16 Facts About Whig history

Whig history is an approach to historiography that presents history as a journey from an oppressive and benighted past to a "glorious present".

Whig history laid the groundwork for modernization theory and the resulting deployment of development aid around the world after World War II, which has sometimes been criticized as destructive to its recipients.

Butterfield argued that this approach to Whig history compromised the work of the historian in several ways.

Whig history criticised it for modernising the past: "the result [of whig history] is that to many of us [historical figures] seem much more modern than they really were, and even when we have corrected this impression by closer study we find it difficult to keep in mind the differences between their world and ours".

Whig history is criticised as having an overly dualist view with heroes on the side of liberty and freedom against traditionalist villains opposing the inevitability of progress.

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Whig history felt that whig history viewed the world in terms of a morality play: that "[the whig historian imagines himself] inconclusive unless he can give a verdict; and studying Protestant and Catholic in the 16th century he feels that loose threads are still left hanging unless he can show which party was in the right".

Butterfield instead advances a view of Whig history stressing the accidental and contingent nature of events rather than some kind of inevitable and structural shift.

Whig history was, in short, an extremely biased view of the past: eager to hand out moral judgements, and distorted by teleology, anachronism and present-mindedness.

Roger Scruton takes the theory underlying whig history to be centrally concerned with social progress and reaction, with the progressives shown as victors and benefactors.

However, Rapin's Whig history lost its place as the standard Whig history of England in the late 18th century and early 19th century to that of David Hume.

Stubb's Whig history began with an imagined Anglo-Saxon past into which representative parliamentary institutions emerged and fought for control with the absolutist crown in various stages before uniting in "nation, church, peers and people" in the Glorious Revolution.

Political history was the usual venue for whig history in Great Britain, but it appears in other areas.

Frederic William Maitland is "now universally recognised as the first practitioner of the modern discipline of Whig history", using "medieval law as a tool to prise open the mind of medieval men".

Bentley speculates that 19th-century British historiography took the form of an indirect social Whig history which "attempted to embrace society by absorbing it into the Whig history of the state", a project gravely disrupted by the First World War and renewed questions on "the pretensions of the state as an avatar of social harmony".

One very common example of Whig history is the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, to whom is often ascribed a teleological view of history with an inexorable trajectory in the direction of progress.

The traditional inheritance of Hegel, interpreted through the Engels' articulation of historical materialism, implied that Whig history progressed from a "primitive communism", through slave societies, feudal societies, capitalism, and finally to socialism and communism.