Modernist method

Summary

Various aspects of a continuing whig history and an opposing series of modernist investments have preoccupied us: an uneasy tension between intimations of a changing discipline and persistent memories and re-enactments of a whig canon; the working out of that tension in the eighteenth-century world of Butterfield and Namier; the wider political and ideological setting against which all such substantive history fashioned itself. Each of those aspects has left an impression, I hope, of the content of those divergent histories and some explanation of why that content took the form that it did. Joining these and other streams of argument about post-whig history into some distilled meaning or conclusion invites us to think, however, beyond content and to consider in a more frontal way what it is about the truth-claims of this generation that defines their specificity; and doing that, in turn, requires an invigilation of the practice that they all shared. Several types of method come to mind but the most obvious characterization of history in the modernist persuasion – that it saw itself embodying an investigative science – merits immediate attention and would do so even if J. B. Bury had never uttered his sole famous phrase at the end of his only famous sentence. For if, in 1903 with Acton safely dead, it seemed plausible to insist on history's status as ‘a science, no less and no more’, then it may seem equally plausible in retrospect to hypothesize that Bury's phrase amounted to a knife in the back for the whig tradition.