Butterfield as Historian: Objectivity Over Partisanship.

AuthorVella, John M.
PositionBrief article - Book review

Herbert Butterfield: Historian as Dissenter, by C. T. McIntire. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. xxv + 499 pp. $50.

In his biography of Herbert Butterfield, C. T. McIntire recounts how the distinguished Cambridge historian was invited to write for William F. Buckley's National Review in the late 1950s. The invitation, subsequently turned down, was offered in response to Butterfield's defense of individual liberty against encroachments from the state. A friend at the British embassy dissuaded Butterfield from writing by warning him against associating with the "right-wing" magazine. At the time, there was enough reason to think that Butterfield was on the conservative side of the political spectrum, or at least on the American conservative side. Yet his political identity has been the subject of debate among historians for many decades. Even so, his political views are worth re-examining since they provide insight into his intellectual contribution to the study of history.

Butterfield was born at the start of the twentieth century and died in his seventy-ninth year. During that time, he earned the respect of fellow historians and enjoyed a kind of celebrity status among his non-academic admirers, on both sides of the Atlantic. Butterfield wrote twenty-two books; became Professor of Modern History at Cambridge in 1944; was appointed Master of Peterhouse, his college, in 1954; and was elected Regius Professor of History in 1963. As vice-chancellor of Cambridge from 1959 to 1961, he earned a reputation as a defender of the independence of colleges vis-a-vis the university and of universities in their relations with the state. While many of his books covered the traditional fields of political and diplomatic history, particularly during his early career, his most original intellectual contributions were in relatively new fields: history of science and historiography.

McIntire applies the "dissenter" label to Butterfield to show how his apparent departure from the dominant orthodoxies of his profession and of public opinion is a product of his Methodist nonconformity. The use of the word dissenter is helpful, but only up to a point. Was he really a dissenter at Cambridge for not abandoning his Methodist faith for the Anglicanism of his fellows? McIntire fails to examine in detail how a rebel like Butterfield could enjoy enormous popularity during his lifetime. His most famous work, a critique of The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), led Annabel Patterson to associate him with the Tory views of Lewis Namier and David Hume. Such misinterpretations are likely the result of a lack of familiarity with Butterfield's written work or an inability to distinguish between various schools of political thought. In contrast, Maurice Cowling and J. C. D. Clark have rightly identified Butterfield with Asquithean Liberalism, in part because his political views were formed in a household loyal...

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