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ما بعد التاريخ: الخيال التاريخي في أوربا القرن التاسع عشر
من وجهة نظر وايت أنه ما وراء المستوى السطحي للنص التاريخي، هناك محتوى بنيوي عميق، أو كامن، يكون شاعريًّا بشكل عام ولغويًّا بطبيعته على وجه التحديد. يشير هذا المحتوى الأعمق -العنصر الماورائي- إلى ما يمكن أن يكون عليه التفسير التاريخي المناسب. في إطار متابعة أطروحته، يقدم وايت كتابًا سيثير اهتمام الفلاسفة وكذلك المؤرخين، وهو يشرح أنماط مؤرخين، مثل: ميشليه، ورانكه، وتوكوفيل، وبورتشاردت، وفلاسفة التاريخ، مثل: هيجل، وماركس، ونيتشه، وكروس.
610 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 1973
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1877 people want to read
About the author
Hayden White
47 books55 followersHayden White was a historian in the tradition of literary criticism, perhaps most famous for his work Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973). He was professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and held position of professor of comparative literature at Stanford University.
White received his B.A. from Wayne State University in 1951 and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Michigan (1952 and 1956, respectively). While an undergraduate at Wayne State, White studied history under William J. Bossenbrook, who inspired several undergraduates who later went on to achieve academic distinction in the field of history, including White, H. D. "Harry" Harootunian, and Arthur C. Danto (The Uses of History).
Hayden V. White has made contributions to the philosophy of history and literary theory. His books and essays analyze the narratives of nineteenth-and twentieth-century historians and philosophers, suggesting that historical discourse is a form of fiction that can be classified and studied on the basis of its structure and its use of language. White ultimately attacks the notion that modern history texts present objective, accurate explanations of the past; instead, he argues that historians and philosophers operate under unarticulated assumptions in arranging, selecting, and interpreting events. These assumptions, White asserts, can be identified by examining the form and structure of texts themselves, providing valuable information about the attitudes of the author and the context in which he or she has written. Furthermore, as White postulates in Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, historical discourse can be classified into the literary patterns of tragedy, comedy, romance, and irony.
In a review in the Journal of Modern History, Allan Megill wrote: "Taken together, White's books and essays have done much to alter the theory of history. Although his focus on trope and narrative is far from what most historians are interested in, they are all aware of his work." The critic added that White "is able to speak fluently and interestingly on an astonishingly wide variety of matters."
Most scholars agree that White's most important work is Metahistory. The book grew out of its author's interest in the reasons why people study—and write—history. Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Frank Day observed that in Metahistory White "adapted ideas from Giambattista Vico and other students of rhetoric and literary history to produce an intricate analysis of nineteenth-century historians in terms of their methods of emplotment. . . . White's broad purpose in Metahistory is to trace how the nineteenth-century historians escaped from the Irony that dominated Enlightenment historiography and from the 'irresponsible faith' of the Romantics, only to lapse back into Irony at the end of the century." The implications for historians and literary theoreticians lay in the "application of rhetorical tropes to narrative discourse," to quote Day.
White received his B.A. from Wayne State University in 1951 and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Michigan (1952 and 1956, respectively). While an undergraduate at Wayne State, White studied history under William J. Bossenbrook, who inspired several undergraduates who later went on to achieve academic distinction in the field of history, including White, H. D. "Harry" Harootunian, and Arthur C. Danto (The Uses of History).
Hayden V. White has made contributions to the philosophy of history and literary theory. His books and essays analyze the narratives of nineteenth-and twentieth-century historians and philosophers, suggesting that historical discourse is a form of fiction that can be classified and studied on the basis of its structure and its use of language. White ultimately attacks the notion that modern history texts present objective, accurate explanations of the past; instead, he argues that historians and philosophers operate under unarticulated assumptions in arranging, selecting, and interpreting events. These assumptions, White asserts, can be identified by examining the form and structure of texts themselves, providing valuable information about the attitudes of the author and the context in which he or she has written. Furthermore, as White postulates in Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, historical discourse can be classified into the literary patterns of tragedy, comedy, romance, and irony.
In a review in the Journal of Modern History, Allan Megill wrote: "Taken together, White's books and essays have done much to alter the theory of history. Although his focus on trope and narrative is far from what most historians are interested in, they are all aware of his work." The critic added that White "is able to speak fluently and interestingly on an astonishingly wide variety of matters."
