Historical knowledge transpires along two dimensions: on the one hand, a historian may (or not) presuppose a common history to which everyone contributes; on the other, a historian may (or not) write from the standpoint of a historical winner. In the 1930s, Herbert Butterfield usefully distinguished between Whig and Tory historiography as the standpoints of, respectively, the winners and the losers of a common history. The common history behind Butterfield's coinage of Whig and Tory historiography involved the ascendancy of parliament over the king in seventeenth-century England. For the monarchist Tories, this was the story of decline from a natural order into fractiousness and chaos, whereas for Whiggish defenders of parliament, it marked the removal of obstacles to the spread of liberty, which has eventuated in peaceful enterprise and prosperity for all. In other words, while the Whigs and Tories recognized each other as characters in the same historical narrative, they interpreted the plot of that narrative in radically different terms: specifically, where the Whig saw freedom, the Tory saw decadence; where the Tory saw order, the Whig saw stagnation. To the Tories, the Whigs were the lucky beneficiaries of monarchical weakness, not riders on the wave of historical destiny, as the Whigs saw themselves. If the Whigs controlled the letter of history, the Tories laid claim to its spirit in exile.

The difference between Whig and Tory historiography is epitomized by their contrasting attitudes towards the past, which Fuller has called, respectively, overdeterminist and underdeterminist (see evolution.)