Onward and Upward

Modernizing
England’s Past

English Historiography
in the Age of Modernism, 1870-1970
by Michael Bentley
Cambridge, 253 pp., $35.99

Two inaugural lectures from Regius professors of modern history, one at Cambridge and the other at Oxford, measure the ground that Michael Bentley covers in this brilliant book.

In 1903 J. B. Bury, the editor of Gibbon, told his Cambridge audience that

If, year by year, history is to become a more and more powerful force for stripping the bandages of error from the eyes of men, for shaping public opinion and advancing the cause of intellectual and political liberty, she will best prepare her disciples for the performance of that task . . . by remembering always that, though she may supply material for literary art or philosophical speculation, she is herself simply a science, no less and no more.

Here, Bury not only looked back to the Whig histories of the 19th century, with their preoccupation with the progress of liberty, but forward to the positivism of Lewis Namier and the extravagant faith in archives of Geoffrey Elton.

Three-quarters of a century later, in 1981, the military historian Michael Howard told his Oxford audience that

There is no such thing as “history.” History is what historians write, and historians are part of the process they are writing about. We may seek for what Jakob Burckhardt described as the “Archimedean point outside events” which would enable us to make truly dispassionate judgments and evaluations, but we know we cannot find it, and . . . we mistrust those of our colleagues in the social sciences who believe they can.