Love's Labours Lost?

Nowadays professional historians are always admonishing each other not to be 'Whiggish'. The Whig interpretation of history, in the broad sense established by the late Sir Herbert Butterfield, implies a tendency to celebrate the present by invoking a version of the past which constitutes a broad path of progress to where we are now, Thus it is Whiggish to select those developments which happen to prefigure modern concerns; Whiggish to glorify the possibly unwitting pioneers of our way of thinking at the expense of their presumably benighted opponents; Whiggish to grub around for the origins or precursors, however obscure, of contemporary movements in thought or politics – whether it be feminism or green issues or the methodology of modern science – rather than seeing such manifestations in the perspective and proportion of their own historical context.