Festschriftiness

Susan Pedersen

• Structures and Transformations in Modern British History edited by David Feldman and Jon Lawrence
  Cambridge, 331 pp, £50.00, January 2011, ISBN 978 0 521 51882 6
• The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain edited by Simon Gunn and James Vernon
  California, 271 pp, £20.95, May 2011, ISBN 978 0 9845909 5 7
• Classes, Cultures and Politics: Essays on British History for Ross McKibbin edited by Clare Griffiths, John Nott and William Whyte
  Oxford, 320 pp, £65.00, April 2011, ISBN 978 0 19 957988 4

Publishers hate festschrifts, but scholars love them, and this has been a good year, with the publication of collections honouring three men who have done much to shape British social history over the last four decades: Ross McKibbin, Gareth Stedman Jones and Patrick Joyce. I should say before I go any further that I too am a modern British historian: this is my subject and my tribe. I’ve met the dedicatees, most of the editors and a majority of the contributors to these volumes; a few are good friends. But for several reasons – location, intellectual formation, sex and especially nationality (I am an American, one of those interlopers whose contribution to British history has been, in Boyd Hilton’s words, ‘respectable at best’) – I stand at a slight distance from them.

The three men honoured in these books seem cast in a common mould. All were born in the early 1940s and did DPhils at Oxford, although McKibbin arrived there from small-town Australia and Joyce from a London Irish family. All position themselves on the left. All began their careers writing about the experience and politics of class, using social history to explain why a country with a working-class majority, the first industrial nation, proved so stubbornly unrevolutionary. All asked themselves, as the long night of Thatcherism stretched on, why neoliberal or market ideologies had proved so hard for the left to counter. That quest led all three to investigate the insular norms of late 19th-century working-class culture, a theme common to their most influential works: McKibbin’s The Ideologies of Class (1990), Joyce’s Visions of the People (1993) and some of the essays in Stedman Jones’s Languages of Class (1984). By the 1990s, this ‘cultural turn’ had driven Stedman Jones and Joyce to jettison Marxist determinism and to emphasise instead how available rhetorical tropes or habits of mind constrained political options. A layman might be forgiven for assuming that those two at least were on the same side.

But when David Mayfield and Susan Thorne, two young American scholars, cited Stedman Jones and Joyce as exemplars of social history’s ‘linguistic turn’ in an essay published inSocial History in 1992, a tempest ensued. Jon Lawrence and Miles Taylor, two of Stedman Jones’s recent PhD students, insisted that Mayfield and Thorne had entirely misunderstood their mentor’s work, which they felt should be judged not in terms of its theoretical affiliations but according to an empiricist standard: how adequately it explained particular outcomes such as the decline of Chartism or the nature of Labour politics. Joyce and his student James Vernon then charged Lawrence and Taylor with a ‘complacent’ desire to appropriate the tools of linguistic analysis while undermining its epistemological radicalism. All the two camps could agree on was that the Americans were hopelessly wrong in conflating their work.

Reading through the collections that these adversaries have produced almost 20 years later, I was filled with nostalgia for the slanging matches of those days. Now, all is comity and mutual appreciation. Then, Vernon and Joyce accused Lawrence and Taylor of various intellectual crimes; now, Lawrence is not only co-editing the festschrift for Stedman Jones but contributing an essay to the volume for Joyce, and Joyce in his most recent book thanks Taylor for his help. Age, no doubt, has something to do with it. In the 1990s these editors were postdoctoral fellows; now, they are readers and professors. (Taylor is the director of the Institute of Historical Research and didn’t contribute to any of these volumes.) They may have realised, too, that, with the Labour Party now less socialist than Macmillanite Tories, the time for internal squabbles has passed. But their intellectual mentors, too, have moved in different directions, leaving the students with less to argue about. It’s even possible that this new politeness is a sign of mutual indifference rather than agreement.

Stedman Jones in any case abdicated his role as a ‘tribal elder’ some time ago. No scholar did more to offer a model for a ‘new’ social history than he did in the 1980s: his essay ‘Rethinking Chartism’ in particular made a powerful case for the autonomy and longevity of the radical critique of political corruption and the concomitant weakness of historical approaches that sought to ‘read’ politics off social structure. His students took these lessons to heart, but he was moving in another direction. In the last decade, Stedman Jones has in essence become yet another Cambridge historian of political thought, concerned, especially in his 2004 book, An End to Poverty?, to recapture the economic ideas of late 18th-century radicals.

His students and colleagues have not followed him. None of the essays ostensibly written in his honour (save the introduction) draws on or even cites that work. Instead, the contributors remain concerned with the social and political transformations of the past two centuries, and especially with the powerful hold liberal values have had both on the left and the right. Methodologically, too, they remain loyal to the ‘anti-determinist’ banner Stedman Jones unfurled in the 1980s: they are convinced that, as the editors put it, ‘there is no new “total history” on the horizon’; they are wary of ‘fads in historical scholarship’ and would rather ‘interrogate connections’ than make causal claims. They have learned, as Daniel Pick writes, that ‘the relationship of economic conditions to cultural production, social action and literary form’ cannot ‘be assumed in advance’. Such connections must rather ‘be researched, case by case’.

All this caution makes for a dispiriting book. The reader is warned not only against ‘the instinctive assumptions of … politicised history’ (the editors again) but, it sometimes seems, against strong arguments of any kind. Emma Griffin examines the transformation of civic marketplaces to conclude that claims of a Georgian ‘urban renaissance’ are not so much ‘wrong’ as ‘partial’; Joanna Innes cautions against drawing excessively bold conclusions about the growth of government in the 19th century from public spending figures alone; Margot Finn uses the family records of one early 19th-century Indian viceroy, the Earl of Minto, to cast doubt on claims that a concern to maintain racial purity increasingly trumped other social ambitions; Jonathan Parry offers a careful account of the decline of institutional reform. All these historians are reliable, sober and meticulous. But they appear to have forgotten that we need strong arguments, even wrong arguments: the job of the historian is to make a persuasive claim and leave it to others to issue the caveats. Too few of these pieces reject one monolithic explanation in order to offer an equally bold alternative. David Feldman’s wonderful essay ‘Why the English Like Turbans’ is a rare exception. He counters the familiar argument that modern British society was constructed on practices of racial intolerance by reasoning that the British have shown a consistent preference for ‘pluralist solutions to multicultural dilemmas’ precisely because tolerance of difference has kept subject peoples in their place.

Gunn and Vernon’s volume is so different as to reinforce the suspicion that social historians’ seeming convergence is only skin deep. Feldman and Lawrence claim that ‘no one’ now writes ‘as though a single, overarching structure might provide the key to historical explanation’ (and this is certainly true of the contributors to their book), but Joyce and his students don’t appear to have heard that news. In the mid-1990s, with neoliberalism sweeping the globe, Joyce argued that the work of Foucault, especially his concept of ‘governmentality’, provided historians with tools for analysing its hegemony; significantly, this turn to Foucault was denounced by Stedman Jones, who warned that historians were simply exchanging one (Marxist) form of determinism for another. But Joyce’s work – especially The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (2003) – has continued to be conspicuously Foucauldian, as is that of many of the students and friends who have contributed to this volume.

As a result, this is much the most coherent of the three collections. Packed with citations of Foucault, Nikolas Rose and of course Joyce (but not McKibbin or Stedman Jones), almost all its essays are concerned with the way liberal practices and technologies (free markets, free labour) produce new relations of power. A characteristic Foucauldian fondness for paradox is much in evidence, with David Vincent explaining how ‘open’ government requires secrecy, James Epstein how the end of slave labour in the Caribbean produced other forms of labour coercion, Tom Crook how the naturalisation of heterosexuality fed an obsession with masturbation, Chris Otter how the unfettered drive towards economic liberalism spurred environmental degradation. To anyone familiar with Foucauldian tropes, these claims will not seem very surprising: I longed for a piece arguing that some liberal practice actually made people freer. But after reading the chastened essays for Stedman Jones, it is impossible not to find the intellectual energy and even self-importance of these pieces refreshing. I can’t share Mary Poovey’s belief that Wall Street’s recurrent financial crises will be overcome only when we (whoever ‘we’ are) ‘understand that there is a relationship between the stories people tell about the market … and the dynamics of the market itself’, but it is heartening to find scholars (and in this case, a 19th-century literary scholar) who still think their work matters in this way.

Since festschrifts are uneconomical by nature, only relatively large, well-heeled institutions can comfortably bear their cost: unsurprisingly, the festschrifts for McKibbin and Stedman Jones contain many contributors from their universities – Oxford and Cambridge – and are published by their university presses. But the contributors to the Joyce festschrift (Joyce taught at Manchester) teach at a wide range of institutions, and the book is part of a series co-edited by Vernon for the University of California Press. It has, therefore, to pay its way. Many of its attributes – thematic coherence, low production values, a title promising engagement with grand themes (liberalism, imperialism, modernity), publication simultaneously digitally and in paper, and especially the fact that it doesn’t admit to being a festschrift and doesn’t include Joyce’s name in the title – were sensible editorial choices designed to help it sell. Joyce might not have been pleased to be effaced from a collection ostensibly in his honour, but he should take comfort that, thanks to these choices, a smart young graduate student might actually buy the book.

