From conjectural history to the Whig interpretation of history

The most important late eighteenth-century historical school to define the emergence of modernity emerged from the leading writers of the Scottish Enlightenment, notably David Hume (1711–76; History of Great Britain, 1754–62), William Robertson (1721– 93), Adam Ferguson (1723–1816) and John Millar (1735–1801). ‘Conjectural’ or ‘philosophical’ history for the Scots involved tracing and assessing the stadial development of humanity through, frequently, four main stages: hunting and gathering, pastoralism, agricultural and commerce. This progress from ‘rudeness’ to ‘refinement’ entailed both an economic narrative, in which the founding of private property, and later the emergence of the urban trading classes, were key moments, and a political narrative, in which the creation of free political institutions, specifically in Britain, demarcated the emergence of the ideal modern polity. History, thus, focused on the factors that stimulated wealth-creation, from which the new science of political economy emerged in the last decades of the eighteenth century, and the embracing of liberty, the analysis of which became central to the emerging science of politics. Conjectural history purported to be universally applicable, because based upon a science of human nature. This provided an account of natural, but ever-expanding, human wants, the satisfaction of which through the improvement of material conditions provided the motive-force for movement from one stage to the next. The development of commerce and manufactures

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causally introduced a ‘good’ or ‘regular’ government of free political institutions, which in turn promoted further commercial freedom as the middling orders grew more powerful. While the broad trend of this school, represented by Hume and Adam Smith in particular, was overwhelmingly optimistic about commercial society, stressing both increasing opulence and sociability, some writers, notably Ferguson, expressed greater ambiguity, contending that progressive economic specialization threatened the loss of both martial and civic virtue, risking both the degeneracy of artisan character and a relaxation of national public-spiritedness.

Successive generations of British historians in the nineteenth-century refined this approach in a variety of ways. Large numbers were, as Herbert Butterfield noted, Protestant, progressive and Whig, and were concerned to celebrate the achievements, liberty, stability and prosperity, of a Protestant constitution whose roots could be traced back to 1688, or 1649, or 1215, or even earlier. The tendency to see history generally as the ‘story of liberty’, as Croce put it, which is perhaps the dominant interpretation of the later modern period, dates from this era. Such ‘Whiggish’ history put the past at the service of the present, and condemns, moralizes or applauds according to its perceived contribution to the Victorian constitution. It is opposed in particular by the historicism of FRIEDRICH MEINECKE (1862–1954), which contends that each age must be understood solely in terms of its own internal principles, not by reference to the present. Such Whiggishness for Butterfield reached its apogee in Acton: it does not define the age as such. The two leading British historian of the era were THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY (1800–59) and HENRY THOMAS BUCKLE (1821–62). Macaulay’s whose History of England (1848–61) was phenomenally successful. Though he avowed his willingness to plot national disasters, and even worse, great crimes and follies, as well as triumphs, Macaulay’s Whig politics brought him to side with his partisan forebearers in his discussion of seventeenth-century developments, and to trace much further back the three factors that contributed most to British liberty, the limitations on executive power, the absence of a ‘caste-like’ nobility and the failure to develop a military establishment that threatened popular liberty. But first and foremost his intent was to defend the claim that ‘the history of our country during the last hundred and sixty years is eminently the history of physical, of moral, and of intellectual improvement’. Not only had resistance to monarchical and ecclesiastical encroachment been successful, but also Britons were rich, and their scientific and technological achievements had brought about

a considerable rise in the standard of living of even ordinary people, a focus crucial to the earlier Scottish writers.

In the chief work of BUCKLE, History of Civilisation in England (1857–61), the emphasis on the emergence of British freedom is less on institutions and politics, and more on intellectual and natural factors. There is a more pronounced effort to proclaim history as a science based upon the assumption of regularity and uniformity in human motivation and action, based on laws ‘permeated by one glorious principle of universal and undeviating regularity’ that are of divine design. But, at root, Buckle’s is still a history of liberty as such, and of the relative absence of the ‘protective spirit’ in Britain by comparison with her Continental neighbours. Britain possessed, Buckle noted, a ‘love of liberty, which for many centuries has been our leading characteristic, and which does us more real honour than all our conquests, all our literature, and all our philosophy put together’. Its final great product was Smith’s Wealth of Nations, which was for Buckle

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‘eminently a democratic book’. A similar effort to ascertain the sources of modern individualism was The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), by the Swiss historian JACOB BURCKHARDT, and to recount the emergence of modern European liberty, the History of the Italian Republics by JEAN CHARLES SIMONDE DE SISMONDI (1773–1842), which appeared in 16 volumes between 1803–18.

From conjectural history to the Whig interpretation of history