Most scholars agree that White's most important work is Metahistory. The book grew out of its author's interest in the reasons why people study—and write—history. Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Frank Day observed that in Metahistory White "adapted ideas from Giambattista Vico and other students of rhetoric and literary history to produce an intricate analysis of nineteenth-century historians in terms of their methods of emplotment. . . . White's broad purpose in Metahistory is to trace how the nineteenth-century historians escaped from the Irony that dominated Enlightenment historiography and from the 'irresponsible faith' of the Romantics, only to lapse back into Irony at the end of the century." The implications for historians and literary theoreticians lay in the "application of rhetorical tropes to narrative discourse," to quote Day.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
July 26, 2010
This was a difficult book for me to get through - never read literary theory, and have not read much historiography, and they both give me headaches. My tactic was to drink lots of red wine as i read, but while enjoyable that tactic failed. The book was started, stopped, re-started, etc. throughout the spring, then finally i took the plunge and headed out further than the first chapters, further than i'd ever gone before...
The chapter on Hegel is like a mental firewall, real difficult to get through. Real difficult. Don't know if i remember any of it either. But after that it came easier, much easier, and at times actually felt fun. Got difficult again once i left the historians and hit the "philosophers of history" (Marx, Nietzche, Croce), but i was near the end, so couldn't stop then.
The author's thesis is simple enough - the same historical events can be described in good conscience in different ways, just like any story. So using literary theory he divides them between different genres (romantic, comedy, tragedy, irony). He does the same for the ways a historian will make their point (or pretend not to): formist, mechanist, organicist or contextualist. And finally he shows how these relate to the ideological implications of the work (which he categorizes as anarchist, radical, conservative or liberal).
So in a word, what it means is that depending on how you tell a tale, there'll be different subtle political conclusions that you or your readers will be read to. Noting that the best historians have played on a tension between the different layers that this can provide, he then goes on to apply this method of analysis to various 18th and 19th century historians.
i liked his literary theory of history - it reinforced the ideas i was getting at a couple of years ago when i wrote of "literary frequencies" - and agree with his point that the reasons for choosing one over another are ethical, not historical. I.e. the same story is equally valid from the point of view of "telling history" no matter which genre you approach it with, but the ethical presuppositions and conclusions may not be. But that's an argument that needs to be won on moral/ethical or political/philosophical grounds, not by appealing to "history" which in and of itself cannot solve those questions.
Reading this book was so difficult for me, i think, also because i knew so little (or even nothing) about many of the people being discussed. The book is not an ideal was to be introduced to these figures - i had enough trouble trying to remember what the difference between synecdoche and metaphor was - but it does serve, to some degree, and after the introduction (where his theory is laid out), i think that's most of what i got from the book.
The chapter on Hegel is like a mental firewall, real difficult to get through. Real difficult. Don't know if i remember any of it either. But after that it came easier, much easier, and at times actually felt fun. Got difficult again once i left the historians and hit the "philosophers of history" (Marx, Nietzche, Croce), but i was near the end, so couldn't stop then.
The author's thesis is simple enough - the same historical events can be described in good conscience in different ways, just like any story. So using literary theory he divides them between different genres (romantic, comedy, tragedy, irony). He does the same for the ways a historian will make their point (or pretend not to): formist, mechanist, organicist or contextualist. And finally he shows how these relate to the ideological implications of the work (which he categorizes as anarchist, radical, conservative or liberal).
So in a word, what it means is that depending on how you tell a tale, there'll be different subtle political conclusions that you or your readers will be read to. Noting that the best historians have played on a tension between the different layers that this can provide, he then goes on to apply this method of analysis to various 18th and 19th century historians.
i liked his literary theory of history - it reinforced the ideas i was getting at a couple of years ago when i wrote of "literary frequencies" - and agree with his point that the reasons for choosing one over another are ethical, not historical. I.e. the same story is equally valid from the point of view of "telling history" no matter which genre you approach it with, but the ethical presuppositions and conclusions may not be. But that's an argument that needs to be won on moral/ethical or political/philosophical grounds, not by appealing to "history" which in and of itself cannot solve those questions.
Reading this book was so difficult for me, i think, also because i knew so little (or even nothing) about many of the people being discussed. The book is not an ideal was to be introduced to these figures - i had enough trouble trying to remember what the difference between synecdoche and metaphor was - but it does serve, to some degree, and after the introduction (where his theory is laid out), i think that's most of what i got from the book.