The editors of the McKibbin volume didn’t have the same constraints. McKibbin has been at Oxford University his whole adult life, and all his books have been published by its press. His works – especially the twin volumes Classes and Cultures: England 1918-51 (1998) and Parties and Peoples: England 1914-51 (2010) – are the closest thing we have to a definitive 20th-century British history. Through his journalism in these pages, he is the only one of these scholars with a readership outside the academy. This volume’s festschriftiness is openly avowed. It displays all the hallmarks of the genre: an affectionate and not unrevealing pen-portrait (by Boyd Hilton), a sympathetic but intellectually astute account of the work that any academic would kill for (by Peter Ghosh), a full bibliography of the works, a brief but mordantly funny sketch of McKibbin’s unrelieved gloom as a writer of political journalism. One might think that such fidelity to the genre would make the book unreadable, but the opposite is true. While the other volumes claim to say ‘important’ things about weighty subjects, these editors, confident that McKibbin’s work will last, present a series of essays written in a style and on subjects he might find interesting, a fitting tribute to a historian who has a keen eye for popular amusements and pastimes (from gambling to dancing to trade unionism) and the wit to take them seriously.

Some familiar themes emerge. McKibbin, like Stedman Jones and Joyce, wanted to understand the relative fragility of socialism and the power of small ‘l’ liberalism in modern Britain, but he didn’t approach the subject through the optic of any ‘total’ theory, Marxist or Foucauldian. Instead, by means of a series of investigations into often class-specific cultural practices and habits of mind, he arrived at a persuasive explanation for the way an anti-socialist constitutionalism and deference to market values somehow became conventional wisdom. He based his argument on the fraught interwar years, however, and some of the most imaginative and valuable pieces here examine how a new social democratic consensus became possible after 1945 and why it then proved so fragile. There are clever essays by Peter Mandler and Joseph McAleer on the rich and untapped sources (survey data, romance novels) historians might use to get at popular attitudes in the 1950s, and splendid articles on why London taxi-drivers became natural recruits to Thatcherism (by John Davis) and on how neoliberal interests and institutions successfully targeted trade unionists as the enemy within (by Ben Jackson). None of the essays has much truck with grand theory; their authors are no more likely to cite the contributors to the Joyce volume than vice versa; the collection is as miscellaneous as the volume for Stedman Jones. But a higher proportion of the essays are fresh and surprising, their authors more interested in making new arguments than in correcting or revising old ones.

None of these books will cast a long shadow: festschrifts rarely do. They are, however, invaluable sources for the study of the academy. These three books, for example, show how the quarrels of the 1990s were not resolved but simply put by; how scholars from a variety of left-leaning perspectives came to take liberalism seriously as a subject of study; and how through some opaque process of affiliation and acculturation, historians defending empiricist methods and resisting monocausal explanations float to the top of elite institutions while those on less elevated perches stud their prose with the latest theoretical terms and pose as prophets of dissent. A Foucauldian could have a field day with festschrifts, given how openly and almost innocently they reproduce the dispensations of power, both intellectual and institutional.

They reveal something too about the gender politics of the academy. Festschrifts have always been mostly for men, and we wouldn’t really expect anything else, but as these books make clear, that isn’t the only problem. If the data available on the Institute of Historical Research website are correct, McKibbin, Joyce and (especially) Stedman Jones have supervised at least 50 PhD students over the past 30 years, just over a quarter (or 14) of whom were identifiably female. Of the 16 of these students who contributed essays to the three volumes, only two (one supervised by Stedman Jones, the other by McKibbin) are women. Almost two-fifths of the men who completed PhDs under these historians’ supervision, in other words, contributed scholarly pieces, while only a seventh of the women did so. It is impossible to infer much from these numbers: we can’t know whether most women students didn’t want to contribute, weren’t invited to do so, or have left the profession. It does seem, however, that the experience and culture of doctoral study in elite institutions – and that includes the compiling of festschrifts – compounds rather than mitigates women’s marginality.

If these historians were not on the left, I doubt whether the editors of their festschrifts would worry about – or perhaps even notice – this. The volumes of essays published in 1993 and 2002 to honour the work of Maurice Cowling, after all, contain not a single piece by a woman. But scholars who learned as students to recognise gender as a key locus of power and to chide each other for being insufficiently attuned to its workings (James Vernon in 1994 discerned ‘phallocentric desires’ underlying Lawrence and Taylor’s arguments) find such easy homosociality retrograde and embarrassing. Each group of editors has clearly tried to increase the representation of women, whether by adding distinguished female scholars of a compatible cast of mind (Gunn and Vernon); or by drawing in women who at some point worked, studied or ran seminars with their dedicatee (Feldman and Lawrence); or, least happily, by assigning exclusively to women the task of writing short tributes to his teaching (Griffiths, Nott and Whyte). That there is a need for such manoeuvres poses the question of whether women will ever inhabit the academic culture of honour and reputation as easily and comfortably as men do. Perhaps, as Virginia Woolf thought, it is better that we don’t. Still, I hear that festschrifts for two female historians, Jose Harris and Pat Thane, are being planned. I await them with curiosity.

Vol. 33 No. 19 · 6 October 2011 » Susan Pedersen » Festschriftiness
pages 31-32 | 2796 words

Letters

Vol. 33 No. 21 · 3 November 2011

From Boyd Hilton

Susan Pedersen quotes me as saying that the contributions of American scholars writing on British history have been ‘respectable at best’ (LRB, 6 October). I cannot confirm or deny that I used those words in a casual email long since deleted, but I clearly remember the point I was making, which was that no American historian working on British history, and likewise no British historian working on American history, has achieved the authoritative status that Elie Halévy achieved in Britain, Raymond Carr in Spain, Denis Mack Smith in Italy, and Jonathan Spence in China. I was certainly not intending to denigrate the work of America’s British historians. The bibliographical commentary in my 2006 volume of the New Oxford History of England refers to hundreds of authors; a rough calculation shows that words like ‘original’, ‘brilliant’, ‘stimulating’, ‘impressive’ and ‘important’ are attached to books by 71 of those writers. At the time I felt awkward about handing out such encomia, as though I were giving away prizes at a fête, but I am now glad that I did, for I find that 31 of those authors are Americans. This is a remarkably high proportion given that there are far more Brits than Americans who do British history.

Boyd Hilton
Cambridge

Burrinchini’s Spectre

Peter Clarke

• That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in 19th-Century Intellectual History by Stefan Collini,Donald Winch and John Burrow
  Cambridge, 385 pp, £25.00, November 1983, ISBN 0 521 25762 X

Time was when Clio had a seamless garment: but that was before the division of labour set in. Prefixless history is now condescendingly thought of as ‘straight’ history and her clothes have been stolen and shared out by her offspring, with continual squabbles over who wears the trousers. Intellectual history was tardy in asserting its separate identity and still has trouble in getting recognised – what is it, after all, but the history of intellectuals, by intellectuals, for intellectuals? One merit of That Noble Science of Politics is that it yields an answer to this question. Its subtitle proclaims it a study in intellectual history, and its authorship exemplifies the unity and coherence of the art.

Stefan Collini has made his reputation as the historian of late 19th-century sociological thought. Donald Winch has long been known for path-breaking studies of the Smithian and Keynesian epochs. John Burrow’s elegant anatomy of the evolutionary paradigm in Victorian Britain has recently been succeeded by a rightfully acclaimed historiographical work. Though three names appear upon the title page, they have pooled their intellectual capital to a remarkable degree. Their decision ‘to accept full collective responsibility for the book as a whole’, rather than accredit the essays individually, is the hallmark of this enterprise: ‘the outcome of common tastes and interests, shared teaching duties and, above all, friendship’. Throughout the English-speaking world, one can list universities where the trade of intellectual history is plied as such, beginning with the Australian National University and proceeding through the alphabet to the University of Sussex. Admittedly, this leaves a lot of virgin paper in between. It is thus safe as well as grandiloquent to claim that wherever intellectual history is known to flourish, a spectre has been haunting the infancy of the precocious discipline. It is the spectre of Burrinchini.

The project to which the efforts of Burrinchini are addressed – truly his raison d’être – is to retrieve a historical account of how ‘things political’ were pondered by a number of British writers during the 19th century. If this seems a cumbrous way of putting it, why not simply say that this is the history of Political Science, summarising the contribution of some notable predecessors to its subsequent emergence as an academic subject? Both by precept and by example, the authors show that such an approach falsifies experience by organising it retrospectively into an implicit celebration of the present. This sort of teleological foreshortening and impoverishment of our notions of the past, so that it is no longer another country where they do things differently but one where they simply do them less well, is what, since Butterfield, the term ‘Whig interpretation’ has covered. In this extended sense, ‘the authors of this book would be glad to be described as “anti-whig”.’

