Books, Arts & Manners: History for Statesmen

The Wisdom of Statecraft: Sir Herbert Butterfield and the Philosophy of International Politics, by Alberto R. Coll (Duke, 173 pp., $25)

If Arnold Toynbee had a philosophy of history, Herbert Butterfield had a more modest philosophy of doing history: Tell the story, don’t try to make a final judgment, seek to understand the past as it understood itself. For him history was a matter of careful reconstruction, not grand generalizations. Not that he objected to philosophies of history; he merely thought them distinct from the activity of the historian as such, and he denied that the technical historian has any special competence to render moral judgment on the past.

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Joseph Sobran

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The Wisdom of Statecraft: Sir Herbert Butterfield and the Philosophy of International Politics, by Alberto R. Coll (Duke, 173 pp., $25)

If Arnold Toynbee had a philosophy of history, Herbert Butterfield had a more modest philosophy of doing history: Tell the story, don’t try to make a final judgment, seek to understand the past as it understood itself. For him history was a matter of careful reconstruction, not grand generalizations. Not that he objected to philosophies of history; he merely thought them distinct from the activity of the historian as such, and he denied that the technical historian has any special competence to render moral judgment on the past.