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Roy Weintraub wrote:  
 
<<"Whig history" is history written from a presentist perspective on the 
presumption that, as Grattan-Guinness once said, history is "the royal road 
to 'we'". That is, Whig history is written to demonstate how the imperfect 
past has necessarily evolved to reveal us as the end-product.>> 
 
I have several difficulties with this formulation, which turn on what seems 
to me to be the obvious fact that we are, as a matter of fact, the 
end-product (so far) of history. It is the case that the history of the 
subject led, in 2001, to the state of affairs as it is in 2001. 
 
Did the past *neccessarily* evolve in that way? I really wouldn't want to 
argue that, one way or the other, but it seems to me that I could be a 
determinist and argue that what happened had to happen, without being a 
whig. 
 
When we do (or teach) history we can't do everything so we have to select, 
and we select what seems interesting or relevant to us, now, in 2001. That 
was, I think, Pat Gunning's point, and he is right. In that sense we cannot 
avoid being 'presentist'. Covering oddball writers and heterodox schools of 
thought doesn't make a course more balanced, just balanced in a different 
way. We and our audience are of the present day, whether we like it or not. 
 
Is it the view of the past as *imperfect* that identifies whig history? I 
hope not, because I find I frequently want to point out errors and 
omissions in past writings that help to explain why they reached the 
conclusions they did. I suspect, for example, that seventeenth-century 
writers got muddled about the balance of trade because they failed to 
distinguish between money and capital. (Not a very original insight.) Does 
that make me a whig? I think it is a sensible comment which helps me to 
understand what would otherwise seem paradoxical and puzzling arguments. We 
all have our own views as to which arguments are cogent and which are not, 
and those ideas are of the present because we are of the present. It is 
hard to see that these ideas should not in any way inform our views of the 
past. 
 
I agree that I can (sometimes) recognize something that one could call 
'whig history', but I don't find it easy to define it. Perhaps it is just 
bad history, in which the usual suspects are tortured until they confess to 
being predecessors of Friedman/Sraffa/Keynes. Good history is attentive to 
evidence and context, avoids anachronisms, and so on (of course). It might 
lead to a history in which past errors really did lead (even necessarily) 
to unbroken progress, with us as the fortunate inheritors. It might not. 
But it won't start with a presumption one way or the other. 
 
Tony Brewer ([log in to unmask]) 
 
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