Here are no founding fathers, conscripted posthumously into an immanent endeavour where each wrought better than he knew. Instead, essay by essay, the distinctiveness of background, outlook, aims and intention is lovingly reconstituted for each protagonist within its appropriate context. ‘As an ordained minister of the established Church,’ we are reminded, ‘Malthus was as much the successor to Abraham Tucker and William Palcy as to Adam Smith, and as much the contemporary of someone like Bishop Sumner, who did so much to make his doctrines acceptable in Anglican circles, as of his friend Ricardo.’ Macaulay, on the other hand, is to be visualised, as he so often visualised himself, addressing the House of Commons in the tones befitting that palladium of our liberties. Walter Bagehot’s self-image was no less vivid, though certainly different, as he projected it onto the persona of the modern reviewer, ‘glancing lightly from topic to topic, suggesting deep things in jest, unfolding unanswerable argument in an absurd illustration’, for all the world the clubman, with whom, as the authors comment, ‘methodology is a tone of voice.’ If Bagehot knew that ‘the lecture of a professor’ was not his natural medium, Henry Sidgwick knew no other, unless it were sitting in his study, grinding out the ‘632 rather closely printed octavo pages’ of The Elements of Politics, with the sapping doubt as to whether it was worthwhile in one half of his mind, and in the other the dutiful riposte that ‘a Professor must write books.’ Altogether, hardly the makings of a faculty meeting.

At this point, however, the triumph of anti-Whig methodology threatens the whole enterprise. We have agreed to abandon anything resembling the metaphor of a well-drilled team, with each player ready to run with the ball when his turn comes, before passing to the next man. But unless Malthus and Macaulay, Bagehot and Sidgwick can agree on what game they are playing, it is not clear what they are doing here, along with such as Dugald Stewart, David Ricardo, the Mills, E.A. Freeman, Alfred Marshall and Graham Wallas. Are these the First Eleven, or just the first eleven names that cropped up? When the Whigs were in charge, at least we used to have an identifiable team of All Stars, whom the fans either loved or loved to hate. Don’t these chaps, in their motley kit, look rather like the Odds and Sods?

Burrinchini’s answer is disarmingly persuasive. It is to admit that this account will be less coherent than one of a closed doctrine. ‘What we have tried to present here is not a rival “tradition” or parallel story of transmission and development, so much as a succession of attempts to occupy and explore the role of informed student of the conditions and possibilities of politics, and of the institutional structures through which it works.’ But these conditions and possibilities were seen in recognisably similar ways by the protagonists surveyed, so as to give them something in common and thereby render them amenable to a common frame of analysis. This was to see politics as a positive field of activity, neither subsumed within some more general process of societal development nor wholly free of the constraints imposed by external circumstances and conditions. It followed that some balance needed to be struck between the utopian impulse to legislate difficulties away and the calculated surrender to supposedly overmastering forces at work. As to what balance was right, the claims of philosophy were in constant tension with the weight of experience, deduction with induction, universal principles of human nature with the evidence of the historical record.

One recurrent motif is the extent to which Politics, conceived as the noble science of which Macaulay spoke, gave way to politics in the vulgar sense of partisan commitment. Sidgwick, who had leant over backwards so long that he was used to seeing the world upside down, gave a characteristically inverted view of this difficulty. ‘I want to write a great book on Politics during the next ten years,’ he recorded in his journal in 1886, ‘and am afraid it will be too academic if I do not somehow go into the actual struggle. But how?’ In most cases, of course, how not to infuse reflection on general principles with the overtones of current contention was nearer the mark. Dugald Stewart, striving to uphold the analytical tradition of Adam Smith, found that Tory Edinburgh could be uncharitable to a man who had visited revolutionary France in its dawn, and who had incautiously cited Condorcet with a respect that he came to rue. The lesson he drew was that keeping his head down was the price of keeping the faith. Preeminently a man whose ‘disciples were among his best works’, as Sir James Mackintosh put it, he exerted a unique influence upon the Whig political world of the early 19th century – Palmerston and Russell among the grandees, Horner and Brougham among the men of talent who made the Edinburgh Review their instrument. Whatever else the system of the North taught them, it evidently instilled a circumspect belief that the canny would inherit the earth. Both Horner and Brougham found that their knowledge of political economy gave them a head start in Whig circles, where the cause of Free Trade was gaining ground. When Horner came to harbour doubts about the analysis presented in The Wealth of Nations, he nonetheless confessed himself ‘reluctant to expose Smith’s errors before his work has operated its full effect. We owe much at present to the superstitious worship of Smith’s name; and we must not impair that feeling, till the victory is more complete.’

Malthus was less happy in finding a match between his doctrines and the contingencies of contemporary polemics. Though himself a Whig, his views on the Corn Laws proved unpalatable to the Edinburgh Review, which fell steadily under the sway of the rival Ricardian version of political economy. Malthus therefore had to resort to the pages of theQuarterly, whose Tory outlook made it hospitable to anyone ready and able to to puncture the doctrinaire claims of Free Trade. For the Utilitarians, conversely, with their own corner to fight in politics, Whigs and Tories were not engaged in a real battle at all, but rather in a tacit conspiracy to uphold aristocratic government. We hear the authentic voice of the Left, with its sneaking preference for the Tories because of their transparency in upholding sinister interests, and its contempt for the opaque sham of Whiggery, Liberalism, social democracy and reformism in all its guises. With ironic inevitability, of course, many philosophical Radicals in time found themselves at the sharp end of this analysis as they approached the threshold of power. Compromise and be compromised, one might say.

The rise and fall of Utilitarianism broaches a larger theme: in some ways the central theme of the book. To be sure, it explicitly calls into doubt ‘both the identification of a unitary, homogeneous Utilitarianism and any assumption of its later disappearance: apart from the various forms which a roughly Benthamite political theory assumed, Hartleian psychology, Austinian jurisprudence and Ricardian political economy all followed somewhat different trajectories.’ This is a point well made and variously substantiated. To this extent, one might say that it was the attack upon Utilitarianism which constituted it as a fully coherent system by explicitly demanding not only what it held but what, on its own principles, it ought to have held. Yet if Utilitarianism fell into this trap, it was a trap which it had helped dig for itself. The deductive method was indeed common to diverse branches of theory, and, combined with Bentham’s mania for system-building, this produced a consistently reductionist pattern of explanation which was vulnerable to subsequent attack.

In many ways political economy provided the paradigm for this sort of reasoning, with its simple premises, its strong logic, and hence its universalising tendency. ‘The laws which regulate the production and distribution of wealth are the same in every country and stage of society,’ proclaimed J.R. McCulloch in 1825. While this proposition won wide assent from philosophic Whigs as well as philosophic Radicals when applied to political economy, the attempt to extend it also to a science of government exposed a sharp line of division between them. James Mill was confident in identifying the self-interest principle as the guiding light in political as in economic behaviour. He could, of course, cite Hume’s apophthegm that in politics every man ought to be supposed a knave, which was a proposition and an authority not likely to be repudiated by his Whig adversaries, like Mackintosh. But the work Mill demanded of it, as a founding axiom, operating without friction or distortion in fashioning civil society, was what really set the Benthamites apart. Their dismissal of history as error of a futile and uninstructive kind was the obverse of their claim to have pioneered a Utilitarian science of politics. Little wonder that Mackintosh’s private opinion of Bentham’s work was terse: ‘Profound – original – useless!’

Brougham said of Ricardo that he addressed the House of Commons like a man ‘from another planet’. When Mill, as it were, brought Ricardo’s methodology to politics, he was accused by Macaulay of speaking as though unaware that ‘any governments actually existed among men.’ Neither Brougham not Macaulay was questioning the need in political reasoning for broad principles, such as Dugald Stewart had upheld. Nor were they personally hostile to the Benthamites: Macaulay mounted the classic attack on Mill’s Essay on Government yet described his History of British India as, ‘on the whole, the greatest historical work which has appeared in our language since Gibbon’. The real thrust of Macaulay’s charge was that Mill had lost the historical dimension necessary io understand a society’s political arrangements somewhere on the passage between India and Britain.

Even in the first flush of Benthamite enthusiasm, therefore, there was no consensus on whether a strict Utilitarian schema could comprehend political as well as economic phenomena. John Stuart Mill’s exercises in retrieval in the next generation met with patchy success. He established a secure methodological foundation for political economy by restricting its scientific claims to hypothetical statements of the necessary relations between a series of abstractions. But such a science was far too austere to fulfil the functions for which it had been eagerly embraced in Victorian England, and in completing his Principles of Political Economy Mill expansively plied a broader brush upon a broader canvas. When it came to the study of politics, however, Mill chose to reject the very possibility of constructing a deductive science, rather than merely to hedge the authority of its practical bearings. Perhaps his main reason, apart from an embarrassing sense of the Benthamites’ deficiencies in historical analysis, was that the method of abstraction, as legitimately applied to the economic aspect of certain actions, became an imposture when faced with the complete range of actions covered by the term ‘political’. This did not, needless to say, preclude Mill from writing at length about politics, but in general he did so to applaud the diversity of experience, motives, goals, choice and results which he saw as integral to the activity.

