History, Science and God: the life and thought of Sir Herbert Butterfield

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My biography of Herbert Butterfield (1900-1979) brings back into focus a man whose life has dropped below the radar of historians, political scientists and theologians in recent years. Once regarded as a major public intellectual with a wide audience, Butterfield now needs urgent revival in a world that is returning to the issues he did most to champion: a spiritual understanding of life, a sophisticated and sensitive reading of history and the necessity for seeing the history of historical writing as a key to understanding. But there were aspects that contemporaries often misssed, not least Butterfield's adherence to a view of science-in-society and the place of scientific method in representing the past - a view more relevant than ever in a world disturrbed by Dawkins's assumed destruction of God from a scientist's perspective. In some respects Butterfield's life was a placid one: Fellow and eventually Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and with a reputation resting on his writing and broadcasting. The writing has come to substitute, however, for the man and people write about him as though they need only to connect the books with a thin vein of narrative. We can do better than this through his private journals and an archive of his early work, both of which have been made available to me by the family. In addition I have found a rich cache of letters from the Black Hole of the 1930s (see Research Context) which transforms our understanding of Butterfield's conception of love and sexuality. What emerges is an intellectual figure of considerable significance who established important links with America and Germany, who spent frequent and uprorious periods in Dublin, who established the Villa Serbelloni as an academic centre on Lake Como with Rockefeller money and chaired for a number of years the British Committee for the Study of International Relations which produced a distinctive treatment of its remit. What made Butterfield more famous than any other facet of his work was perhaps his championing of two causes: the history of science as an academic subject,of which I provide a full account, and the idea of historiography as a subject of study. We might understand this term to mean an attention to and explanation of differering perceptions of the past at different times and in different cultures. For us this has become so normal a notion as to be part of the profession's outlook. But it was not so in the 1950s when Butterfeild undertook to promulgate its importance. Since I have written a good deal about the subject I am well placed to discuss this part of Butterfield's thought and lend it a location in British historiography as a whole. Finally, we should not ignore Butterfield's relationship to many distinguished figures of his time who are woven into the story here - the scientific genius Joseph Needham, the luminous political philosopher Michael Oakeshott, a raft of distinguished historians, some of which he brought together in a special number of the TLS that he guest-edited in 1956, and European figures of the significance of Percy Schramm or Raymond Aron. The result will a substantial monograph of around 160 000 words written for a general audience - the one that Butterfield himself addressed.