery was to be disdained. This political culture led the moderates to portray everybody who was either on the right or the left of their camp, both in Piedmont and Italy, as a ‘sectarian’ and hence a dangerous revolutionary.

La Reine malheureuse: Stuart history, sympathetic history and the Stricklands' history of Henrietta Maria

This article examines the representation of ‘Stuart’ queens, particularly Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I, in the writings of Victorian royal biographers, Agnes and Elizabeth Strickland, to consider how their depiction of women associated with the Stuarts might alter our understanding of the Stuart heritage in Victorian Britain. The article will demonstrate that the Stricklands' sympathetic representation of Henrietta Maria can be read, not merely as an attempt to insert women into the historical record, but rather, as an alternate feminine historiography of Britain, which contrary to the Whig tradition, retained a sympathy for things French, Catholic and Stuart.

‘That brave company of shadows’: gender, national identity, and the formation of children's British history in Alison Uttley's A Traveller in Time

Alison Uttley's classic children's novel, A Traveller in Time (1939), is the story of Penelope Taberner's time travel back to the Protestant England of Elizabeth I and into the Catholic household of Anthony Babington, who is determined to rescue the imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots.1 This article analyses this overlooked work, and demonstrates how Uttley—using the past as a mirror for her present—offers children a complex anti-Whig historical narrative driven by issues of gender. Uttley challenged the masculine Whig tradition of British history through the genre of children's historical fiction. This analysis redresses her absence from the existing historiography.

SHARON ACHINSTEIN and ELIZABETH SAUER (eds), Milton and Toleration. * BARBARA K. LEWALSKI (ed.), John Milton: Paradise Lost.

THE collection of essays published by Oxford University Press explores various ways in which Milton did or did not engage with the concept of toleration. The editors of the volume define toleration in broad terms, but the most commonly discussed issues relate to early modern religious practices. Although social, political, legal and intellectual backgrounds also come into focus, the only contribution that is not in one way or another tied up with the subject of religion is James Turner's chapter on libertine philosophy and literature. We also learn a lot about other religious thinkers and writers of the day, and at times more than about Milton himself. The introduction argues that there is a complex correlation between tolerance and intolerance in the early modern period. The book's aim is therefore to resist overemphasizing intolerant aspects of Milton's thought at the expense of the common perception of him as a liberal hero of the Whig tradition. Although a number of essays bring out the least attractive features of his writings, the general tendency is to assume a link between his heterodoxy, insistence on freedom of inquiry and toleration.

The Whig World 1760-1837

A single word which survives as a political label for two hundred years must certainly be flexible and will suffer sea-changes. Whiggism was born during the Popish Plot and expired after the Home Rule crisis. It stood for moderate reform—a concept of which most of us would approve but which prompts the question ‘what is moderate’ and ‘what is reform’? This book does not deal with early Whiggism but with that in the later part of George III's reign. One wonders whether Sir Robert Walpole, Lord Hardwicke and the duke of Newcastle would have recognised Charles James Fox and Lord John Russell as whigs at all? Walpole did not believe in flirting with the people, Hardwicke was quite satisfied with the political settlement, and Newcastle was scarcely a libertine. Mitchell's book is a kind of spin-off from his outstanding biography of Lord Melbourne—mature reflections on the nature of Whiggism. It is beautifully written, with a splendid sense of balance, at times the author clearly exasperated with whig self-satisfaction, at others a reluctant admirer. It is a full of piquant asides—the Whigs did not see Jude the Obscure coming. There are of course considerable difficulties in getting the troops into line. Burke was bound to be awkward and perhaps the Portland Whigs—Windham, Spencer and Fitzwilliam—were given too little attention? What of Liverpool, Peel and the liberal Tories who, in Disraeli's celebrated phrase, caught the Whigs bathing and made off with their clothes? And socially, there are difficulties. If the Whigs were essentially salon creatures of London society, bored and restless in the countryside, what do we make of Lord Althorp, who was hardly comfortable out of the saddle, or even of Grey, who could scarcely tear himself away from his Northumberland retreat at Howick? If libertinism was an essential Whig characteristic, how do Tory gentlemen-about-town fit in—the duke of Queensberry, the duke of Leeds, the duke of wellington? Mitchell makes much of the Whigs' lack of patriotism—their buff-and-blue admiration for American rebels, their pitiful naïvety towards Bonaparte, and their unpleasant delight at British setbacks and defeats. Canning's jibe—the friends of every country but their own—was deadly, and finds targets even today. Part of Whig insouciance was perhaps accidental. Many of them were too rich and had too little to do: gambling, drinking and whoring filled up the day. On those rare occasions when they did take office, they sobered up with some speed, Fox discovering in 1806 in a few weeks that Bonaparte was not to be trusted; Lord Melbourne proving to be, at least towards the Tolpuddle martyrs, a determined Home Secretary. G.M. Trevelyan, reared at Wallington in the Whig tradition, believed that they had saved England from revolution. Perhaps. But it is also possible that their appalling self-indulgence helped to discredit that aristocratic rule which they admired so much, and brought about the very crisis with which they had to deal. Even then, as Mitchell points out, they seemed blissfully unaware that they were sawing off the branch they sat on. ‘Finality Reform’ proved to be yet another Whig will-o’-the-wisp. So excellent a book can withstand one tiny quibble. I do not think that Keppel was one of the ‘immortal seven’ who invited in William of Orange in 1688: he was only eighteen and a page of honour. I daresay he would have signed had he been asked.

