In Man on His Past (1955)—his second great study of historiography after the more famous Whig Interpretation of History (1931), Herbert Butterfield lists three elements that can be thought to constitute the new “scientific” history that emerged in the late eighteenth century, and gained dominance in the nineteenth, as history became a professionalized, academic discipline.
These three elements were (1) “the critical handling of documentary sources”; (2) “the question of seeing how the historical data, once established, could be made amenable to scientific treatment”; and (3) “the development of the right imaginative approach—the cultivation of what we call historical-mindedness”.
Of these three elements, only the third was essentially new. Historians in the Western tradition had, since Herodotus and Thucydides, been concerned to identify and evaluate their sources. But they had not done so systematically, and were slow to develop formal methods. This procedure becomes “scientific” once source criticism is expected to always be explicit, and once historians are expected to canvas and rank a very wide range of sources.
Of the three elements of “scientific” history, only the third was essentially new.
These expectations make history-writing much more laborious than it was for the old chroniclers. One is no longer authorized to write a history on the strength of a handful of written and oral sources, referenced hazily or not at all, and with one’s own memory as a primary tool. One needs libraries, archives, time and money to travel, and the whole enterprise becomes of necessity collaborative. Thucydides could write, on his own, the one and only the history of the Peloponnesian War. But there are thousands of histories of the French Revolution, supported in turn by a hundred times that number of studies of single points and personages.
By his second element, Butterfield was designating the search for historical laws, the ambition to make history a science in the way Newton had done for physics. Could human affairs be shown to conform to set rules, which might even allow prediction? Thucydides had already suggested something similar, when claiming that his readers would learn not only “events which have happened”, but also “those which will some day, in all human probability, happen again”. In a different vein, the history in the Bible, and the Christian history written in its wake, saw the action of God as the guiding principle of the human story.
So, here again, the “scientific” historians did not bring an entirely new approach. Of course, they had new laws to propose, notably various visions of “progress” (dialectical or otherwise) and, on occcasion, “decline”. But their main innovation was once again to attempt a systematic, rather than cursory or vatic, mapping of the evidence against the axioms.
By “historical-mindedness”, his third element, Butterfield meant reflection on how the past is different from the present, on how previous men and women’s thoughts and lives were not configured like ours. For this we can find some precedent in the ancients’ musings on their archaic ancestors and proto-anthropological studies of barbarians, and then in medieval and Renaissance writers’ attempts to get to grips with how pagans did not see the world as Christians did. Still the problem did not much worry pre-modern historians, generally happy to write as if their predecessors spoke and thought much as they did. It was industrial modernity, in remaking the world at a speed and scale hitherto unknown, that made the gap between past and present seem to require a great leap of the imagination.
It was industrial modernity, in remaking the world at a speed and scale hitherto unknown, that made the gap between past and present seem to require a great leap of the imagination
It is somewhat paradoxical that the imagination was felt to play such a necessary role in making history into a science. Walter Scott’s novels were as influential as any work from the German universities in this aspect of modernizing historiography. But, after all, imaginative leaps, rather than merely the collection and cataloguing of data, had also been vital to the various scientific revolutions which historians aspired to emulate.
There was already a note of rueful skepticism in Butterfield’s survey of these scientific ambitions. How are these projects faring, seventy years later?
The first element has proven the most robust. Once it is possible to do detailed and copious research into sources, it is very hard to argue that historians don’t have to bother. Moreover the modern research university arose as an institution within which such work could be carried out indefinitely. This has made for a lot of arid and pedantic writing, but that was already true in the nineteenth century, and has always been seen as a necessary price to pay for historiography’s reaching what Butterfield called its “adult stage”. More concerning is the erosion of competence (knowledge of languages, expertise in parsing archives): this is an area where universities are perilously close to endangering the sort of work they were set up to sustain.
As for history as a Newtonian science, this is a faltering project, not least because it is in a difficult tension with Butterfield’s two other “scientific” elements. The more detail we accumulate about the past, the less the past seems to yield itself to clear laws. And the more we insist on the past’s difference, the less confidence we can retain in any trans-historical principles that can be read into or out of it.
Christians, to be sure, still believe that Providence acts through history. But few today would presume to speculate at length on how exactly God is acting through events. Die-hard Marxists, one gathers, have not given up on their dialectic, but they have been pushed to the sides. If any narrative prevails, it is a dim, incoherent progressivism, in line with that of current left-wing politics, a runt descendant of the great visions of the philosophes and Hegelians.
“Historical-mindedness” has also proven fragile, because the very notion that it is required contains a latent suggestion that the historian’s task of understanding the past may be impossible. If the gap between present and past is so great as to require a special mindset to bridge it, how can we be sure it can be bridged at all? How is this in fact done? It is clearly not a “method” that can be taught in the manner of a language or how to read an ancient handwriting. If it is an activity of the imagination, isn’t our imagination particularly bound by the present? Walter Scott’s novels no longer seem to us to provide startling insights into how medieval people thought. Rather they seem revealing only of nineteenth-century Britons’ thoughts about the Middle Ages and about themselves.
“Historical-mindedness” has proven fragile, because the very notion that it is required contains a latent suggestion that the historian’s task of understanding the past may be impossible
So the search for historical-mindedness has sent historians into spirals of self-doubt, to wondering whether they can study anything effectively other than their predecessors’ creation of historical narratives. Hence Butterfield’s own work on the history of historiography, and indeed the more acerbic and opaque projects of “deconstruction” carried out across the English Channel.
In short, scientific history has hardly been a triumphant paradigm. Yet it will soldier on, both because its three elements are, at bottom, exciting and fruitful, and because we have no real alternative. Yet I wonder whether in the (very distant) end, scientific history will not come to seem too cumbersome and tormented a model, a partial wrong turn in man’s attempt to recall and understand his past. At least, it is troubling that so much of this scientific history goes out of date—becomes unreadable to all but specialists—so very quickly, whereas Herodotus and Thucydides, for all their rudimentary methods and unabashed judgments, remain as good as new more than two millennia after they wrote.
