| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

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?	1
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.	2
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.	. . .

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