Justice Curtis in the Civil War Era: At the Crossroads of American Constitutionalism

Through this biography of Benjamin R. Curtis, Stuart Streichler aspires to “present a constitutional history of the Civil War era” (p. xi). A preeminent constitutional lawyer, Curtis also served six years as a justice of the Supreme Court, resigning in 1857. Introducing his book's seven chapters and conclusion, Streichler argues the centrality of constitutional issues to the Civil War, echoing the view common among legal analysts that the era marked a turning point in American constitutionalism. An initial chapter places Curtis within a sketchily outlined “Whig tradition.” In each of the other chapters, Streichler addresses a different constitutional topic linked to a case or controversy in which Curtis was involved. In this manner he discusses Curtis's role in delineating state and federal power in the federal system, the rendition of fugitive slaves, the origins of “substantive” process of law, the Dred Scott case, the debate over the extent of presidential war powers, and the defense of President Andrew Johnson in the impeachment trial of 1868. Curtis played a leading part in all these controversies, setting the framework for debate and in some cases establishing principles that are still fundamental today.

Geweld in de polder

Violence in the poldersThere is a staunch Whig tradition in Dutch historiography coupled with a strong inclination to emphasize moderation and tolerance as key features in Dutch history. The explanation for the relatively low level of violence, however, is rather weak or missing altogether. This article presents a case that links the low level of violence to three positive factors: the Netherlands was situated, geopolitically speaking, in the eye of the storm; there were relatively few cases of famine; and, it had no iron and coal basins that could easily be exploited. Violence, therefore, tended to manifest itself in the form of strict social control: specifically developed through the process of keeping tight control of religious differences, which culminated in the system of pillarization in the nineteenth century and continued as a means of suppressing the class war. This throws some light on one specific aspect of modern Dutch history, namely that far from being weak (as maintained in the Whig tradition), the state and societal organizations strengthened each other, as a result of which they were able to dispel all manner of unrest and discontent.

Mary Shelley in Her Times by Betty T. Bennett , Stuart Curran The Mental Anatomies of William Godwin and Mary Shelley by William D. Brewer (review)

