There has been a considerable resurgence of interest recently in the Cambridge historian and public intellectual Herbert Butterfield (1900–1979). Two comprehensive biographies have been written in the last eight years along with a number of other detailed studies too. His latest appearance in a series of introductory texts titled Library of Modern Thinkers alongside such luminaries as Michael Polanyi and Wilhelm Röpke bears striking testimony to the importance that is now attached to his work. Most commentators on Butterfield have emphasised the tensions—indeed, inconsistency—in his output. By contrast, Kenneth B. McIntyre makes a forceful case for its coherence and also its relevance.

At issue is Butterfield's espousal of two types of history: technical or academic, on the one hand, and practical, on the other. “Technical history” is linked to a belief in the past as discontinuous with the present and a unity in itself. First in The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) and then in Christianity and History (1950) and History and Human Relations (1952) Butterfield insisted that history has its own distinct purpose: to explain change in human society from the point of view of individuals caught up in unique events. McIntyre traces this belief to Butterfield's interest in the German historians of the nineteenth century, particularly Leopold von Ranke, reinforced by English historians nearer his own time, F. W. Maitland for example. An emphasis on individuals as the bedrock of historical explanation provides the criterion by which he judged other “technical” historians, Lewis Namier in particular. For Butterfield, Namier's “structuralism” and reduction of human motivation to self-interest explained little.

By contrast, “practical history” seeks to draw lessons from the past by reading back into it the concerns of the present (37–38). Practical history is thus heavily circumscribed by the moral and political considerations that inform it. McIntyre points here to Butterfield's critique of Lord Acton for insisting on the obligation of historians to pass moral judgments on those they study, and also to his critique of Marx for identifying economic forces as the single determinant of human action for obvious political reasons. The parallels that McIntyre draws between Butterfield's insights into the development of technical history and science are especially illuminating; Butterfield, he maintains, showed how both spheres of enquiry emerged by emancipating themselves from practical concerns (97).

The two types of history would appear to be incompatible, the one superior and other inferior in terms of their relation to “truth,” and thus of unequal worth. But Butterfield did not draw this conclusion. At one level, McIntyre emphasizes his conception of the provisional nature of technical history. This arose not only from the incomplete state of the evidence and need to re-evaluate existing evidence in the face of new historical questions (39), but also from the closure to historians of the innermost recesses of the minds of their subjects, concealing the full play of personality from public view (37). Thus, historical accounts of the past are grounded in “presuppositions” that set limits to their validity, a predicament shared by science—another of Butterfield's insights into the affinity between technical history and science that McIntyre notes (86). At another level, Butterfield conceded the importance of practical history. This was not despite but because of his austere view of the role of the historian proper. The Englishman and His History (1941) holds up Whig history as an example of the way in which historical interpretation informed by the concerns of the present can enrich political thought.

Butterfield's approval of nontechnical history did not stop there. In his later work he embraced the necessity of providential or prophetic history, in keeping with the enduring influence on him of St. Augustine. This was at the core of the history that he believed was “going over men's heads.” For Butterfield's most recent biographer, Michael Bentley, the intellectual development that Butterfield underwent in the decade after 1945 was crucial here, shaped by a continuing fascination with the legacy of Lord Acton. While Butterfield still could not countenance Acton's concern to judge the characters of history, he extolled the breadth of Acton's historical interests and the role he gave to Providence—defined as “the continual extraction of good from evil”—in shaping the past (Bentley, The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield: History, Science and God [Cambridge University Press, 2011], 237–38). For Butterfield as for Acton, historiography in the sense of the history of history was not so much an imperative of history as science (although that was important: see ibid., 305) but of history as meaning (see, for example, Butterfield's article “The Christian and History,” The Spectator, 29 April 1953).

While recognizing that Butterfield was not a systematic thinker, McIntyre nevertheless identifies clear links between his conception of technical history, on the one hand, and his political and religious beliefs, on the other (41–45). He regards “skeptical liberalism” as the anchor of Butterfield's thought. This interpretation runs counter to a widely held view of Butterfield as essentially a Conservative or conservative thinker with a deep antipathy toward change. However, the received view—to which the present reviewer once subscribed—ignores his insistence on the duty of Christians to work for the good of the world. The point that McIntyre makes is that Butterfield conceived the good of the world in pragmatic rather than teleological terms and was averse to concentrating the effort of improvement in the state.

To this end, McIntyre shows how Butterfield welded together St. Augustine's view of human nature as tainted by original sin to a conception of the English tradition of politics that followed the settlement of the Glorious Revolution in 1688 (122). The outcome was an alternative view of liberalism to that which emerged from the French Revolution. While the Revolutionaries tied liberalism to the project of human emancipation grounded in an ideal of abstract equality, the thrust of St. Augustine's theology combined with the English tradition was toward an “inherent respect for individual liberty” (127). Accordingly, “skeptical liberalism” conceives the state as maintaining a set of laws that are nonpurposive. This enables individuals—the vehicles of Providence—to pursue their own ends in a context in which the consequences of sin are contained. Here, McIntyre explores the commonalities between Butterfield's thought and that of other contemporary thinkers, including his Cambridge colleague Michael Oakeshott. Butterfield shared Oakeshott's preference for the “nomocratic” over the “teleocratic” state and the antiperfectionist politics that inspired it. He went beyond Oakeshott, however, in transplanting the teleocratic model of the state to the international order, producing a compromise between amoral realism, on the one hand, and the pursuit of self-righteous crusades, on the other. It is as the founder of the “English School of International Relations” in this mold that McIntyre most extols Butterfield's legacy. He does so especially against the recent propensity of the US to pursue ideological goals in foreign policy, leading to wars such as “the war on terror” and wars to spread “democracy” that can never be won.

Bentley brings to light intriguing new evidence that Butterfield's concern for individual liberty and the idea of personality at its heart was related to the “Sex Question.” This was an issue with which he had engaged forcefully in the 1930s as a result of an extramarital affair that changed his whole persona (Bentley, 87–91). But the primacy of his Christian belief in the uniqueness of the individual person in shaping his conception of liberty and its importance is not in dispute. Without that foundation in Christianity, liberty is the prey of shifting ideals such as equality, nondiscrimination, and inclusivity that have no reference outside themselves. This is at the root of Butterfield's message, a message that McIntyre well captures in this thoughtful and elegantly written book.