December 29, 2015
A fascinating book. I gave it a fairly cursory read for some essay research but I think I will have to give it a more thorough reading sometime in the future. It basically argues that historiography produces tropologically constituted representations of the past, not methodologically justified true accounts. These representations are not distinguished by their accuracy or truth but by the narrative modes and forms that are used and the way relations between historical objects are conceived including causal reations. The way this last is explored is a particularly interesting feature of the work because White claims that the only way true historical change can be registered is either when a historian holds two separate forms of relation in mind at once or engages in Hegelian style dialectics. White's typology of historical relations lists Irony, Metonymy, Metaphor and Synecdoche as four paradigms. It's an interesting theory but it's often hard to understand exactly what he means by them and how their normal meaning as rhetorical features precisely relates to White's understanding of them as attitudes towards the past. Irony is linked to a sceptical view towards the prospect of an understanding of the past, Metonymy with mechanistic runs of causal chains with a determined outcome (often thus productive of a sort of stasis), Synecdoche, a sort of micro-macrocosm linkage that is hard to consider diachronically and Metaphor a sort of comparative attitude to past phenomena. I think the most interesting thing about the book is how White compares such different figures as Ranke, Tocqueville, Marx and Nietzsche and in so doing shows how similar their concerns with the historical discipline were and how their responses often followed very similar lines, a perspective that is rare for figures as complex as Marx and Nietzsche who are often studied much more closely as stand-alone figures.
February 10, 2010
Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe is not a work for the casual reader. Hayden White's opus requires some commitment and some work. It is lengthy and there is a lot of jargon to wade through. While jargon in a work of history often seems to substitute for original or even simply interesting thought, White's project is complex enough that the jargon is warranted. It effectively becomes shorthand for very complicated ideas so that the reader can follow White has he builds his arguments and he does not need to restate himself at every turn.
Essentially, White examines eight nineteenth-century authors (four historians and four "philosophers of history") in order to dissect their works and discern the literary premises upon which they constructed their narratives. I will attempt to paraphrase his project and I will not half do it justice. White examined the works of G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Benedetto Croce, Jules Michelet, Leopold von Ranke, Alexis de Tocqueville and Jacob Burckhardt. In doing so, he paid special attention to what he called the poetic "trope" each author used to characterize their narrative. That is, were they basing their historical narratives in Metaphor, Irony, Metonymy or Synecdoche? Depending on the trope employed, each author's work would proceed on the grounds assumed by that trope. In this way, the operative trope of a work of history would necessarily characterize its subject in a certain fashion, whether the trope were consciously chosen or subconsciously employed. Additionally, unconnected to the operative trope, but working in conjunction with it, is the author's given method of "emplotment". Does he present the historical events at hand as Romance, Tragedy, Comedy or Satire? All of these questions (and oh so many more) determine, for White, the form these men's histories took.
I would come up with an example but, frankly, this aspect of Metahistory bored me a little. I already believe that history is not a science or even really a pseudoscience, but an art. It is not the least surprising to me that an historical narrative draws its epistemological assumptions from poetic conceits (storytelling conceits) and not from "objective" observation. But this very topic, whether history is a science, a pseudoscience or an art, is precisely what White's subject authors were debating. Which, in fact, brings me to what I did find really fascinating about Metahistory.
White contends that history in the newly scientific, Enlightenment world of the 18th century suffered from extreme irony. There was nothing new under the sun, man had repeated the same savage and stupid mistakes in the past and would continue to do so into the future, and while change is inevitable it is neither distinctly traceable nor predictable. This state of psychological malaise, triggered by a fever of scientific inquiry that only pointed out humankind's limitations, made it practically necessary to write history in an ironic mode. Come Hegel and the 19th century, and folks were really tired of irony. Hegel and the gentlemen whom White studies in Metahistory, sought to identify history as a discipline proper and, in many cases, as a scientific discipline. They sought to liberate it from irony and to *gasp* learn lessons from it that would improve the state of man. Okay, that last bit only generally. For as White discovered, liberating oneself from irony when the history of man is, in fact, a cyclical pageant of power relationships is not an easy task. And a good portion of these eight authors did not believe the march of history was necessarily toward something good or better.
And here's what I found really interesting - the extent to which our post-post-modern world suffers from just such an ironic malaise. We live in an incredibly ironic age. It is truly difficult to be earnest and genuine when you have been shown, again and again, that there is a dark side to every positive human impulse and that the light and the dark exist in each of us simultaneously. And if history does anything, it instructs us well of that. As I wholeheartedly believe this correlation between the 19th century and the early 21st century, and as I too have studied history hoping to learn some "truths" of humanity, I was thrilled when White repeatedly found each of his eight authors grappling with a central conundrum, with which I struggle daily - action versus withdrawal.