By the time of the younger Mill, therefore, the Utilitarian synthesis in its more ambitious form was in disarray. If it was unsatisfying to Mill, what chance had it of pleasing others, who had not been brought up on it? Back in the club, Bagehot had a fine way of deflating the earnest rhetoric of political rationalists. Where they spoke of the ends of society, Bagehot wearily acknowledged that ‘by stupid industry, a certain social fabric somehow exists.’ Confronted by ‘public opinion’, he visualised it as ‘the opinion of the bald-headed man at the back of the omnibus’, rather in the way that Graham Wallas supplied the image of ‘the tired householder’ some forty years later, treading much the same ground. As is well observed by Burrinchini, ‘part of Bagehot’s immediate motive, in The English Constitution, was to point out that a too crudely utilitarian approach to the constitution might fail to recognise the more recondite functions of its apparently purely ornamental and useless features.’ Bagehot is, in a sense, giving the game away – ‘one feels that some passages should be asterisked, marked pas devant les domestiques’ – though obviously he is not unduly worried about his indiscretions. If this is insider’s information, then – as Gramsci said of Machiavelli – it is mainly the outsiders who need to read about it in books.

This sort of cynical wisdom contrived to make doctrinaire Utilitarianism look gauche, just as the appeal to history was intended to make it sound glib. The historians were certainly serving their own purposes when they claimed to have an indispensable contribution to make. Freeman’s quip that ‘history is past politics and politics are present history’ is a well-known version of the claim. J.R. Seeley displayed a more straightforward effrontery in pressing it in his 1869 inaugural lecture at Cambridge, when he argued from the assertion that history was about politics to the conclusion that ‘everyone, therefore, who studies political institutions, whether in the past or in the present, studies history.’ The age of academic imperialism had clearly begun and expansion was the order of the day. What Seeley and Freeman had discovered as ‘the best clue to the maze of annalistic facts’ was the Comparative Method, a discovery of which they made the most. In Freeman’s hands it was predicated upon a unique pattern of development among an Aryan family of nations, allowing confident extrapolation from the known to the unknown and a sealing of gaps in recorded testimony. By the time Seeley had abandoned the Aryan underpinning, and Bryce had jettisoned the developmental framework, it had become little more than a posh way of saying: ‘what we don’t know, we make up.’

When Utilitarianism was made the subject of attack as a political theory, it was broadly from a conservative direction that criticism came. The work of Sir Henry Maine in advancing a historical account of the evolution from status to contract is a case in point. Habit and custom, as revealed by history, were the forces on which this critique of deductive rationalism depended. Now essentially the same critique could be turned against classical political economy. Jevons conceded in the 1870s that historical investigation ‘may very properly do for political economy what Sir Henry Maine has done for jurisprudence’. Alfred Marshall, always sensitive to a shift in the wind, was not slow to distance himself, and the academic discipline which he kept under his wing, from the alien deductivist taint of Ricardo: ‘the faults and virtues of Ricardo’s mind are traceable to his Semitic origin; no English economist has had a mind similar to his.’ But whereas the critique of deductivism had an ideological purchase of a conservative kind when it was applied to politics, in economics its thrust was subversively radical. In both cases, one might say that the ideological enemy was Mid-Victorian Liberalism, with its complacent pieties of Reform and Free Trade; conversely, that laissez-faire had a comfortable air about it by now, even if ‘one man, one vote’ did not.

The historical economists, notably William Cunningham and William Ashley, asserted the relativism of economic theories and the primacy of politics. In particular, they offered a reappraisal of mercantilism, which had for a century been regarded, through Smith’s spectacles, as little more than a racket in defiance of the public interest. When Ashley demonstrated that in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, Free Trade was a Tory policy which the Whigs had denounced, he presented pious Liberals with a nice dilemma. Either they must rat on the Whigs (as the agents of sinister interests pitted against the common weal rather than the friendsof the people) or they must rat on Free Trade (which was unthinkable). For Ashley, calling himself an evolutionary socialist, such epiphanies were milestones on a road that led to radical Toryism and Tariff Reform. In politics as in economics, the paradigm of rational individualism did not collapse along with the deductive reasoning which the Utilitarians had used to support it. Instead there was a tendency to limit the damage by remoulding axioms which were vulnerable as universal postulates into pragmatic rules of thumb on which it was safe to rely in practice. Thus Bagehot with one hand dispensed relativism, showing that political economy only applied ‘in a single kind of society – a society of grown-up competitive commerce such as we have in England’. But with the other hand – the hand that counted the change – he set aside his own admission as unimportant: ‘As “men of the world” are the same everywhere, so the great commerce is the same everywhere.’

Too much should not be built upon such a relaxed concession, but in Sidgwick’s case there was a more purposeful rearguard effort at salvage. If Utilitarianism could not be justified a priori – and Sidgwick saw that the game was up here – could it nevertheless be shown that its maxims corresponded to common sense within a society like that of Victorian England? When a reviewer pejoratively concluded that Sidgwick ‘nowhere arrives at any conclusion which would differ very widely from that of the average man of the professional and commercial middle-classes at the present day’, he was also unwittingly endorsing Sidgwick’s project. This ambivalence is well captured in Burrinchini’s comment that Sidgwick ‘uses the method of Bentham to arrive at the conclusions of Burke’, though he could also be said to use the method of Burke to arrive at the conclusions of Bentham. Such works of reconciliation were second nature to Marshall, who headed off the challenge of the historical economists by two shrewd concessions. One was to diminish their enterprise by channelling it towards a new discipline called economic history. The other was to use historical example and argument to give economic man a pedigree. The rational root of customary behaviour was invoked here, and the formative experiences moulding different national characters were given their due (or more than their due). The abstraction of economic man was no longer needed when a judicious reading of history could produce his clone.

By the time of Marshall, Political Science had achieved its place in the syllabus at Cambridge – one of the high points in any triumphalist account. When the great Maitland was dining as a guest at Trinity Hall, the Master referred contempiuously to ‘the little scraps and snips of information which a popular newspaper was in the habit of serving up for its readers’. ‘That,’ said Maitland, ‘is what we call Political Science here.’ Burrinchini’s opinion is less damning but a resolute front against sentiment is maintained to the end: ‘insofar as one can talk of the “legacy” of the 19th-century science of politics to the academic study of politics in the first half of the 20th century, the term is to be understood less as representing a steady accumulation in the family bank balance and more as a collection of heavy, awkward, unfashionable pieces of Victorian furniture bequeathed by several remote and slightly dotty aunts of the same name.’ This is not an inspiring book. It is not a celebration of the activities it records, it is not a tract denouncing them, it is not a manifesto outlining a better way. It is, on the other hand, not only erudite but eloquent in its evocation of the landmarks of a universe of discourse which proves well worth understanding in its own right. The authors begin by telling us how intellectual history should be done, which is salutary: but their real tour de force comes in showing us how it should be done.

Vol. 6 No. 1 · 19 January 1984 »

Is It Glamorous?

David Simpson

• Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain by Stefan Collini
  Oxford, 544 pp, £16.99, July 2005, ISBN 0 19 929105 5

George Orwell is commonly invoked as the ideal role model for the intellectual: feisty, independent, outspoken and contrarian, active in the public sphere, and famous. So it’s a surprise to learn that the combined circulation of the three periodicals in which most of his essays appeared was only about half that of the publication you are now reading. On the other hand, A.J.P. Taylor wrote some 1500 book reviews in the course of his career, many of which appeared in the Sunday Express, which in the late 1950s had a circulation of four million and paid him up to £100 a time – a very considerable sum.

These are among the many striking items of information in Stefan Collini’s Absent Minds, whose title appears to accept the myth that the book disputes: that there are no British intellectuals – intellectuals are always elsewhere – or that those who think of themselves as intellectuals are really empty-headed populists or mere showmen. To anyone who supposes that Britain is uniquely inhospitable to its intellectuals, while the French give them their proper due, Collini has a story to tell: the grass is not greener across the Channel and it is not so bad here after all. The myth of British exceptionalism is a key component of the governing assumptions about intellectuals, but it doesn’t square with the facts. France may be a special case, especially France between the 1930s and the 1950s, but the British situation should be regarded as ‘one distinctive variant of a larger international pattern’. Germany, Russia, Italy and the United States, among others, share with Britain a set of habits and rhetorical conventions for discussing intellectuals.

The term ‘intellectual’ has been passed down through modern history, even in France, with explicit or implicit scare quotes, as a sneer, a dubious attribution, implying a kind of malfeasance. Those who upbraid the failings of intellectuals most vigorously are often intellectuals themselves, while those who deplore the narrow specialisms of others often depend on their own reputations as specialists in one discipline or another. Not until the late 20th century does the word ‘intellectual’ begin to circulate ‘without requiring introductions, bodyguards or identity papers’. This suggests that whatever the actual functions of intellectuals (and Collini is not so much concerned with these as with what is said about them), it is not the case that they are to be considered simply objects of nostalgia, figures from some heroic past. Unless, that is, the dropping of the scare quotes indicates a dilution of whatever threat or challenge intellectuals were formerly supposed to carry.

