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

我的赫伯特·巴特菲尔德传记（1900-1979）让人们重新关注到这个人，他的生活近年来一直没有受到历史学家、政治学家和神学家的关注。巴特菲尔德曾经被认为是一位拥有广泛受众的重要公共知识分子，现在他迫切需要复兴，因为这个世界正在回归他最努力捍卫的问题：对生活的精神理解，对历史的复杂而敏感的阅读，以及将历史写作的历史视为理解的关键的必要性。但也有一些方面是同时代的人经常忽略的，尤其是巴特菲尔德坚持社会科学的观点，以及科学方法在代表过去方面的地位——从科学家的角度来看，这种观点比以往任何时候都更有意义，因为道金斯假设上帝毁灭了。从某些方面来说，巴特菲尔德的一生是平静的：他是剑桥大学彼得学院的研究员，最终成为院长，并凭借写作和广播获得了声誉。然而，写作已经取代了这个人，人们在写他的时候，好像他们只需要用一种薄薄的叙事脉络将这些书联系起来。通过他的私人日记和他早期作品的档案，我们可以做得更好，这两者都是他的家人提供给我的。此外，我还发现了1930年代黑洞的大量信件（见研究背景），这些信件改变了我们对巴特菲尔德关于爱和性的概念的理解。他是一位相当重要的知识分子，与美国和德国建立了重要的联系，他经常在都柏林度过动荡的时期，他用洛克菲勒的钱在科莫湖畔建立了塞贝洛尼别墅作为学术中心，并担任英国国际关系研究委员会主席多年，该委员会对其职责做出了独特的处理。巴特菲尔德之所以比他的著作的其他方面更出名，也许是因为他对两项事业的支持：一是把科学史作为一门学术学科，我对此作了全面的阐述；二是把史学作为一门研究学科。我们可以把这个词理解为对不同时期和不同文化中对过去的不同看法的关注和解释。对我们来说，这已经成为一种很正常的观念，成为职业前景的一部分。但在20世纪50年代巴特菲尔德开始宣传其重要性时，情况并非如此。因为我已经写了很多关于这个主题的文章，所以我很适合讨论巴特菲尔德思想的这一部分，并在整个英国史学中给它一个位置。最后，我们不应该忽视巴特菲尔德与他那个时代许多杰出人物的关系，这些人都被编织在这个故事中——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，一大批杰出的历史学家，其中一些是他在1956年客座编辑的特别数量的TLS中汇集的，以及珀西·施拉姆或雷蒙德·阿隆等重要的欧洲人物。结果将是一部为普通读者写的大约16万字的专著——巴特菲尔德自己也曾向普通读者发表过演讲。

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.