Over and over again, the intellectual pursuits of these eight historians led them to weigh the public merits and personal toll of remaining politically active and invested in the the future of their societies, or of withdrawing into a personal life where one invests in private pursuits and loved ones and pretty much leaves the outside world to itself. Something about studying history must bring this specific quandry upon one, for I have certainly been consumed by it in recent years. Or maybe it is a more general question we all must answer and, for those of us who are historically minded, the study of the expanse of time brings the question front and center. Maybe for the scientifically minded, studying the universe's beginnings or the minute cosmos of an atom has the same effect.
In any event, I certainly fall on the withdrawn side of things - as, it turns out, did Jacob Burckhardt. I felt a great kinship with these eight men, even the ones who answered this question differently, for at least they asked it...if all change seems to end up as the same old grinding wheel of power and oppression, why should I really advocate for change? You take a long enough perspective on history and it all seems inane. We are dust motes. And we are not even particularly kind or virtuous dust motes. We love our power and we want, want, want. It makes me think of Meet John Doe (the 1941 Capra film) and Walter Brennan's rant about the "heelots". If you are not familiar, please take a few minutes and watch this clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYrr1o... I do not agree on every point, but I find it a really succinct way of summing up human greed and materialism. And, like Walter Brennan's character, I prefer simply to not play that whole game rather than deal with the heelots. I get by on a little and try not to wish for a lot. I withdraw and I invest myself in the people and quiet pursuits I love. I do vote, I donate a little time and money now and again, and I listen to the news. But I definitely hear it filtered through the assumptions of the Ironic trope and emplotted by a mix of Satire and Comedy.
Essentially, White examines eight nineteenth-century authors (four historians and four "philosophers of history") in order to dissect their works and discern the literary premises upon which they constructed their narratives. I will attempt to paraphrase his project and I will not half do it justice. White examined the works of G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Benedetto Croce, Jules Michelet, Leopold von Ranke, Alexis de Tocqueville and Jacob Burckhardt. In doing so, he paid special attention to what he called the poetic "trope" each author used to characterize their narrative. That is, were they basing their historical narratives in Metaphor, Irony, Metonymy or Synecdoche? Depending on the trope employed, each author's work would proceed on the grounds assumed by that trope. In this way, the operative trope of a work of history would necessarily characterize its subject in a certain fashion, whether the trope were consciously chosen or subconsciously employed. Additionally, unconnected to the operative trope, but working in conjunction with it, is the author's given method of "emplotment". Does he present the historical events at hand as Romance, Tragedy, Comedy or Satire? All of these questions (and oh so many more) determine, for White, the form these men's histories took.
I would come up with an example but, frankly, this aspect of Metahistory bored me a little. I already believe that history is not a science or even really a pseudoscience, but an art. It is not the least surprising to me that an historical narrative draws its epistemological assumptions from poetic conceits (storytelling conceits) and not from "objective" observation. But this very topic, whether history is a science, a pseudoscience or an art, is precisely what White's subject authors were debating. Which, in fact, brings me to what I did find really fascinating about Metahistory.
White contends that history in the newly scientific, Enlightenment world of the 18th century suffered from extreme irony. There was nothing new under the sun, man had repeated the same savage and stupid mistakes in the past and would continue to do so into the future, and while change is inevitable it is neither distinctly traceable nor predictable. This state of psychological malaise, triggered by a fever of scientific inquiry that only pointed out humankind's limitations, made it practically necessary to write history in an ironic mode. Come Hegel and the 19th century, and folks were really tired of irony. Hegel and the gentlemen whom White studies in Metahistory, sought to identify history as a discipline proper and, in many cases, as a scientific discipline. They sought to liberate it from irony and to *gasp* learn lessons from it that would improve the state of man. Okay, that last bit only generally. For as White discovered, liberating oneself from irony when the history of man is, in fact, a cyclical pageant of power relationships is not an easy task. And a good portion of these eight authors did not believe the march of history was necessarily toward something good or better.
And here's what I found really interesting - the extent to which our post-post-modern world suffers from just such an ironic malaise. We live in an incredibly ironic age. It is truly difficult to be earnest and genuine when you have been shown, again and again, that there is a dark side to every positive human impulse and that the light and the dark exist in each of us simultaneously. And if history does anything, it instructs us well of that. As I wholeheartedly believe this correlation between the 19th century and the early 21st century, and as I too have studied history hoping to learn some "truths" of humanity, I was thrilled when White repeatedly found each of his eight authors grappling with a central conundrum, with which I struggle daily - action versus withdrawal.