What is an intellectual? Intellectuals are not a class; they are not by definition significantly political (though the Russians once thought they were); they can’t be relied on to speak truth to power – but they must be something. Collini finds little to interest him in two of the three modern senses of the word he brings up for inspection: the sociological sense, which implies a distinct occupational category, and the subjective sense, which is merely self-ascribed or idiosyncratic. He finds it more useful to work with what he calls the ‘cultural sense’, which recognises that the intellectual performs a role before a certain sector of the public, using media that reach audiences different from and larger than those addressed by specialists. To call someone an intellectual should involve neither praise nor opprobrium, and no one medium should be considered uniquely important or effective. Above all, intellectuals are not always elsewhere, or better off elsewhere: they are always here and always now. Besides looking to France, the British have long enviously cited the careers of New York intellectuals, whose world, Collini finds, was always smaller than we like to think; meanwhile, both the Americans and Raymond Aron have imagined Britain as the place where the intellectual can live a happy and well-rewarded life. Collini’s book ought to put a stop to such fantasies.

Not least among the virtues of Absent Minds is that it spares us another extended account of the life and times of Isaiah Berlin – I would have put money on his place in this story, along with F.R. Leavis and C.P. Snow, who also feature sparsely. Many of the exemplary careers it does describe are full of surprises. The account of ‘Mr Facing-Both-Ways’ Eliot focuses vividly on his membership of a group called The Moot, where he crossed swords with Karl Mannheim about the best ways to be ‘planning for freedom’. Orwell comes in for another mild debunking, as the intellectual who can’t stand other intellectuals and as the man who said: ‘I think Sartre is a bag of wind and I am going to give him a good boot.’ Best of all are the accounts of the first generation of public intellectuals, television dons and celebrities, none of whom was so described at the time. It’s especially useful to be reminded of the careers of A.J. Ayer and A.J.P. Taylor: both, as Collini tells it, became successful media intellectuals partly by conveying the message that what intellectuals say or do hardly affects the public interest. Such a display of professional modesty speaks for a different time; similarly, Noel Annan’s model of a tightly related British intellectual aristocracy driving the national culture, and Edward Shils’s celebration of postwar Britain as a haven for intellectuals (‘Outside the China of the Mandarins, no great society has ever had a body of intellectuals so integrated with, and so congenial to, its ruling class, and so combining civility and refinement’), will seem shocking to anyone whose idea of the intellectual goes no further back than The History Man. In the middle of the Cold War, Shils seems to have felt the warm glow of Britain’s appreciation of people like him.

Absent Minds has a cheering message: that things are not so bad, that there are plenty of ways to circulate ideas outside the academic sphere, and that the public or the various publics are ‘neither as doped up nor as dumbed down’ as is often suggested. And yet Collini raises the possibility that wanting to lower the temperature and refine the terms of the debate about intellectuals might seem ‘dispiritingly unambitious’. He is happiest when exposing clichés about intellectuals and their national cultures, but less willing to ask why intellectuals so often think of themselves as alienated or misunderstood. Collini’s commitment to a level-headed occupation of the middle ground between optimism and despair doesn’t allow much room for the urgent aspirations of the more passionate figures in the tradition. His attraction to the middle is in the spirit of the left intellectuals (like Taylor) who criticised the Stalinist apologetics of the 1948 Wroclaw conference, and the liberal intellectuals (like Ayer) who stood out against the equally coercive pro-Nato atmosphere of the 1950 Berlin conference. But not every intellectual has been comfortable when arguing against extreme positions, or when the mark of approval goes only to those with average views.

Take the case of R.G. Collingwood, who had no radio or television career and did not write for the newspapers, who was an exceptional scholar and philosopher, but who never lived up to his own expectations, and who figures here as an example of ‘one distinctively British way of being an intellectual manqué’. He had no public reputation in his lifetime, though he very much wanted one; he saw his vocation as that of a Capitoline goose – ‘cackling is my job, and cackle I will’ – and philosophy as a weapon against the rising tide of European Fascism. Collini thinks this is an instance of ivory-tower self-deception: Collingwood fooled himself into thinking that getting philosophy straight would somehow stop the Panzers. But Collini makes no place for any equivalent consideration of the careers of Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson, C.L.R. James and others whose impact on the political sphere was arguably greater. The price Perry Anderson pays for being discussed at length here is to be regarded as an example of an ‘intellectualist’ tendency that arranges a list of big names into the patterns of a ‘stark geometry’. Taylor’s CND activism is treated more favourably, perhaps because Taylor was an opponent of civil disobedience, but Ayer is mocked as the signer of too many petitions.

Collini leaves right-wing activism out of the story, too, but it seems symptomatic that the figure he finds most wanting is Edward Said, who was not British, and whose 1993 Reith Lectures on the public intellectual (a British event, at least) tempt Collini to step way beyond the historical period with which most of the book is concerned. He makes short work of the critics and journalists who opposed the choice of Said as Reith lecturer in the first place, but this is largely a way to give himself permission to attack the book that came out of the lectures a year later. Collini finds it a ‘poor book’ marked by ‘simplistic binary alternatives’, a ‘kind of political free association’ and a proclivity for ‘graceless abstract nouns’. Above all it succumbs to an ‘insidious kind of glamour, that of being the champion of the wretched of the earth’. Why is this insidious, and is it glamorous? Said responding patiently but with evident distress to the long lines of pre-organised questioners who would hog the microphone ten minutes before the end of his talks and prevent anyone else getting to it never looked glamorous to me, nor did the death threats and public abuse he had to put up with throughout his career as a defender of those who couldn’t speak for themselves or get a fair hearing when they did. To be sure, Said’s Representations of the Intellectualdoes not attempt what Collini is aiming for: a comprehensive, academically detailed history of a disputed and misunderstood term. The core of Said’s argument is quite different: that there is no middle ground, or none worth inhabiting.

Said, in other words, had a very different idea from Collini about what the intellectual should be doing. For Collini it seems to be a matter of sorting out one’s histories, sharpening the terms, debunking the regnant myths and keeping’s one’s feet firmly within a discipline while making a modest effort to address a wider public. These are worthy enough goals, but Said thought that intellectuals should do more than mind their manners (or preserve what he calls a ‘smug heedlessness’) while the world’s haves and have-nots drift further apart. They should call our attention to ‘all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug’ and should universalise every crisis so as to bring it into line with as many other crises as possible, to the point of being ‘embarrassing . . . even unpleasant’. I do not find this insidiously glamorous, but rather the admirable opinion of a man who worked hard to make a difference in the world. For Said, the image of ‘stability’ masks a ‘state of emergency threatening the less fortunate with the danger of complete extinction’. Collini, on the other hand, is pleased to record a steady-state history marked by small, local variations, in which activists are an embarrassment and should be dismissed.

Collini worries that Said’s misuses of the word ‘intellectual’ will, if left unchallenged, ‘infect and disable one’s own account’. Collini, who is not merely descriptive but also prescriptive, convinces me that more intellectuals might remind themselves of their ordinariness and work harder to achieve a rational middle ground between ‘self-effacing specialism and self-promoting vulgarity’, but he does not persuade me that all intellectuals are just ordinary, or that Said (who was not ordinary) has betrayed that middle ground. Collini does not like Said’s ‘existential drama’ and its ‘inescapable logic of choice’, and he finds there – as he does with Orwell – the symptoms of a pathology, a ‘strong personal anxiety or fantasy at work’. Is he, then, in his dogged level-headedness and determination to find the same story (or non-story) almost everywhere, immune to anxieties of his own? Is Said really ‘culpably romantic’? How exactly is romanticism culpable? Is the damage to the world of intellectual historians as significant as the damage Said talks about, that done by nation-states and their military and economic executors? The baroque archness and tortured impersonalism of Collini’s prose on this occasion (he refers to Said as ‘a figure whom one has defended, perhaps on rather high-principled grounds’) seems more than a little anxious; the lively wit that marks so much of his writing is lost here, and turns sour.

If Collini is right that with a few variations and exceptions the view of intellectuals has been much the same across the West in the 20th century, that there is a ‘larger international pattern’ at work, what is the common influence or structure that would explain it? He says at the end of the book that there is such a structure, but somehow the matter of ‘structural rather than merely local explanations’ dwindles down to a matter of ‘alarmist cultural pessimism’ which he has ‘taken issue with on other occasions’. There might be interesting reasons why capitalist economies in tandem with representative democracies are felt to have the power to impose despair or desperation on their intellectuals. But do they do so on all of them? Are there not some who maintain an optimism of the will, and must it be ‘culpably romantic’ to do so?

Collini’s book, for all its virtues, is an exercise in limitation. He announces early on that he will be confining his attention to ‘a somewhat limited range of established literary and academic figures’ that will not include ‘various groups defined in terms of their political activism or their provincial location or their working-class origins, and so on’. ‘And so on’ includes a good number of women, who, a few paragraphs on Iris Murdoch apart, figure not at all. ‘And so on’ also includes the events of 1968 and 1989 (which made all sorts of intellectuals think about their obligations to political causes), the Vietnam War, apartheid, the feminist movement, and many other intellectuals who (like Said) were not British but very much part of a British debate: Derrida, Althusser, Foucault, Fanon, Chomsky, Beauvoir, to name a few. Collini would say, I think, that the existence of activist intellectuals who saw it as part of their job to work to change the world can be understood as one more instance of a tradition of tolerance that we misrepresent by paying attention only to the alienated and dyspeptic voices. But one thing intellectuals have said about themselves is that not all intellectuals are the same, or are treated the same way by the societies in which they subsist.