YES, 34, 2004 YES, 34, 2004 lay before him, whereas Moore subsided into prosaic hackwork,until his Lifeof Byron carriedhim to posterityon the greaterwriter'sdolphin back. Strong philosophical and political principles united the friends. As Vail shows, their intellectualroots are in the classicallibertinetraditionwith its emphasis upon sceptical enquiry and freedom of thought and action. The fruit manifests itself in their liberalismand toleration of diversityof creed and custom. Accordingly,both men gravitatedtowardsthe Whig party that had been founded upon a declaration of 'rights'and in (armed)opposition to State 'tyranny'.The poetry of Byron and Moore is an expressionof the conscience of the Whig tradition.'One common note on either lyre did strike, I And knaves and fools [they] both abhorred alike.' Vail's testament to this friendship is deeply empathetic as well as being well grounded in historyand objectivelydetailed. He is the heir of Erdman, Marchand, and Woodring (couldthere be higher praise?)and the poets his account gives us are figures to whom modern multiculturalismmay sympatheticallyrespond. It is right that the critic should be empathetic, for we learn from insight:'Knowledge is ever the parent of tolerance'(asMoore wrote of Byron, cited p.I69). Yet, for the present reviewer,it is the astringentirony of late Byron (when he is separatedfrom Moore) that distinguisheshim from the sentimentalitiesof 'patriot'opposition. The case of Lord Edward Fitzgerald may illustrate the point. Doubtless the Geraldine scion of Carton House was inspired by the noblest ideals of the New World in calling for armed insurrectionin Ireland,and he was an ideal figurefor Byron and Moore, but the fate of the aristocraticrevolutionariesin France, the consequences of '98 in Ireland,and the emergence of O'Connellism muddy the crystalpurityof Whig idealism (witnessthe Satanic host in TheVision ofJudgment). What happenswhen liberal tolerationis faced with religiousintolerance,and libertinismliberatesilliberalism?It was PontiusPilate'sdilemma, and IrelandandJudaea, Byronand Moore knew, had much in common. InJudaea religiousfundamentalistscrucifiedan hereticalteacher of peace (andfreed a criminal);at Scullaboguea Catholicpriestinstigatedthe burning of two hundredprotestantsagainstthe true faith. It was an act the 'knowledge' of which did not furtherthe cause of 'tolerance'. 'Let Erin remember ....' CARDIFF UNIVERSITY MALCOLM KELSALL Mary Shelleyin Her Times.Ed. by BETTY T. BENNETT and STUART CURRAN. Baltimore, MD, and London:Johns Hopkins University Press. 2000. xiii + 311pp. ?33. ISBN: 0-80186-334-I. The Mental Anatomiesof William Godwin and Mary Shelley.By WILLIAM D. BREWER. Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses. 200I. 246 pp. [32. ISBN:0-83863-870-8. These books offer major contributionsto Mary Shelley scholarship.Both confirm that Mary Shelley is not just the author of Frankenstein; both offer refreshing, alternativereadings to the until now predominantlypsychobiographicalapproach, and both base their findings on the textual scholarshipwhich went into the recent Pickeringand Chatto edition of NovelsandSelected Works ofMaryShelley. In addition, Mary Shelley's literaryrelationshipwith, and possible indebtednessto, her parents William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, her husband P. B. Shelley, and her larger literary circle, Byron, the 'Satanic School', her publishers, are now interpreted with a keener eye for the wider intellectualand historicalcontext as opposed to the previous emphasis on family dynamics. lay before him, whereas Moore subsided into prosaic hackwork,until his Lifeof Byron carriedhim to posterityon the greaterwriter'sdolphin back. Strong philosophical and political principles united the friends. As Vail shows, their intellectualroots are in the classicallibertinetraditionwith its emphasis upon sceptical enquiry and freedom of thought and action. The fruit manifests itself in their liberalismand toleration of diversityof creed and custom. Accordingly,both men gravitatedtowardsthe Whig party that had been founded upon a declaration of 'rights'and in (armed)opposition to State 'tyranny'.The poetry of Byron and Moore is an expressionof the conscience of the Whig tradition.'One common note on either lyre did strike, I And knaves and fools [they] both abhorred alike.' Vail's testament to this friendship is deeply empathetic as well as being well grounded in historyand objectivelydetailed. He is the heir of Erdman, Marchand, and Woodring (couldthere be higher praise?)and the poets his account gives us are figures to whom modern multiculturalismmay sympatheticallyrespond. It is right that the critic should be empathetic, for we learn from insight:'Knowledge is ever the parent of tolerance'(asMoore wrote of Byron, cited p.I69...

The Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy

In this major reinterpretation of the Victorian Aesthetic Movement, Linda Dowling argues that such classic works of Victorian art writing such as Ruskin's Stones of Venice of Morris's Lectures on Art or Wilde's Critic as Artist become wholly intelligible only within the larger ideological context of the Whig tradition. The Vulgarization of Art explores the tragic consequences for the Aesthetic Movement when a repressed and irresolvable conflict between Shaftesbury's assumption of aristocratic soul and the Victorian ideal of aesthetic democracy repeatedly shatters the hopes of such writers as Ruskin, Morris, Pater, and Wilde for social transformation through the sense.

Educational History and Educational Change: The Past Decade of English Historiography

Commenting primarily on American and German educational historiography, Konrad H. Jarausch lamented that the “initial excitement” of the “new history of education” had abated and that education was no longer in the forefront of discussion in social or cultural history. Was this perception based upon an assumed coherence of the various trends which he described? Characteristic of the “new history,” according to Jarausch, had been, first, a radical criticism of the prevailing Whig tradition; secondly, a shift of focus from pedagogical ideas to social context; and thirdly, the adoption of social scientific techniques and quantification. All three features have contributed significantly to the development of research in British educational history, yet it would be artificial to postulate a unitary movement. Rather, various trends are visible, which reflect the institutional infrastructure within which history of education is produced in Britain. Changing priorities in and approaches to research in the history of education cannot be understood apart from the ties between the study of educational history and the institutional and research environments in which British historians and educationists work, as well as the wider context of contemporary educational politics.