"Trevor-Roper is inclined to depreciate the Whig interpretation of history. I still see its merits. After all, our political forerunners stumbled on a system of government the least imperfect that has been known. We still benefit from their inheritance. We still enjoy ordered liberty. The authority of the states is still limited though not as much as it should be. Macaulay erred, I think, when he added to the Whig interpretation the great delusion of his age, which was until the other day the great delusion of ours: belief in limitless progress and in the possibility, indeed the inevitability, of limitless improvement, both moral and material."
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Historians from EnglandActivists from EnglandSocialists from EnglandUniversity of Oxford facultyJournalists from England
Original Language: English
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'Leviathan of history', The Observer (29 July 1979), p. 37
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/A._J._P._Taylor
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A. J. P. Taylor
Alan John Percivale Taylor (25 March 1906 – 7 September 1990) was a British historian, journalist, broadcaster and scholar. His approachably written and sometimes contentiously revisionist studies of 19th and early 20th-century subjects brought academic history to a new audience.
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