Page "Whig history" Paragraph 5

Butterfield's book on the ' Whig interpretation ' marked the emergence of a negative concept in historiography under a convenient phrase, but was not isolated.

Undermining ' whiggish ' narratives was one aspect of the post-World War I re-evaluation of European history in general, and Butterfield's critique exemplified this trend.

Intellectuals no longer believed the world was automatically getting better and better.

Subsequent generations of academic historians have similarly rejected Whig history because of its presentist and teleological assumption that history is driving toward some sort of goal.

According to Victor Feske, there is too much readiness to accept Butterfield's classic formulation from 1931 as definitive.

A study, Herbert Butterfield and the Interpretation of History by Keith Sewell, was published in 2005.