Over and over again, the intellectual pursuits of these eight historians led them to weigh the public merits and personal toll of remaining politically active and invested in the the future of their societies, or of withdrawing into a personal life where one invests in private pursuits and loved ones and pretty much leaves the outside world to itself. Something about studying history must bring this specific quandry upon one, for I have certainly been consumed by it in recent years. Or maybe it is a more general question we all must answer and, for those of us who are historically minded, the study of the expanse of time brings the question front and center. Maybe for the scientifically minded, studying the universe's beginnings or the minute cosmos of an atom has the same effect.
In any event, I certainly fall on the withdrawn side of things - as, it turns out, did Jacob Burckhardt. I felt a great kinship with these eight men, even the ones who answered this question differently, for at least they asked it...if all change seems to end up as the same old grinding wheel of power and oppression, why should I really advocate for change? You take a long enough perspective on history and it all seems inane. We are dust motes. And we are not even particularly kind or virtuous dust motes. We love our power and we want, want, want. It makes me think of Meet John Doe (the 1941 Capra film) and Walter Brennan's rant about the "heelots". If you are not familiar, please take a few minutes and watch this clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYrr1o... I do not agree on every point, but I find it a really succinct way of summing up human greed and materialism. And, like Walter Brennan's character, I prefer simply to not play that whole game rather than deal with the heelots. I get by on a little and try not to wish for a lot. I withdraw and I invest myself in the people and quiet pursuits I love. I do vote, I donate a little time and money now and again, and I listen to the news. But I definitely hear it filtered through the assumptions of the Ironic trope and emplotted by a mix of Satire and Comedy.
to-read-in-part
August 18, 2016Filosofía de la Historia. Unidad 4.
En Metahistoria (1973), la obra que lo hizo conocido (a White), se analiza la estructura narrativa propia de los grandes trabajos historiográficos y de filosofía de la historia del siglo diecinueve. Es aquí donde aparece por primera vez expuesta su bien conocida teoría del discurso histórico llamada tropología. La dimensión explícita de cualquier discurso histórico, esto es, su modo de explicación (organicista, mecanicista, formalista o contextualista), sus compromisos ideológicos (radical, liberal, conservador, revolucionario), las diferentes formas de narrar (romántica, trágica, satírica o cómica) y, finalmente la forma de combinar todas estas opciones, se explican en última instancia, por referencia a un nivel precrítico, poético y constructivo. Este nivel está constituido por diferentes modos de prefiguración discursiva provenientes de la literatura, los llama tropos y son cuatro: metáfora, metonimia, sinécdoque e ironía. Su carácter prefigurativo se manifiesta en que determinan la posterior elección de estrategias por parte del historiador, pues gracias a ellos los elementos del caótico registro histórico pueden ser conceptualizados como para ser conformados en una narración. White aclara muy bien que su enfoque es textual y formalista y concluye que al analizar las narrativas históricas como lo que efectivamente son, textos, ellas no se distinguen en nada de las narrativas ficcionales. [Clase 7]
En Metahistoria (1973), la obra que lo hizo conocido (a White), se analiza la estructura narrativa propia de los grandes trabajos historiográficos y de filosofía de la historia del siglo diecinueve. Es aquí donde aparece por primera vez expuesta su bien conocida teoría del discurso histórico llamada tropología. La dimensión explícita de cualquier discurso histórico, esto es, su modo de explicación (organicista, mecanicista, formalista o contextualista), sus compromisos ideológicos (radical, liberal, conservador, revolucionario), las diferentes formas de narrar (romántica, trágica, satírica o cómica) y, finalmente la forma de combinar todas estas opciones, se explican en última instancia, por referencia a un nivel precrítico, poético y constructivo. Este nivel está constituido por diferentes modos de prefiguración discursiva provenientes de la literatura, los llama tropos y son cuatro: metáfora, metonimia, sinécdoque e ironía. Su carácter prefigurativo se manifiesta en que determinan la posterior elección de estrategias por parte del historiador, pues gracias a ellos los elementos del caótico registro histórico pueden ser conceptualizados como para ser conformados en una narración. White aclara muy bien que su enfoque es textual y formalista y concluye que al analizar las narrativas históricas como lo que efectivamente son, textos, ellas no se distinguen en nada de las narrativas ficcionales. [Clase 7]
August 31, 2014
Three levels by which historians provide explanation.
* Mode of Emplotment: Provides the meaning of the story by identifying the kind of story that it is. Plot structure
* Romantic: transcendence of the world experience, victory over it and his final liberation from it (Phillips)
* Tragic: No festive occasions except false or illusory ones. There is a fall of the protagonist and a gain in consciousness.
* Comic: Hope is held out for the temporary triumph of man over his world by the occasional reconcilliations. These reconcilliations are symbolized as festive occasions.
