Herbert Butterfield was elected Chair in Modern History at Cambridge University in 1944 after 20 years as a fellow at Peterhouse College.. He taught modern history, especially the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and authored a number of books, including two on Napoleon. His first book, The Historical Novel (1924), won the Le Bas Prize. His later work explored political history in The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) and The Englishman and His History (1944). The Whig Interpretation and his Origins of Modern Science (1949) are Butterfield’s best remembered works. He was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge in 1963 and was elected to a fellowship of the British Academy in 1965. In 1968, he was knighted. He was active in public life as well, serving on the Eire government’s O’Dalaigh commission on higher education in the Republic of Ireland. He died in 1979.
Butterfield held three lectures: Religion and the Rise of Individualism, Liberty and Tradition in England & Liberty and Revolution in the World Today. Butterfield began his lectures by outlining the influence of Christianity on academic and everyday thought, even in a time of increasingly secularism, highlighting the concept of individualism in particular. He then extended this to a consideration of the British political system, examining the role of individualism in British approaches to liberty and to tradition. He illustrated a difference in the French tradition to think in terms of the natural rights of man and the British method of thinking in terms of the historic rights of Englishmen. In his third lecture, he focused on the steps to revolution. He showed that the Bolshevik revolution was the best organized revolution since 1789: “a scoundrel who wishes to become a tyrant could do no better than to follow their whole technique.” Since the French Revolution. Butterfield argued, a single Revolution “en permanence” had emerged, manifesting in different ways across time and place.
While he was at Queen’s, Butterfield met with student groups to discuss the value of studying history.
Listen to an excerpt from his lectures or read the full transcript below.