Vol. 30 No. 5 · 6 March 2008 » David Simpson » Is It Glamorous?
pages 21-22 | 2494 words

Letters

Vol. 30 No. 7 · 10 April 2008

From Paul Anderson

In his review of Stefan Collini’s Absent Minds, David Simpson writes of George Orwell that ‘it’s a surprise to learn that the combined circulation of the three periodicals in which most of his essays appeared was only about half that of the publication you are now reading’ (LRB, 6 March). Simpson is repeating Collini’s mistake here. It’s true that Cyril Connolly’s Horizon and Humphrey Slater’s Polemic sold something in the region of 10,000 between them. But Tribune was on a roll when Orwell wrote his ‘As I Please’ columns for it between 1943 and 1947. It wasn’t certificated by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, but its print run was around 40,000 a week towards the end of this period. This is fewer copies than the LRB sells today, but a lot more than half its circulation, even if it’s peanuts compared with the readership A.J.P. Taylor reached by writing for the Sunday Express.

Paul Anderson
Ipswich

Vol. 30 No. 9 · 8 May 2008

From Stefan Collini

I am very willing to believe that Paul Anderson has new and reliable evidence about the circulation of Tribune in the mid-1940s, in which case my calculation about the combined circulation of the three periodicals in which much of Orwell’s best writing appeared may have to be revised (Letters, 10 April). But, as Anderson acknowledges, the Audit Bureau of Circulations seems not to have certified any figures for Tribune, and one has to rely, therefore, on the figures provided by historians of this period. The most recent, and possibly the most authoritative, of these is Kenneth O. Morgan, in his 2007 biography of Michael Foot, who was an editor of Tribune for part of the period in question, 1945-47. During these years, Morgan writes, ‘sales, at perhaps ten thousand copies (so far as the facts could be uncovered), were disappointing.’ He later makes the point that this figure persisted until the end of the decade. It ‘increased considerably, to perhaps eighteen thousand’, in the early 1950s during the brief heyday of the Bevanites in the Labour Party, though this was long after Orwell’s association with the paper had ended.

So, if, as Anderson agrees, Horizon and Polemic ‘sold something in the region of ten thousand between them’ in the mid-1940s, it was on this evidence entirely accurate to claim that the combined circulation of all three journals was around half of the ABC’s certified figure for the LRB in 2004.

Stefan Collini
Cambridge

==

Whigissimo

Stefan Collini

• Herbert Butterfield: Historian as Dissenter by C.T. McIntire
  Yale, 499 pp, £30.00, August 2005, ISBN 0 300 09807 3

Do you speak Whiggish? The most recent edition of the Oxford English Dictionary does not, it appears – at least not fluently. The original OED, compiled in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, contained full entries for ‘Whig’ and its adjectival derivatives, denoting that group or tradition which had been one of the two main contending forces in British political life from the late 17th to at least the mid 19th century. The dictionary wisely refrained from attempting to specify in any detail what this tradition’s informing principles were, beyond a certain attachment to liberty, parliamentary government and the Protestant succession to the English throne; the general bearing of the term was suggested by the observation that in political life it had largely been superseded by ‘Liberal’, though it could still be used occasionally ‘to express adherence to moderate or antiquated Liberal principles’. The illustrative quotations reinforced this emphasis: ‘The term Whig,’ Lord John Russell said in the 1850s, ‘has the convenience of expressing in one syllable what Conservative Liberal expresses in seven.’

The entry ranged widely over the (mainly pejorative) extensions of the core use, including such delights, now lost, as ‘Whiglings’ and ‘Whigissimi’, but all these terms and their accompanying definitions were dependent on the central political sense. It was not until the OED Supplement published in the mid 1980s that the phrase ‘Whig historian’ made a separate appearance, defined as ‘a historian who interprets history as the continuing and inevitable victory of progress over reaction’. As so often with this magnificent but frustrating compilation, there appeared to be some tension between this encompassing definition and the illustrative examples. Should one simply conclude that ‘Whiggish history’ was history informed by Whig principles in the political sense, as suggested by quotations referring to Macaulay and G.M. Trevelyan (and as the dictionary’s own internal system of cross-referencing implied), or did ‘Whiggish history’ have a larger sense applicable to any account of the past which appeared to be selected and arranged so as to lead up to and confer legitimacy on the present, as in a quotation from 1975 warning against the ‘Whiggish perspectives’ that tended to infect the writing of labour history and women’s history? Clearly, it was not being suggested that toilers in these latter fields had been extolling parliamentary government and the Protestant succession, though the entry was still being offered as a further example of the original political definition. As is indicated by this and similar quotations (including one, I am disconcerted to find, by my younger self), the term expanded at some point to embrace historical accounts of ‘continuing and inevitable’ progress in any desirable direction, rather than simply the direction implied in the original political sense.

The clue – a rather gnomic one – to the relation between these senses (still not discriminated as such) is given by the inclusion of a quotation from 1931: ‘The truth is that there is a tendency for all history to veer over into whig history.’ That sentence is taken from the introduction to Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History, one of those ‘classics’ which is now more referred to than read. Its title, together with the generalised sense of ‘Whig history’, may have entered the language, but beyond having a vague awareness that Whiggish history is, in the terms used by another historical classic of the same vintage, a Bad Thing, many of us might struggle to state Butterfield’s argument any more precisely, and certainly very few people outside a small circle of professional historians could confidently recall what else Butterfield wrote and how, or indeed whether, his other work consorted with his strictures on the Whig interpretation of history.

When I returned to the book itself, a slim volume of 132 small pages, my uncertainty increased rather than diminished. It’s a stylish but oddly elusive work in which proper names are strikingly rare. E.H. Carr was being only slightly unfair when, in What Is History?, published thirty years later, he mocked Butterfield for attacking the Whig interpretation of history without naming ‘a single Whig except Fox, who was no historian, or a single historian save Acton, who was no Whig’. This points to a larger unsteadiness about the object of Butterfield’s criticism, an unsteadiness that was to be reproduced as a tension running throughout his career. In the narrow or literal sense, the ‘Whig interpretation of history’ (usually so capitalised, though not by Butterfield) refers to an account of English history. It is an account that celebrates the unbroken continuity of representative institutions and the legal protection of individual freedom, an account that identifies a deep political wisdom in the English, expressed above all through the wise moderation of those statesmen who adapted to changing circumstances without falling into either rigid reaction or unbridled revolution.

The origins of this account are traced to the middle of the 17th century as parliamentary lawyers attempted to formulate their case against the encroachments of the royal prerogative, arguing for the ‘restoration’ of supposedly ancient liberties rather than pressing the claims of either abstract principle or mere expediency. By the 19th century, this account, generalised and suitably buffed up to accommodate Reform Acts and the like, became the dominant narrative of English history, versions of which could be found in Macaulay, Stubbs, Freeman, and on into the 20th century in the writings of such latter-day Whig historians as Trevelyan and, less obviously, Churchill.

Butterfield’s attack, however, is directed at the informing assumptions of popular and outline histories. ‘It is perhaps a tragedy,’ he writes, or over-writes, ‘that the important work of abridging history is so often left to writers of textbooks and professional manufacturers of commercial literature.’ In such passages he appears to be primarily concerned with the historical framework imbibed and half forgotten by non-historians. ‘Perhaps all history books,’ he remarks with similar loftiness, ‘hold a danger for those who do not know a great deal of history already.’

But at other moments in the book he appears to be preoccupied with a dilemma facing professional historians. He extols detailed research, or what he calls ‘technical history’, as the antidote to the elisions and superficialities of narrative or synoptic history, but at the same time he doubts that such archivally grounded research leads to any fundamental change in the accepted framework. The inconvenient findings of technical history tend to be set on one side as ‘exceptions’, and ‘these exceptions are lost indeed in that combined process of organisation and abridgement by which we reach our general survey of general history.’ So in the broadest terms it is the problem of ‘the relations between historical research and what is known as general history’ that stirs him, and in issuing his warning against ‘an unexamined habit of mind into which we fall when we treat of history on the broad scale’, his use of the first-person plural indicates a predicament he shares. This, and not the prevalence of Protestant and progressive allegiances, or even, quite, the failing of writing about the past ‘with direct and perpetual reference to the present’, is what lies behind the remark quoted in the OED about the ‘tendency for all history to veer over into whig history’.

We are then left with a double uncertainty at the end of The Whig Interpretation of History. First, is Butterfield actually repudiating the broadly Whig story of the growth of English liberties, and if so, what if anything is he suggesting should replace it? The book does not seem to be advocating ‘Tory’ interpretation, whatever that might look like. It is surely the smugness and the anachronism pervading popular forms of Whig history that arouse his ire, not their emphasis on the growth of English liberty and stability. More generally, he appears to be urging what in another vocabulary might be called a dialectical account of history, one in which conflict and discontinuity constitute the norm and outcomes are rarely the result of deliberate agency.

