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

我的赫伯特·巴特菲尔德(Herbert Butterfield，1900-1979)传记让人们重新聚焦于这位近年来在历史学家、政治学家和神学家的视线之外生活的人。巴特菲尔德曾被视为拥有广泛受众的主要公共知识分子，现在他迫切需要在一个正在回归他最努力倡导的问题的世界中复兴：对生活的精神理解，对历史的复杂而敏感的阅读，以及将历史写作历史视为理解的一把钥匙的必要性。但有一些方面是同时代的人经常遗漏的，尤其是巴特菲尔德对社会科学观的坚持，以及科学方法在代表过去中的地位--在一个被道金斯从科学家的角度假定为上帝的毁灭所扰乱的世界里，这一观点比以往任何时候都更相关。在某些方面，巴特菲尔德的生活是平静的：剑桥彼得豪斯学院的研究员，最终成为大师，他的声誉建立在他的写作和广播上。然而，写作已经取代了那个人和人们对他的描述，好像他们只需要把书与细微的叙事联系起来。我们可以通过他的私人日记和他早期工作的档案来做得更好，这两个都是我的家人提供给我的。此外，我还发现了大量来自20世纪30年代黑洞的信件(参见研究背景)，这些信件改变了我们对巴特菲尔德的爱情观和性行为的理解。出现的是一位相当重要的知识分子人物，他与美国和德国建立了重要的联系，后者在都柏林频繁而繁荣地度过了一段时间，他用洛克菲勒的资金在科莫湖上建立了塞贝洛尼别墅作为一个学术中心，并担任了多年来英国国际关系研究委员会的主席，该委员会对其职权范围做出了独特的处理。让巴特菲尔德比他作品的任何其他方面都更出名的，可能是他对两个事业的拥护：科学史作为一门学术学科，我对此进行了全面的描述，以及历史学作为一门研究学科的思想。我们可能会将这个术语理解为对不同时代、不同文化中对过去的不同看法的关注和解释。对我们来说，这已经成为一个非常正常的概念，成为该行业前景的一部分。但在20世纪50年代，当巴特菲尔德承诺公布其重要性时，情况并非如此。由于我已经写了很多关于这个主题的文章，所以我可以很好地讨论巴特菲尔德思想的这一部分，并在整个英国历史学中占有一席之地。最后，我们不应该忽视巴特菲尔德与他那个时代的许多杰出人物的关系，这些人物在这里交织在故事中--科学天才约瑟夫·李约瑟、杰出的政治哲学家迈克尔·奥克肖特、一批杰出的历史学家，其中一些人聚集在他于1956年客座编辑的TLS特辑中，以及具有珀西·施拉姆或雷蒙德·阿隆意义的欧洲人物。其结果将是一部约16万字的大型专著，面向普通读者--巴特菲尔德本人也是这样做的。

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.