Whiggism

Abstract: In 1961, the well-known American philosopher Ernest Nagel published The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation. It is an impressive work, laying out the so-called “logical empiricist” philosophy of science. This is a physics-based vision of science that goes back centuries. The great British philosophers of science, John F. W. Herschel (1830) and William Whewell (1840), writing in the first half of the nineteenth century and ardent Newtonians both, would have found much that is familiar. Nagel, along with others – notably Richard Braithwaite (1953) in England and Carl Hempel (1965, 1966) in America – saw theories as axiom systems. There are hypotheses at the top –Newton’s laws of motion and of gravity – and, deduced further down, empirical laws – those of Kepler and Galileo. The discussion was sophisticated and there was a huge amount of detail, ranging from general theoretical problems like the use of analogy through to problems of confirmation, especially where unseen or theoretical entities are concerned. It would not be true to say there is nothing historical in Nagel’s book. Apart from a discussion of history as a science, or perhaps as a failure as a science, there is a very good chapter on theory reduction. This occurs when an older theory like thermodynamics (to use Nagel’s example) is overtaken and absorbed by a new theory, in this case statistical mechanics. Empirical laws about the temperature and pressure of gases are explained in terms of little balls buzzing around in a container. Underlying everything, though, lay the logical empiricist mantra – separate the context of discovery from the context of justification. Discovery, found in the gemütlich homes of the historians, deals with fallible people having all sorts of irrational thoughts through time. Hempel’s (1966) example was of Kekulé dozing off to sleep in front of a fire, dreaming of a snake swallowing its tail, and thus discovering the circular nature of the benzene molecule. Justification, done in the Spartan quarters of the philosopher kings, deals with entities and their connections in the unchanging Platonic world of the Forms. Anything Newtonian qualifies here. History and theory change are not big items. There is, for instance, no reference to “revolution” in the index of Nagel’s book. There was no discussion of geology, for all that, with the coming of continental drift and plate tectonics; the earth sciences were at that time in the middle of the greatest upheaval of their history. Here there was a break with the past. Whewell (1837) was always interested in the history of science and he and Herschel were major players in the geological theorizing of their day. No longer. Logical empiricism was ahistorical. And proud of it!

Abstract: Anticlericalism has long been integral to our idea of the Enlightenment. This used to encourage an heroic mythology of secularisation, in which reason did battle with religion, free-thought with bigotry. Few historians today would endorse so Manichaean a picture, for European thought in the eighteenth century is now seen to have been characterised by an ameliorated Christianity rather than by a militant crusade to overthrow it. Yet even so, the attack on priestcraft, on clerical dogmatism and religious intolerance, remains stubbornly central to the story of Europe's passage from Reformation zeal to Enlightenment eirenicism. That even devout Catholics thought it important to clip the wings of Jesuits is a propensity distinctive of the age of Enlightenment. The historical prominence of anticlericalism renders England's position puzzling. For it is commonly supposed that, in the words of a Times leader in 1984, England ‘has had no intellectually sanctioned tradition of anticlericalism since the Reformation’ – and a fortiori no Enlightenment. John Pocock, deploying one of his more colourful metaphors, has written that ‘to try to articulate the phrase “the English Enlightenment” is to encounter inhibition; an ox sits upon the tongue’. The English, by disposing of Laudian and Calvinist fanaticism in the Civil War, and popery and tyranny in the Glorious Revolution, were able to breathe easily the air of intellectual liberty. Consequently there was ‘simply no infame to be crushed’ and the voices of the intelligentsia lacked the antagonism which Continental clergies provoked.

Abstract: Introduction: Whiggism and the age of reform Whiggism and Liberalism, 1780-1850 Aristocratic styles in the age of reform: I Whigs Aristocratic styles in the age of reform: II Liberals and Moderates Part two: Aristocratic government in the age of reform: Coalition government, 1830-1834 Whig government, 1835-1841 Whig opposition, 1841-1846 The last Whig government, 1846-1852 Epilogue and conclusion: Whiggery in an age of Liberalism