Second, does Butterfield’s extended sense of ‘Whig history’ apply only to a certain kind of present-minded, triumphalist or teleological narrative, or is it an unavoidable feature of large-scale synoptic history in general? He hints at the latter view when he writes: ‘The whig interpretation of history is not merely the property of whigs and it is much more subtle than mental bias; it lies in a trick of organisation, an unexamined habit of mind that any historian may fall into.’ This almost reduces it to a general difficulty of exposition – what he calls in his preface ‘an aspect of the psychology of historians’ – where it is not clear how the difficulty is to be overcome short of refusing to unite the findings of ‘technical history’ into any larger picture. Yet he seemed to be unwilling to abandon the ambition to write ‘general history’, and was evidently not content to leave it to those ‘professional manufacturers of commercial literature’.

The Whig Interpretation of History itself does not explicitly confront these difficulties, and its mix of rhetorical indignation and studied elusiveness does not help to resolve them. The book’s encompassing criticisms also left it unclear what kind of history its author could go on to write. These issues only become more puzzling as we broaden our view to take in two further facts about Butterfield’s career. First, that 13 years after his assault on the Whig interpretation he published The Englishman and His History, which waxed lyrical about the intimate and animating relationship between the English and their past (his friendship in the 1930s with Michael Oakeshott may have played a part here): ‘Let us praise as a living thing the continuity of our history, and praise the whigs who taught us that we must nurse this blessing – reconciling continuity with change, discovering mediations between past and present, and showing what can be achieved by man’s reconciling mind.’ Stirred by the ‘deliverance’ of 1940 and by Churchill’s ‘great speeches’ of that year, he appears to be belting out a familiar patriotic tune from a score marked ‘Whigissimo’. The contradiction between this and his most celebrated work seems so glaring that it has been called (in allusion to German scholars’ attempts to reconcile the apparently conflicting positions of Adam Smith’s two great books) Das Herbert Butterfield Problem. The problem is only made more intractable by observing that although the heightened emotions of wartime may have contributed to the rousing register in which Butterfield wrote in 1944, these views were repeated, in tones that were not significantly cooler, at other times too. For example, in his brief study of Napoleon, published in 1939, he had written: ‘Liberty comes to the world from English traditions, not from French theories.’ And in a series of lectures delivered in Toronto in 1952, he declared that the story of liberty was ‘the basic theme of English history’.

Second, we discover that although Butterfield wrote a great deal in the later stages of his career, it is hard to see that much of it could be counted as either ‘technical history’ or ‘general history’ as he understood those terms. Most of his later publications were revised lectures and collected essays, many of them given over to metahistorical musings on the nature of ‘historical-mindedness’. In his few more sustained publications he was either defending an interpretation of 18th-century English politics that gave a central place to the struggles between popular liberties and royal power, or writing brisk surveys with titles such as The Origins of Modern Science 1300-1800. We seem to be driven to the vexing conclusion that not only was Butterfield a Whig historian in the full political sense of the term, but he also committed a fair bit of Whiggish history in the extended sense as well.

For all these reasons, Butterfield’s is an exceptionally difficult career to make sense of or give a shape to. C.T. McIntire provides some assistance in this task, if indirectly. His book is neither a full biography nor a purely critical study: for the most part, it is a detailed exposition of Butterfield’s writings set within a loosely biographical frame. It has clearly been a very long time in the making: McIntire draws on interviews he conducted with Butterfield in the 1970s, as well as with colleagues and pupils in the ensuing decades. He also draws extensively on the voluminous collection of Butterfield’s personal papers and unpublished writings now held in Cambridge University Library, as well as on other archival sources. All this adds to the usefulness of the book, though its learning is heavily worn and McIntire’s punctilious stations-of-the-cross summaries of every aspect of Butterfield’s numerous writings does not make for exciting reading. But the picture it discloses, sometimes despite itself, is an intriguing one.

Butterfield was born, in 1900, into the respectable, deferential stratum of the working class in a small mill village between Halifax and Keighley in West Yorkshire, on the fringe of the northern heartland of industrial Britain. He followed the route of the bright scholarship boy through the local grammar school and on to Peterhouse, Cambridge, in 1919. Exhibiting a practical commitment to continuity that would have done credit to the most Whiggish of Whig politicians, he remained at Peterhouse until his death sixty years later. But this did not signal either lack of ambition or lack of success: Butterfield was appointed to the chair of modern history in 1944; he was elected master of Peterhouse in 1955, serving a turn as vice-chancellor of the university from 1959 to 1961; he progressed to the regius professorship in 1963; he was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1965, was knighted on his retirement in 1968, and was the recipient of 13 honorary degrees.

McIntire’s method allows us few glimpses of the private man behind this impeccably successful public career. One can only speculate about the strains of adaptation as the shy young man with a Yorkshire accent who served as a lay preacher at Methodist chapels in the Fens was thrown into the pomp and snobberies of college life in interwar Cambridge, though at least some of the surviving biographical evidence asks to be read in terms of what another son of the Yorkshire working class, Richard Hoggart, wrote about ‘the scholarship boy’, who goes on to lead an ‘apparently normal life, but never without an underlying sense of some unease’. Butterfield worked ferociously hard all his life, driven by who knows what mixture of ambition, duty and anxiety, and he displayed a marked hunger for the conventional badges of success. We are told that he ‘delighted in the knighthood probably more than any other of the honours he ever received’. Sitting proudly in his new study on taking possession of the Master’s Lodge at Peterhouse, he confided to his secretary: ‘If I die tonight, I shall have been master of my college.’

Butterfield’s professional ascent can, Whiggishly, be made to appear steady and inevitable, but there was in fact a dramatic lurch in the late 1940s. The careers of few intellectual figures, especially historians, can have turned so decisively on a single month, for October 1949 saw the simultaneous publication of three books by him: George III, Lord North and the People 1779-80; The Origins of Modern Science 1300-1800 and Christianity and History. The third of these attracted more attention than the other two put together, but it was the impressive conjunction across such disparate topics that gave his reputation a decisive boost.

The curve of Butterfield’s career can be charted from McIntire’s impressively detailed bibliography of his published writings (there is also a long list of unpublished items). Publications falling in the first 45 years of his life occupy just under a single page, but it then takes seven pages to list the vast output of his remaining three decades. This is not an uncommon ratio as people become more successful, and one also has to allow for his transition from teaching fellow to professor, but the wider acclaim that greeted his triple whammy of October 1949 transformed his life. Thereafter, he received a constant flow of invitations to speak, a large proportion of which he seems to have accepted (McIntire calculates that there were some years in the 1950s when Butterfield delivered more than 15 invited lectures, on top of all his other duties). His radio talks – this was the heyday of the Third Programme – brought him still wider audiences, leading McIntire to speak, with forgivable hyperbole, of ‘his status as a public celebrity’. But the costs of celebrity include superficiality and repetitiveness: Butterfield’s lectures became windier, his examples tireder, his books thinner. Although he published 22 books, only two measured up to the standards of what he called ‘technical history’: his 1929 study of Napoleon and the peace negotiations of 1806-08 (the book which constituted his guild qualification as an academic historian), and the 1949 book on the politics of 1779-80. Significantly, both deal with a very short period; the problems intrinsic to writing extended history seem to have had a sharply personal force for him.

Perhaps the most poignant pages in McIntire’s study occur, improbably, in the bibliography, which includes a section devoted to works Butterfield ‘proposed, planned or agreed to write or edit, but did not complete or, in some cases, begin’. It is an unnervingly long list. Any scholar, especially one who gave as much time as Butterfield did to university administration, is likely to leave some such testimony to thwarted literary aspirations, but even so the length of the list suggests deeper intellectual inhibitions. Pride of place must go to his projected life of Charles James Fox, a project for which he collected, even hoarded, material for almost forty years. Trevelyan had generously lent the younger historian his family’s collection of Fox papers; after Butterfield had kept them for twenty years, Trevelyan finally insisted they be transferred to the British Museum. In 1939 Butterfield signed a contract to write the Concise Cambridge Modern History: more than twenty years later he spoke of this as ‘a large volume hardly half finished’, and although CUP continued to nag him gently about it during the 1960s, it was never completed.

Even where his loyalties were most strongly engaged, Butterfield had a bad record as a non-finisher. The diplomatic historian Howard Temperley had been his patron and model in the early stages of his career, and after Temperley’s death Butterfield promised his widow that he would write a book-length memoir of his former teacher. The promise was given in 1946; he took receipt of a large collection of Temperley’s papers, and began collecting further material. When Temperley’s son inquired about progress in the early 1960s, Butterfield had to confess that the papers were still in his basement, largely untouched. Eventually they had to be returned and the biography was never completed. In 1965 he gave the Gifford Lectures on ‘The History of Historiography’, but decided against following the usual convention of swift publication. For several years he laboured to expand his script into a publishable book, reading widely about the development of ‘historical-mindedness’ among the ancient civilisations of the Near East; the book never appeared.

