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When human beings lost the unique place which in Christianity they had held amongst all created things, and became no longer the end and purpose of t… - Herbert Butterfield
" "When human beings lost the unique place which in Christianity they had held amongst all created things, and became no longer the end and purpose of the created universe, but a mere part of nature, the highest of the animals—a more intricate organization of matter than the beasts of the field, but part and parcel of the same system—then, fallen as they were from the dignity of eternal souls, it was easy to think of them as not (from a terrestrial point of view) ends in themselves, but as means to an end; each of them not a whole, but a part of some higher system, some super-person, whether the Volk or the New Order or the deified State. Once that superpersonality has been brought into existence, then the Rubicon has been crossed; for nothing—nothing at least in the universe of modern rationalism—can prevent the Leviathan from growing until it has swallowed every right of the individual.
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About Herbert Butterfield
Herbert Butterfield (October 7, 1900 – July 20, 1979) was a British historian and philosopher of history who is remembered chiefly for a slim volume entitled, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931).
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Alternative Names:
Sir Herbert Butterfield
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Additional quotes by Herbert Butterfield
I wonder nowadays whether the neglect of military history and war does not have the effect of giving some people an anaemic and unreal idea of the deeper processes of mundane history. Indeed, it is possible that our conventional history-teaching underestimates the part played by war in the development of our civilisation and our economy, as well as in the rise of the modern state. It has been noted that great constitutional concessions were won from English kings who were usually unsuccessful in their foreign policy; and certainly it is not easy to know what would have happened if King John or Charles I or James II had been more fortunate in this field. Ranke thought that the disgrace suffered by the French monarchy in its foreign policy had much to do with the outbreak of the French Revolution.
Perhaps only in the shock of 1940 did we realize to what a degree the British Empire had become an organization for the purpose of liberty. What power is in this English tradition which swallows up monarchy, toryism, imperialism, yet leaves each of them still existing, each part of a wider synthesis. And how cunningly did the whig interpretation assert itself in all the utterances of Englishmen in 1940—throbbing and alive again, and now projected upon an extended map.
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