---
title: "Whig history"
chunk: 3/4
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:34:24.184729+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Stubbs was a true believer who concealed his biases, even from himself, behind the façade of a dispassionate historian translating original documents into magisterial prose. His rhetorical gifts often obscured his combination of high church Anglicanism, whig history, and civic responsibility. In the Church of England, Stubbs saw the original model for the development and maintenance of English liberties.
Stubb's 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 (including overreaches during the English Civil War) before uniting in "nation, church, peers and people" in the Glorious Revolution. This view of events was substantially challenged: Maitland discovered in 1893 that the early "parliaments" had "no hint of operating as a representative body but resembled instead a meeting of the King's Council, called to meet the king's purposes; it passed no 'legislation', but rather considered petitions or 'bills' as though acting as an ultimate court of justice". Albert Pollard, writing in 1920, also shot through much of Stubbs' ideas on the representative and law-making powers of early English parliaments, pulling the emergence of a semi-independent House of Commons to the 1620s.

=== Robert Hebert Quick ===
Political history was the usual venue for whig history in Great Britain, but it also appears in other areas. Robert Hebert Quick (1831–1891) was one of the leaders of the Whig school of the history of education, along with G. A. N. Lowndes. In 1898, Quick explained the value of studying the history of educational reform, arguing that the great accomplishments of the past were cumulative and comprised the building blocks that “would raise us to a higher standing-point from which we may see much that will make the right road clearer to us”.

=== End of whig history ===
Frederic William Maitland is "now universally recognised as the first practitioner of the modern discipline of history", using "medieval law as a tool to prise open the mind of medieval men". Blaas, in Continuity and Anachronism (1978) discerns new methods in the work of J. H. Round, F. W. Maitland and A. F. Pollard; Bentley believes that their work "contained the origins of much twentieth-century [historical] thinking in England". Marwick also positively mentions Gardiner, Seeley, Lord Acton, and T. F. Tout as transforming the teaching and study of history at British universities into a recognisable modern form.
The First World War, however, did substantial damage to whig history's fundamental assumption of progress and improvement:

Accelerated by the sceptical power of a new breed of historian epitomized in the brilliance of F. W. Maitland, whiggery had begun its turn downwards (we are told) and met its Waterloo on the Somme ... [T]win thrusts—on the one hand cultural despair in face of a dead civilization, on the other a determination to make history say something different for the post-war generation—worked between them to put whig susceptibilities between a rock and a hard place.
Bentley also speculates that 19th-century British historiography took the form of an indirect social history which "attempted to embrace society by absorbing it into the 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". He, however, notes that whig history has not died "outside the academy" and lives on partially in criticism of history as something published in "a row of small-minded monographs written by authors calling themselves 'doctor', whose life-experience and sense of English culture extended no further than taking cups of tea in the Institute of Historical Research".

== Later instances and criticism ==

=== In science ===

It has been argued that the history of science is "riddled with Whiggish history". Like other whig histories, whig history of science tends to divide historical actors into "good guys" who are on the side of truth (as is now known), and "bad guys" who opposed the emergence of these truths because of ignorance or bias. Science is seen as emerging from "a series of victories over pre-scientific thinking". 
The writing of Whig history of science is especially found in the writings of scientists and general historians, while this whiggish tendency is commonly opposed by professional historians of science. Nicholas Jardine describes the changing attitude to whiggishness this way:

By the mid-1970s, it had become commonplace among historians of science to employ the terms "Whig" and "Whiggish", often accompanied by one or more of "hagiographic", "internalist", "triumphalist", even "positivist", to denigrate grand narratives of scientific progress. At one level there is, indeed, an obvious parallel with the attacks on Whig constitutional history in the opening decades of the century. For, as P. B. M. Blaas has shown, those earlier attacks were part and parcel of a more general onslaught in the name of an autonomous, professional and scientific history, on popular, partisan and moralising historiography. For post-WWII champions of the newly professionalized history of science the targets were quite different. Above all, they were out to establish a critical distance between the history of science and the teaching and promotion of the sciences. In particular, they were suspicious of the grand celebratory and didactic narratives of scientific discovery and progress that had proliferated in the inter-war years.
More recently, some scholars have argued that Whig history is essential to the history of science. At one level, "the very term 'the history of science' has itself profoundly Whiggish implications. One may be reasonably clear what 'science' means in the 19th century and most of the 18th century. In the 17th century 'science' has very different meaning. Chemistry, for example, was then inextricably mixed up with alchemy. Before the 17th century dissecting out such a thing as 'science' in anything like the modern sense of the term involves profound distortions." The science historians' rejection of whiggishness has been criticised by some scientists for failing to appreciate "the temporal depth of scientific research".