---
title: "Whig history"
chunk: 1/4
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"
---

Whig history (or Whig historiography) is an approach to historiography that presents history as a journey from an oppressive and benighted past to a "glorious present". The present described is generally one with modern forms of liberal democracy and constitutional monarchy: it was originally a term for the  metanarratives praising Britain's adoption of constitutional monarchy and the historical development of the Westminster system. The term has also been applied widely in historical disciplines outside of British history (e.g. in the history of science) to describe "any subjection of history to what is essentially a teleological view of the historical process". When the term is used in contexts other than British history, "whig history" (lowercase) is preferred.
In the British context, whig historians emphasize the rise of constitutional government, personal freedoms and scientific progress. The term is often applied generally (and pejoratively) to histories that present the past as the inexorable march of progress towards enlightenment. The term is also used extensively in the history of science to refer to historiography that focuses on the successful chains of hypotheses and experiments that led to present-day theories, while ignoring rejected hypotheses and dead ends. 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.

== Terminology ==
The British historian Herbert Butterfield used the term "Whig history" in his short but influential book The Whig Interpretation of History (1931). It takes its name from the British Whigs, advocates of the power of Parliament, who opposed the Tories, advocates of the power of the king.
Butterfield's usage of the term was not in relation to the British or American Whig parties or Whiggism, but rather took aim at "the nineteenth-century school of historiography that praised all progress and habitually associated Protestantism with liberal views of liberty". The terms "whig" and "whiggish" are now used broadly, becoming "universal descriptors for all progressive narratives".
When H. A. L. Fisher gave a Raleigh lecture in 1928, he implied that the "whig historians" really were Whigs (i.e. associated with the Whig party or its Liberal successor) and had written centrist histories that were "good history despite their enthusiasm for Gladstonian or Liberal Unionist causes"; on introduction the term was mostly approbatory, unlike Butterfield's later use, since Fisher applauded Macaulay's "instructive and illuminating" history. By the time Butterfield wrote his Whig Interpretation, he may have been beating a dead horse: P. B. M. Blaas, in his 1978 book Continuity and Anachronism, argued that whig history itself had lost all vitality by 1914. Subsequent generations of academic historians have rejected Whig history because of its presentist and teleological assumption that history is driving toward some sort of goal.

=== The Whig Interpretation of History ===
Butterfield's purpose with writing his 1931 book was to criticise oversimplified narratives (or "abridgements") which interpreted past events in terms of the present for the purposes of achieving "drama and apparent moral clarity". Butterfield especially noted:

It is part and parcel of the whig interpretation of history that it studies the past with reference to the present.
Butterfield argued that this approach to history compromised the work of the historian in several ways. The emphasis on the inevitability of progress leads to the mistaken belief that the progressive sequence of events becomes "a line of causation", tempting the historian to go no further to investigate the causes of historical change. The focus on the present as the goal of historical change leads the historian to a special kind of "abridgement", selecting only those events that seem important from the present point of view.
He also 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 also criticised as having an overly dualist view with heroes on the side of liberty and freedom against traditionalist villains opposing the inevitability of progress. It also casts an overly negative view of opposing parties to heroes described, taking such parties "to have contributed nothing to the making of the present" and at worst converting them into a "dummy that acts as a better foil to the grand whig virtues". Butterfield illustrated this by criticising views of Martin Luther and the Reformation which "are inclined to write sometimes as though Protestantism in itself was somehow constituted to assist [the process of secularisation]" and misconceptions that the British constitution was created by Whigs opposed by Tories rather than created by compromise and interplay mediated by then-political contingencies.
He also 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 history stressing the accidental and contingent nature of events rather than some kind of inevitable and structural shift. Moreover, he called upon historians "to evoke a certain sensibility towards the past, the sensibility which studies the past 'for the sake of the past', which delights in the concrete and the complex, which 'goes out to meet the past', which searches for 'unlikenesses between past and present'".
A decade later however, if under wartime pressure from the Second World War, Butterfield would note of the Whig interpretation that "whatever it may have done to our history, it has had a wonderful effect on our politics....In every Englishman there is hidden something of a whig that seems to tug at the heart-strings".