Nobody's Perfect: A New Whig Interpretation of History by Annabel Patterson (review)

106 letters in canada 2002 university of toronto quarterly, volume 73, number 1, winter 2003/4 ing Horizons,= >Adjustment,= >Raising the Sights=), in ten chapters, take the story a further forty-five or so years, to 1999, presenting what was done to create the modern multiversity, with its panoply of interdisciplinary activities and points of contact with the wider society. In dealing with Toronto=s academic profile, Friedland gives proper credit to the humanities, the federated college structure, and to the Arts and Science Honours Program, as distinguishing features throughout much of the university=s rise to prominence. He also makes it clear that several strong basic science departments and a number of professional faculties, particularly Medicine and Engineering, were equally significant contributors to the university=s stature, based on their rapid growth and research contributions in the early decades of the twentieth century. One strength of the volume is its detailed accounts of the contributions of individual faculty. Friedland also traces the professoriate=s evolving roles in teaching and research and B latterly B as an influential collective force in university politics. Incidents about >academic freedom,= spanning a century, are recounted in lively fashion, for their own significance and as reflecting the milieus of the times. Friedland=s picture of student life is more episodic, but with significant accounts of the struggle for admission of women in the 1880s, the student strike of 1896, athletics in several periods, and the activism of the 1960s. Those who wish for more comprehensive accounts of this or other facets of the university=s history are directed by the author to the work of other scholars or to his separately published footnotes, almost equal in length to the book, and to his source material, much of which is already deposited in the University Archives. Friedland takes his account to the dawn of the twenty-first century. He carries well the burden of selecting what to say about the most recent decades. He cannot, almost by definition, identify the most significant recent >turning points,= in the way he focused, for example, on the interplay or religion and politics in the university=s first sixty years, or on the emergence of graduate studies and research activity in the next sixty. He does, however, provide a good, topical account of a period that many of his readers will remember well. His reflective epilogue indicates where he expects the next history of the university to look: to the fate of the humanities and social sciences, to the balance between applied and fundamental research, and to the resolution of questions about accessibility and corporate influence. (JACK DIMOND) Annabel Patterson. Nobody=s Perfect: A New Whig Interpretation of History Yale University Press. ix, 288. US $27.50 Annabel Patterson hopes to characterize >liberal= thought in the eighteenth century, and to rescue the term >whig= from the dustbin in which, she humanities 107 university of toronto quarterly, volume 73, number 1, winter 2003/4 argues, Sir Lewis Namier and Sir Herbert Butterfield placed it. Since nobody=s perfect, Patterson=s Whigs B the >party= B and her whigs B the political philosophy B occasionally wandered from their >liberal= principles, but really were true >progressives.= She studies six such men. John Almon, the bookseller and political activist, sought to publish parliamentary debates and putative libels. Edmund Burke was not as reactionary as the Reflections suggest; his speech on conciliation with the colonies is a prose version of Paradise Lost and shows his true whig colors. Edward Thompson=s edition of Andrew Marvell=s letters and other writings was ethically and politically charged with >progressive= principles. Sir Joshua Reynolds was not the conservative he was thought late in his life, but the favourite painter of the Whigs. Thomas Erskine defended Paine for publishing the Rights of Man, worked in Milton=s intellectual tradition, and was committed to the idea of progress. William Wordsworth did not allow the revised Prelude to be published in his lifetime because it did not adequately negate his whig principles of 1805. Patterson never properly explains why she chooses these as opposed to other whigs. The Stage Licensing Act of 1737, the intimidation and arrest of Opposition printers...