ИПИ Библиотека

William Edward Hartpole Lecky (1838-1903), an Anglo-Irish historian and essayist of classic Whig proclivities, was perhaps the greatest historical scholar Ireland ever produced.

Lecky was a Whig in the tradition of Edmund Burke, who remained his lifelong intellectual hero. Always suspicious of democracy, he deplored the evils of excess in religion or nationalism; at the same time he was acutely and somewhat pessimistically aware of the importance of mass social influences and ideas in history. Like his contemporary John Richard Green, he helped to reorient the purposes of 19th-century historical writing away from politics and diplomatics.