---
title: "Whig history"
chunk: 4/4
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"
---

=== In economics ===
Retrospectives on modern macroeconomics are generally whiggish histories. For example, the popularisation of mathematical models by Paul Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis, when viewed by economists trained in a mathematical framework becomes "an important milestone on the road to the mathematization of economics" in a story told by the victorious. Yet "those who do not agree that such mathematization is a good thing could argue that the mathematical developments... represent a regression rather than a progression". The introduction of rational expectations similarly carries implicit hindsight bias: people who disagree on the reality of agents making decisions in the manner assumed (e.g. behavioral economics) "would not necessarily rejoice in [rational expectations'] present ascendancy".
Burrow views Marxist history, with its "[supposed] anticipated terminus from which it derives its moral and political point", as "characteristically whig".

=== In philosophy ===
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.
Marxists have had varied views on Whig history. The traditional inheritance of Hegel, interpreted through Engels' articulation of historical materialism, implied that history progressed from a "primitive communism", through slave societies, feudal societies, capitalism, and finally to socialism and communism. However, contemporary Marxists, such as Ellen Meiksins Wood, have aggressively challenged those assumptions as deterministic and ahistorical. Walter Benjamin criticized conception of history which assumed a necessarily progressive or teleological course, though he did not employ the term "Whig history". "The danger affects both the content of the [progressive] tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it."

=== In Canadian history ===
Regarding Canada, Allan Greer argues:

The interpretive schemes that dominated Canadian historical writing through the middle decades of the twentieth century were built on the assumption that history had a discernible direction and flow. Canada was moving towards a goal in the nineteenth century; whether this endpoint was the construction of a transcontinental, commercial, and political union, the development of parliamentary government, or the preservation and resurrection of French Canada, it was certainly a Good Thing. Thus the rebels of 1837 were quite literally on the wrong track. They lost because they had to lose; they were not simply overwhelmed by superior force, they were justly chastised by the God of History.

=== In the emergence of intelligent life ===
In The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1986), John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler identify whiggishness with a teleological principle of convergence in history to liberal democracy. This is in line with what Barrow and Tipler call the "anthropic principle".

=== In general history and biography ===
James A. Hijiya points out the persistence of whiggish history in history textbooks. In the debate over Britishness, David Marquand praised the whig approach on the grounds that "ordered freedom and evolutionary progress have been among the hallmarks of modern British history, and they should command respect".
Historian Edward J. Larson in his book Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (1997) challenged a whiggish view of the Scopes trial. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1998.

== See also ==

== References ==

=== Sources ===

== Further reading ==
Burrow, J. W. (1981). A Liberal Descent: Victorian historians and the English past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521240796.
Burrow, J. W. (1988). Whigs and Liberals. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 978-0198201397.
Burrow, J. W. (2000). The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848–1914. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0300083903.
Butterfield, Herbert (1931). The Whig Interpretation of History. London: G. Bell and Sons. OCLC 217470144. 1963 edition at the Internet Archive.

== External links ==

Text of The Whig Interpretation of History
James A. Hijiya, "Why the West Is Lost"
2003 article "Catholic Whiggery"
"Catholic Whiggery". Angelus. April 2003.