I suspect that the tensions within Butterfield’s commitment to ‘general history’ played a key part in this repeated pattern of self-frustration. He took the term ‘general history’ from Ranke, for whom it connoted something more ambitious than merely a piece of extended or synoptic narrative. As Butterfield pointed out in Man on His Past (1955), Ranke (contrary to his later reputation as a blinkered archive-hound) did not repudiate the 18th-century ideal of ‘universal history’: ‘He simply claimed that it should be in the hands of historians rather than philosophers. Both he and his predecessors seem to have assumed that, if the historian himself does not undertake the task, some H.G. Wells will carry it out, and will acquire undue power over the minds of men.’ The use of the anachronistic example is telling: Butterfield is projecting the particular form of his own preoccupation onto Ranke. Disparaging references to Wells’s enormously popular Outline of History, first published in 1920, recur in Butterfield’s writing. We are back with those ‘professional manufacturers of commercial literature’ he had inveighed against in 1931.

The problem was an acute one for Butterfield because, unlike most of his highly professionalised colleagues and successors, he was not willing to abandon the ambitions of ‘general history’. One of the main reasons he resisted the introduction of numerous optional courses into the Cambridge history syllabus was that he clung to the honourable ideal of history as a form of moral education for a non-specialised governing elite rather than as a training for future historians, and for this purpose he thought it a duty of the university history lecturer to provide a coherent interpretative account that ranged across different countries and several centuries. It is revealing in this respect that he emphasised in Man on His Past that he was not writing as a specialist in the sub-field of ‘history of historiography’, but from the perspective of the general historian interested in many other things alongside historiography:

Because the role of the general historian is so important, and because the decisions that we make in our capacity as general historians are liable to be the most far-reaching of all – because, also, we cannot even escape having a general history which in a certain sense must preside over the works of multiple specialists and co-ordinate them with one another – it would be a serious matter either to neglect the training or to overlook the function of the general historian.

This, he added, had been a central concern for both Ranke and Acton, naming the predecessors to whom he returned most frequently throughout his career.

Butterfield’s energy as a historian was both stirred and dissipated by the tension between his strong desire to find large patterns in history – even, it could sometimes appear, to identify one overall direction – and his no less strong but much more corrosive urge to dismantle all received accounts, to be sceptical of all overarching narratives. It was the tension, one might say, between Butterfield the programmatically Whig historian and Butterfield the nominalist critic of Whiggish history. These two inclinations roughly correspond to the two extremes of his published work: sweeping but gnomic second-order ruminations about the nature of history, on the one hand, against minutely detailed monographic researches on the other. The increasing part played by Providence in his thinking can be seen as one rather desperate attempt to overcome this tension: Providence often seems to be little more than the law of unintended consequences in Christian dress. In this way he could indulge his taste for demonstrating the way human purposes were constantly frustrated or productive of ironic outcomes without having to present history as just one damn thing after another.

‘Historians,’ Butterfield declared, ‘cannot have too great flexibility of mind.’ But perhaps they can. For all the appeal of that sentiment, and for all the suggestiveness of Butterfield’s own diverse and, in their way, impressive writings, he may not have had quite enough of that combination of confidence, pragmatism and monomania essential to writing, to completing, major works of history. And perhaps this was allied to his counter-suggestibility and cultivated disengagement: although he was, by any measure, a serious historian and, beneath the layers of self-protection, a serious man, it may be that his apparent lack of interest in and commitment to the task of understanding the contemporary world (he regarded reading a newspaper as a ‘boring duty’) lent some excess of intellectual fastidiousness to his attempts to write genuinely explanatory history on any large scale. Butterfield had made his name mainly on the strength of his adroitness at turning received wisdom on its head; for the most part he was less successful at replacing it with some alternative account. The reasons he left behind no major piece of fully realised historical writing were partly contingent and circumstantial (no one working in a modern university can fail to sympathise), but partly the result of this self-inhibiting mixture of scepticism and ambition.

Butterfield concluded Christianity and History with the injunction: ‘Hold to Christ, and for the rest be totally uncommitted.’ Perhaps it’s because I find both parts of this credo more or less equally unappealing that it seems to me to offer a key to understanding his role in mid 20th-century British culture. His was a respected, influential and (at least from the late 1940s to the late 1960s) often heard voice, yet it is peculiarly hard to discern the effects of his influence in public debate beyond the encouragement of an obstructive scepticism about the possibility of rational agency in politics and society. Urging the wise statesman to ‘work with Providence’ just sounds like the historian trying to pull rank because he is on first-name terms with hindsight. Butterfield, it appears, did not demur when his position was described as ‘New Whig’, but here, one might say, the term ‘New Whig’ has the convenience of expressing in two syllables what ‘apolitical conservative’ expresses in nine.

That would, however, be far too pat as a characterisation of his stance across his entire career, not least because his mercurial intellect was prone, especially in his younger days, to try out various positions for effect without fully adopting them as his own. He always insisted that it was no part of his case to try to replace the Whig interpretation with a Tory one, yet he did, perhaps despite himself, end up giving aid and comfort to the Tory cause. Those who are principally stirred by their irritation with what they see as fashionable liberal and progressive pieties, rather than concentrating on the states of the world that those views aspire to remedy, are always likely to end up in a clotted, generalised grumpiness that becomes, in practice, hard to distinguish from simple conservatism. Butterfield clearly cherished a sense of his own mischievousness, a light-footed provokingness that couldn’t easily be labelled or pigeonholed in political or intellectual terms. But this, in those who are rather heavier of foot, can encourage the kind of intellectual nihilism that issues in know-nothing conservatism. Partly through his sceptical teaching, partly through a series of appointments he presided over at his college, he came to be thought of as a progenitor of the so-called ‘Peterhouse Tory’ school, exemplified by such figures as Maurice Cowling and John Vincent, though he did not share their leaning towards reactionary populism or their combative delight in sheer bloodiness. It is wholly appropriate that, by his teaching and example, Butterfield, subtle celebrant of the play of unintended consequences, should have been held to have produced ‘disciples’ whom he would have been unwilling to lead.

In the mid-1930s, the young J.H. Plumb felt lost as a research student in Cambridge, largely neglected by Trevelyan, his aloof and shy supervisor. He found stimulus and affirmation in long talks with Butterfield, 11 years his senior, but his later recollection of these intense exchanges pinpointed both the attraction and limitation of Butterfield as a historian: ‘I loved yet distrusted Butterfield’s impish qualities, his almost electric versatility at times daunted me, but his major principles – the deep belief in the role of Providence (Christian of course) in human history – left me, in the end, bored as well as disbelieving.’ Butterfield, Plumb had come to realise, exaggerated any position he took up ‘in order to provoke the inevitable outburst, for deep down he loved to shock, to be contrary’. This sharp judgment on Butterfield in his mid-thirties may have incorporated a little hindsight, but it does seem right about the central tension in his temperament, and right, too, about at least one major part of his legacy.

For ‘bored as well as disbelieving’ is just how one comes to feel in the end about the Peterhouse Tories whom Butterfield spawned, only half deliberately. The intention to provoke becomes too transparent, too merely tiresome: the raison d’être of history seems to be limited to turning any moderately popular or, still worse, liberal notion on its head. Intellectual nihilism becomes boring in the end because it seems like an expression of unresolved adolescence. Moreover, in practice it is tied to a substantive conservatism: all attempts at serious analytical explanation are derided, leaving force and established mores in possession of the ground. When this is conjoined, as it was in Butterfield’s case and, in different ways, in some of the Peterhouse historians, with an insistence on the all-powerful but ever inscrutable ways of God in history, it is bound to look like trying to have the best of both worlds – all the debating-club benefits of the negative forms of cleverness allied to the smugness which comes from always having a hand full of trumps. Butterfield the polemicist, Butterfield the challenging but corrosive supervisor, Butterfield the deeply conservative master of his college cannot altogether escape responsibility for having enabled this unlovely combination of qualities to become a noisy presence, if not a real force, from the 1960s to the 1980s.

Even at this distance, one can still experience some of the attractiveness of Butterfield’s ‘almost electric versatility’, and this helps to explain how he could also have inspired pupils who went on to become serious and original intellectual historians in the next generation, such as Duncan Forbes and J.G.A. Pocock. He saw the importance of the history of science so much earlier than most historians of his formation, just as he saw that the history of historiography was too significant and rich a field to be left to political historians pursuing their professional genealogy as a retirement hobby. It was also to his credit that he refused to let British and European history be confined to wholly separate boxes and that he publicly stood out against the Namierite interpretation of the 18th century when that school was in its heyday. And although The Whig Interpretation of History is, as a book, a patchy and contradictory affair, its identification of that perspectival error which is constitutive of so much celebratory and teleological history is of permanent value. But for all his talents and the diversity of his achievements, the more one reads of Butterfield’s later pronouncements – the murky invocations of Providence, the complacent celebration of the English political tradition, the constant preaching about the limitations of human reason and human agency, the endlessly relaid each-way bet on ‘technical history’ as the corrective of all over-confident generalisations and ‘general history’ as the antidote to disabling specialisation – the more, alas, one starts to become ‘bored as well as disbelieving’. Butterfield certainly wasn’t, as at moments it seemed he aspired to be, the English Ranke. Perhaps he came closer to being the Methodist Acton. It is an intriguingly contradictory identity, of course, but at least it is one that allows for the co-existence of a frequently indulged taste for moralising on the past with a long list of uncompleted projects in the present.

Vol. 27 No. 14 · 21 July 2005 

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