On heroes, hero-worship and demonology in Scottish historiography: a reply to Dr. Ferguson

It is an honour to have been thwacked by Dr. Ferguson. For several decades Dr. Ferguson has assumed the role of the dominie of Scottish historiography, and several distinguished historians, including a former Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford and Her Majesty's present Historiographer in Scotland, have felt the sting of his tawse, for errors large, small and non-existent. However, the honour I feel also stems from another source, for Dr. Ferguson—a scholar of great erudition and an indefatigable smiter of Amalekites in historical debate¹ —has long been, and still remains one of my 'heroes'; as, indeed, is the late Lord Dacre (the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper), who, notwithstanding his open hostilities with Dr. Ferguson and his very different style, in life as much as in prose, shared several of the same vital characteristics. It should not cause too much surprise, therefore, that the neophyte historian should find himself hero-worshipping both of these auld enemies. I should point out, of course, that hero-worship did not blind me to the obvious flaws in either scholar, and my recent article which discussed them both, 'Lord Dacre and the Politics of the Scottish Enlightenment', was a warts and all appreciation.²

Most readers of this article, to which Dr. Ferguson takes exception, will, I imagine, have been clear about its point of departure and its primary intent. Trevor-Roper's death seemed to provide an opportunity for calm and considered reflection upon his contributions to Scottish history. With his passing, I reckoned, Scottish historians could now treat Trevor-Roper with a greater degree of detachment, as a figure of the past not of the present, and might come to see the complex range of motivations—beyond an undoubted Scotophobia—which inspired his interventions in the field. How wrong I was! It transpires that anything more ambiguous or nuanced than a blanket anathema of Trevor-Roper's interventions in the field of Scottish history is, as far as Dr. Ferguson is concerned, a kind of trahison des clercs. Trevor-Roper, as I pointed out, got several things wrong in his essays on Scottish history; but to point out that he also brought some cosmopolitan and comparative insights into the study of the Scottish past is, it appears, to question an established demonology, and as such an affront to the Scottish historical community and its witchfinder-general.

More curious still, Dr. Ferguson's piece is oddly evasive. It fails entirely to engage with the central arguments of my essay—that Trevor-Roper's central aim in his exploration of the origins of the Scottish Enlightenment was not to denigrate Scotland's cultural history, but to use Scotland as a case study which might prick the influential extrapolation from the Weber thesis that Calvinism provided the crucial underpinnings for scientific and intellectual advances in post-Reformation Europe; that Trevor-Roper, though undoubtedly a conservative in his politics and an acerbic critic of Marxists and Marxism, was drawn in the earlier phase of his career to Marxisant explanation and never quite escaped Marxism's gravitational pull; that a non-doctrinaire materialism clearly influenced his overarching interpretation of the Scottish Enlightenment and its successor, Scottish Romanticism, as epiphenomena of the rapidity of economic and social change in eighteenth-century Scotland; and that, for all his sniping at the backwardness of late seventeenth-century Scottish life, Trevor-Roper did acknowledge the pre-Union roots of the Scottish Enlightenment, did not ascribe the flowering of eighteenth-century Scottish culture to contact with England and sought out—admittedly a priori—an Arminian, or Jacobite, Enlightenment on Scotland's eastern seaboard whose lines of communication were with the Continent.

The recent publication of Trevor-Roper's letters to the art critic Bernard Berenson lends support to some of these positions. In January 1951 he confessed that he 'used to think that historical events always had deep economic causes', but now took the view that 'pure farce covers a far greater field of history, and that Gibbon is a more reliable guide to that subject than...