ABSTRACT
History pace Condorcet is not the inevitable march of progress. In his “Notes on Progress” James Miller points out “the discrepancy between the observable improvements in the human condition and the appalling calamities that have occurred since the French Revolution”: on the one side, “the reduction of poverty, the spread of literacy and the lengthening of the life span,” and on the other side, two horrific world wars and the Holocaust. What does this mean for the writing and understanding of history? In The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History (2008), the distinguished American historian Gordon Wood warns against the distortions of reading the present into the past or seeing the present as a progressive outcome of events in the past. “Much of the work of … present-minded historians … does violence to what ought to be the historian’s central concern—the authenticity of the past—and commits what the great French historian Marc Bloch called ‘the most unpardonable of sins’—anachronism” (9). Wood’s warning echoes that of Herbert Butterfield, author of The Whig Interpretation of History, who asserts, “The study of the 176past with one eye, so to speak, upon the present, is the source of all sins and sophistries in history … It is the essence of what we mean by the word ‘unhistorical’” (quoted in Mehta, 255). Whig historians, heirs to the Enlightenment belief in the Idea of Progress, distort our understanding of the past by judging “people in the past as those who furthered progress and those who hindered it” (Speck, 64). Wood qualifies his warning by saying that he is not suggesting that “history has no connection to the present; I am not advocating that history become antiquarianism” (9). What he has in mind, as evidenced by the review essays on other historians that follow, are distortions of the past to serve the ideological interests of historians, who are usually, but not always, of a progressive cast. At stake are contending views between liberal and conservative historians. Present-minded historians interested in “the furthering of progress” are often, but not invariably, liberals, whereas caveats about present-mindedness in the writing of history tend to have a conservative inflection. As we shall see, however, conservatives may also draw lessons for the present from the past.
