Possessed by the Idols 
Steven Shapin
Historical progress is back, even if it was only in some genres of academic history that it ever went away. It’s been some time, certainly, since historians of art saw painting as a triumphal progress from Titian to Tracey Emin, or historians of music celebrated a linear ascent in compositional quality from Bach to Birtwistle. It was, perhaps, in political history that historians first recognised their job to be something like interpreting the past in its own terms, warning themselves against the tendency to award points to past actors insofar as their thinking anticipated the present. What Herbert Butterfield in 1931 called ‘the Whig interpretation of history’ counted as much as a prescription of what historians should avoid as a description of how history had been written in the bad old days.
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Steven Shapin is the Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science at Harvard. The Life of Science: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation will appear in the autumn.
Other articles by this contributor:
Megaton Man · The Original Dr Strangelove
Guests in the President’s House · Science Inc.
Tod aus Luft · The Rise and Fall of Fritz Haber
I’m a Surfer · What’s the Genome Worth?
Dear Prudence · Stephen Toulmin
The Great Neurotic Art · Steven Shapin tucks into Atkins
Don’t let that crybaby in here again · The Manhattan Project
Nobel Savage · Kary Mullis
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