Whig history
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
Whig history presents the past as an inevitable progression towards ever greater liberty and enlightenment, culminating in modern forms of liberal democracy and constitutional monarchy. In general, Whig historians stress 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 toward enlightenment. It also refers to a specific set of British historians. Its antithesis can be seen in certain kinds of cultural pessimism.
In popular culture
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".
Popular understandings of human evolution and paleoanthropology may be imbued with a form of "whiggishness". See for example the celebrated scientific illustration, The March of Progress (1965). Most portrayals and fictionalized adaptations of the Scopes Trial, such as in Inherit the Wind (1955), subscribe to a Whig view of the trial and its aftermath. This was challenged by historian Edward J. Larson in his book Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (1997), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1998.
Recent examples representative of the Whig history understanding of the world include Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature, Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man, and Michael Shermer's The Moral Arc, which argue that the modern world is much more moral. Pinker is criticized for collapsing distinctions and misrepresenting humanity's past by Douglas P. Fry and R. Brian Ferguson in War, Peace and Human Nature; and Darcia Narvaez points out the opposite trajectory in Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture and Wisdom. The Whig version of history was satirised in 1066 and All That.
See also
- Chronological snobbery
- Classical liberalism
- Ethnocentrism
- Great man theory
- Historian's fallacy
- Historiography
- Idea of Progress
- Meliorism
- Neoconservatism
- Philosophic Whigs
- Precursorism
- Predestination
- Presentism
- Schools of History
- Soviet historiography, another style of historiography driven by political preconceptions
- The End of History and the Last Man
