CONSERVATISM IN BRITAIN
555
The main object of Butterfield's criticism is what he calls "Whig
history": the word "Whig" being used as an instance of what gram–
marians call "synecdoche," i.e. the part standing for the whole. What
he is in effect against is any history which presumes to treat its sub–
ject matter in moral terms, which would detect in the course of
events the work of divine providence, and he takes as supreme ex–
ample of this kind of error and presumption the Whig historians who
saw the Civil War as a divine judgment on an unrighteous dynasty.
In contrast to this Butterfield urges the claim of "technical history,"
history which tries as far as is possible to eliminate the element of
appraisal and censure and subjectivity. And if Butterfield, living a
hundred years later, knows well enough that Ranke's maxim of re–
counting things
wie es eigentlich gewesen
is for one reason or another
ultimately unobtainable, he sees this not as a reason for abandoning
it as an ideal but rather as an extra reason for pursuing it with un–
relenting pertinacity: if we can achieve so little, all the more reason
for trying harder.
Butterfield's arguments against the introduction of moral judg–
ments into the writing of history are hasically three in number. In
the first place, there is the fact of original sin, the dead weight of
innate evil in comparison with which the differences in moral achieve–
ment between this and that human being are as nothing.
If
there is
a moral lesson that history teaches, it is a lesson of such pervasiveness,
of such generality as to be supremely dissatisfying to those with a
taste for that kind of thing: namely, "that all men are, and always
have been, sinners." There is fundamentally no point in trying to
divide the sheep from the goats, because all belong to the same pen.
If
however we concede this point and admit that the historian can
do no more than grade the goats, urging that they can at least do
this much, then we come up against Butterfield's second argument:
namely, that the task is too difficult for human powers.
As
human
beings, we live externally one to another, seeing only the outer husk
of behavior, and, from this particular vantage point, to try and de–
termine in the case of another's action, first of all, the determining
factors that would acquit him of responsibility and, secondly, the ex–
tenuating factors that would diminish his responsibility-as we must
before passing a true moral judgment-is virtually and practically
impossible: "The difference between the wickedness and responsi-