* Satirical: Opposite of romance. Hopes, truths, and possibilities are held Ironically.
* Mode of Argument: The story is explained by construction of a nomological-deductive argument. Theories of truth.
* Formist: Attempts to identify unique characteristics of objects in a historical field. Dispersive and wide in scope.
* Mechanistic: Reductive and integrative. Studies history to discern its laws like Marx.
* Organicist: See individual entities as components of processes which aggregate into wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts. Nationalism. This finds crystallization in dispersed events (Phillips)
* Contextualist: Events can be explained by being set in the context of their occurrence. (the rest of the authors)
* Mode of Ideological Implication: This is the ethical element in the historian’s assumption of a particular position on a study of past events. The way historians suggest to their readers why their study is important.
* Anarchist: Abolish society and substitute a new community of individuals, held together by their shared sense of common “humanity”
* Radical: Believes in the necessity of structural transformations. Interested in reconstituting society on a new basis.
* Conservative: Suspicious of change of the status quo (Phillips)
* Liberal: See change as fine-tunings to the present.
* The theory of tropes: 4 figures of speech for analysis of poetic language. This is not really necessary because examining specific lines of text is beyond the scope of this assignment. Prefiguration
* Metaphor: Representational. Phenomena are characterized by similarity to each other. “my love is like a rose”
* Metonymy: Reductionist. The name of a part is substituted for the name of a whole. 50 sails=50 ships
* Synecdoche: Integrative. A part symbolizes a quality. He is all heart
* Irony: Negative. Items that negate on the figurative level what they say on the literal level. cold passion. Or “he is all heart” in a different tone. Self-critical thought which denies the possibility of truth in language.
* Phases of 19th century Historical Conscious
* First phase 1800-30
* The pre-Romantics like Rousseau
* Opposed the ironic construction of the Enlightenment
* Had an antipathy to rational
* The “problem of historical knowledge” was studied by Hegel: He saw the problem as a schism between the Ironic and Metaphorical mode of studying the historical field
* French Positivists revised Enlightenment rationalism with an Organicst direction. Auguste Comte
* Three schools of this period; Romantic, Idealistic, and Positivist
* Mature of Classic phase, 1830-70
* The master’s of 19th historiography produced their work
* Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, & Burckhardt were inspired by finding an objective past
* The success of the historians in this phase plunged historical consciousness into the Ironic mode.
* This is the “crisis in historicism”
* They did this by their consistent elaboration of equally comprehensive yet mutually exclusive conceptions of the same set of events. This undermined confidence in histories claim to be objective and scientific.
* Crisis of Historicism, 1870-1900
* Croce recognized that the crisis was due to the triumph of the ironic
* He hoped to purge historical thinking of irony by assimilating it into art.
* The crisis was the impossibility of choosing among the different ways of viewing history
* The Historical Imagination Between Metaphor and Irony
* To be a realist
* This was to be objective and see things as they really were
* Realism is best defined by what the realists rejected about the Enlightenment
* They rejected irony and skepticism. They accepted optimism and the concept of progress
* Hegel: The Way Beyond Irony
* Synecdochic: This was the most applicable because the physical and the human world can be comprehended in terms of hierarchies
* Four Kinds of Realism in 19th Historical Thinking
* Michelet: Romantic
* Romantic, Formist, Liberal, Metaphor
* Ex. of Metaphor and Romance in History of the French Revolution
* His description of the spirit of France is a characterization as the emergence of light from darkness
* “France advances courageously through the dark winter, towards the wished for spring which promises a new light” [151]
* Ranke: Comedy
* Comic, Organicist, Conservative, Synecdoche
* Write history as it actually happened (historicism)
* Comedy: A condition of apparent peace, through conflict, to a peaceful social order.
