1990/04/01 by Ernst Mayr · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #American Constitutional Law and Politics
paper · doi:10.2307/2709517
openalex publication_date 1990/04/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
Increasingly often in recent critiques of books and articles in of science an author is accused of having written history. Sometimes specific items are mentioned that are said to justify this label, but sometimes it would seem simply to document that critic does not like writings of author. No two people seem to use term in exactly same sense, nor would any two historians entirely agree exactly what is whiggish. One person's is another's revisionism. As label whiggish was more and more frequently applied, some historians became so fearful of epithet that they decided it was better not to make any interpretation or evaluation of past than to be called a whig. This meant, of course, as has been claimed, a return to the Baconian inductive method, which attempts to investigate phenomena with an observant but empty mind. 2 With that method historiography would become a deadly, purely descriptive exercise of reporting facts. Furthermore, use of term whiggish has brought such an unpleasant tone into many book reviews that a critical analysis of its meaning and justification would seem appropriate. The expression whig interpretation of history was proposed by historian H. Butterfield to characterize habit of some English constitutional historians of seeing their subject as a progressive broadening of human rights, in which good, forward-looking liberals were continuously struggling with backward-looking conservatives.3 More broadly, term was applied by Butterfield to any interpretation of that studies past with reference to present. In that sense, it was applied by him later to kind of of science in which past science and scientists were judged in light of modern