Crooked Timber is hosting an online seminar on Sherri Berman's book, The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century featuring, among other things, a contribution from yours truly. Check it all out.
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Sherri Berman Seminar
31 Oct 2006 10:40 am
Comments (8)
The book and the review both sound kind of whiggish in their arguments.
The book and the review both sound kind of whiggish in their arguments.
I am a bit whiggish. No, seriously, what does that mean?
I haven't read the review yet, but I'm guessing Wade is alluding to 'Whig history'.
'No discussion of presentism in history would be complete without the classic example of the "Whig interpretation of history," which has been defined by Herbert Butterfield as the "tendency in many historians to write on the side of Protestants and Whigs, to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasize certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present."' (David Fischer, Historians' Fallacies, p. 139)
'There is perhaps no better illustration of the manner in which for more than a century the whole political ethos of a nation, and for a shorter time of most of the Western world, was shaped by the writings of a group of historians than the influence exercised by the English "Whig interpretation of history." It is probably no exaggeration to say that, for every person who had first-hand acquantaince with the writings of the political philosophers who founded the liberal tradition, there were fifty or a hundred who had absorbed it from the writings of men like Hallam and Macaulay or Grote and Lord Acton. . . . Whether in any relevant sense "Whig history" really was wrong history is a matter on which the last word has probably not yet been said but which we cannot discuss here. Its beneficial effect in creating the essentially liberal atmosphere of the nineteenth century is beyond doubt and certainly was not due to any misrepresentation of facts.' (F.A. Hayek, Capitalism and the Historians, pp. 5-6)
Hm. Not the Yglesiastic writing style we're used to.
Posted by: Ikram on October 31, 2006 12:00 PM
yeah, i read that over rss and didn't even raelise it was MY.
bnqh uwtp wqgmohybr zfco lyodjug ibcnyxwa uinw
bnqh uwtp wqgmohybr zfco lyodjug ibcnyxwa uinw
bnqh uwtp wqgmohybr zfco lyodjug ibcnyxwa uinw
Comments closed November 14, 2006.
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Heads in the Sand
Hm. Not the Yglesiastic writing style we're used to.
Posted by Ikram | October 31, 2006 12:00 PM