* Conservatism: He did not believe that new forms of community could emerge that would free men from the restrictions of the church or state
* Tocqueville: Tragedy
* Tragic, Mechanist, Radical, Metonymy
* The future held little prospect of the reconciliation of man with man in society
* Their is a fall from a position of eminence and a failure to exploit given possibilities
* Democracy in America: The spirit of independent judgment and criticism continued to develop in Europe (from Luther, Descartes, Voltaire), in America this spirit degenerated into common opinion
* Burckhardt: Satire
* Satirical, Contextualist, Anarchist, Irony
* No progressive evolution; things remained the same
* The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
* In the Renaissance no explanation of cultural flowering occurred except as a general notion of culture as an eternal moment in human nature which flowers when the compulsive powers are weak
* His heroes were withdrawn (like he was) or rose above the ordinary human condition with supreme acts of will
* This theory is Contextualist. It holds that an explanation of historical events is provided when the various strands which make up the tapestry of human events are tied together
* The Repudiation of Realism in Late 19th Century Philosophy of History
* Difference between history and philosophy of history
* Historiography had to be a true account of the past, objective
* Philosophy of history was a threat to historiography because it strives to change the professionally sanctioned strategies by which meaning is conferred on history
* Philosophy of history attempted to avoid the Ironic implications of a historiography conceived as an exercise in explanation by description
* What the philosophers actually achieved was a theoretical justification for the alternative modes of historical reflection worked out by Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, and Burckhardt
* Marx and Nietzche contributed to the “crisis in historicism” because it was the nature of objectivity that they called into question
* Marx: Metonymical
* His thought moved between Metonymical apprehensions of the severed condition of mankind in its social state and Synecdochic intimations of the unity he saw at the end of the whole historical process
* Marx emplotted with Tragedy and with Comedy
* Tragedy: Man lives tragically because he is frustrated by the laws that govern history
* Comedy: Man also lives comically because the interaction between man and his society will eventually be dissolved into a genuine community
* Nietzche: Metaphorical
* He denied that there was any such thing as a historical process
* He wanted to destroy the belief that there was a single historical past by which men could learn the truth
* He wanted to destroy the notion that the historical process had to be explained or emplotted in any particular way. This notions gave way to the historical notion of representations as stories, myths, which were the equivalent of music
* Croce: Ironic
* Had contempt for the academic profession
* He defended the concept of art and that history was an art form
* History Subsumed Under the General Concept of Art
* Conclusion
* White argued that to designate the work of a historian as “romantic,” “Idealist,” “liberal” or “conservative” obscures more than it reveals about the historian
* His research allows him to ignore the distinction between history and philosophy of history
* The philosophy of history contains a proper history, and history contains a full blown philosophy of history
* The master historians wrote history in the forms of Metaphor, Metonymy, Synecdoche, and Irony; The philosophers of history wrote about the writing of history from positions within this same framework
* Little is gained by understanding a given writers thought or his personality type
* The crisis of historicism was the impossibility of choosing among the different ways of viewing history
* The history of 19th century historical thinking came full circle. A rebellion against the Irony of the late Enlightenment, to the return to prominence of Irony at the beginning of the 20th
* Contemporary historiography is locked within this ironic perspective
* Modern historical thought attacks this ironic perspective from 2 sides
* It seeks to overcome its inherent skepticism
* Moral agnosticism which passes for objectivity and neutrality
* Mode of Emplotment: Provides the meaning of the story by identifying the kind of story that it is. Plot structure
* Romantic: transcendence of the world experience, victory over it and his final liberation from it (Phillips)
* Tragic: No festive occasions except false or illusory ones. There is a fall of the protagonist and a gain in consciousness.
* Comic: Hope is held out for the temporary triumph of man over his world by the occasional reconcilliations. These reconcilliations are symbolized as festive occasions.
* Satirical: Opposite of romance. Hopes, truths, and possibilities are held Ironically.
* Mode of Argument: The story is explained by construction of a nomological-deductive argument. Theories of truth.
* Formist: Attempts to identify unique characteristics of objects in a historical field. Dispersive and wide in scope.
* Mechanistic: Reductive and integrative. Studies history to discern its laws like Marx.
* Organicist: See individual entities as components of processes which aggregate into wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts. Nationalism. This finds crystallization in dispersed events (Phillips)
* Contextualist: Events can be explained by being set in the context of their occurrence. (the rest of the authors)
* Mode of Ideological Implication: This is the ethical element in the historian’s assumption of a particular position on a study of past events. The way historians suggest to their readers why their study is important.
* Anarchist: Abolish society and substitute a new community of individuals, held together by their shared sense of common “humanity”
* Radical: Believes in the necessity of structural transformations. Interested in reconstituting society on a new basis.
* Conservative: Suspicious of change of the status quo (Phillips)
* Liberal: See change as fine-tunings to the present.
* The theory of tropes: 4 figures of speech for analysis of poetic language. This is not really necessary because examining specific lines of text is beyond the scope of this assignment. Prefiguration
* Metaphor: Representational. Phenomena are characterized by similarity to each other. “my love is like a rose”
* Metonymy: Reductionist. The name of a part is substituted for the name of a whole. 50 sails=50 ships
* Synecdoche: Integrative. A part symbolizes a quality. He is all heart
* Irony: Negative. Items that negate on the figurative level what they say on the literal level. cold passion. Or “he is all heart” in a different tone. Self-critical thought which denies the possibility of truth in language.
* Phases of 19th century Historical Conscious
* First phase 1800-30
* The pre-Romantics like Rousseau
* Opposed the ironic construction of the Enlightenment
* Had an antipathy to rational
* The “problem of historical knowledge” was studied by Hegel: He saw the problem as a schism between the Ironic and Metaphorical mode of studying the historical field
* French Positivists revised Enlightenment rationalism with an Organicst direction. Auguste Comte
* Three schools of this period; Romantic, Idealistic, and Positivist
* Mature of Classic phase, 1830-70
* The master’s of 19th historiography produced their work
* Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, & Burckhardt were inspired by finding an objective past
* The success of the historians in this phase plunged historical consciousness into the Ironic mode.
* This is the “crisis in historicism”
* They did this by their consistent elaboration of equally comprehensive yet mutually exclusive conceptions of the same set of events. This undermined confidence in histories claim to be objective and scientific.
* Crisis of Historicism, 1870-1900
* Croce recognized that the crisis was due to the triumph of the ironic
* He hoped to purge historical thinking of irony by assimilating it into art.
* The crisis was the impossibility of choosing among the different ways of viewing history
* The Historical Imagination Between Metaphor and Irony
* To be a realist
* This was to be objective and see things as they really were
* Realism is best defined by what the realists rejected about the Enlightenment
* They rejected irony and skepticism. They accepted optimism and the concept of progress
* Hegel: The Way Beyond Irony
* Synecdochic: This was the most applicable because the physical and the human world can be comprehended in terms of hierarchies
* Four Kinds of Realism in 19th Historical Thinking
* Michelet: Romantic
* Romantic, Formist, Liberal, Metaphor
* Ex. of Metaphor and Romance in History of the French Revolution
* His description of the spirit of France is a characterization as the emergence of light from darkness
* “France advances courageously through the dark winter, towards the wished for spring which promises a new light” [151]
* Ranke: Comedy
* Comic, Organicist, Conservative, Synecdoche
* Write history as it actually happened (historicism)
* Comedy: A condition of apparent peace, through conflict, to a peaceful social order.
* Conservatism: He did not believe that new forms of community could emerge that would free men from the restrictions of the church or state
* Tocqueville: Tragedy
* Tragic, Mechanist, Radical, Metonymy
* The future held little prospect of the reconciliation of man with man in society
* Their is a fall from a position of eminence and a failure to exploit given possibilities
* Democracy in America: The spirit of independent judgment and criticism continued to develop in Europe (from Luther, Descartes, Voltaire), in America this spirit degenerated into common opinion
* Burckhardt: Satire
* Satirical, Contextualist, Anarchist, Irony
* No progressive evolution; things remained the same
* The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
* In the Renaissance no explanation of cultural flowering occurred except as a general notion of culture as an eternal moment in human nature which flowers when the compulsive powers are weak
* His heroes were withdrawn (like he was) or rose above the ordinary human condition with supreme acts of will
* This theory is Contextualist. It holds that an explanation of historical events is provided when the various strands which make up the tapestry of human events are tied together
* The Repudiation of Realism in Late 19th Century Philosophy of History
* Difference between history and philosophy of history
* Historiography had to be a true account of the past, objective
* Philosophy of history was a threat to historiography because it strives to change the professionally sanctioned strategies by which meaning is conferred on history
* Philosophy of history attempted to avoid the Ironic implications of a historiography conceived as an exercise in explanation by description
* What the philosophers actually achieved was a theoretical justification for the alternative modes of historical reflection worked out by Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, and Burckhardt
* Marx and Nietzche contributed to the “crisis in historicism” because it was the nature of objectivity that they called into question
* Marx: Metonymical
* His thought moved between Metonymical apprehensions of the severed condition of mankind in its social state and Synecdochic intimations of the unity he saw at the end of the whole historical process
* Marx emplotted with Tragedy and with Comedy
* Tragedy: Man lives tragically because he is frustrated by the laws that govern history
* Comedy: Man also lives comically because the interaction between man and his society will eventually be dissolved into a genuine community
* Nietzche: Metaphorical
* He denied that there was any such thing as a historical process
* He wanted to destroy the belief that there was a single historical past by which men could learn the truth
* He wanted to destroy the notion that the historical process had to be explained or emplotted in any particular way. This notions gave way to the historical notion of representations as stories, myths, which were the equivalent of music
* Croce: Ironic
* Had contempt for the academic profession
* He defended the concept of art and that history was an art form
* History Subsumed Under the General Concept of Art
* Conclusion
* White argued that to designate the work of a historian as “romantic,” “Idealist,” “liberal” or “conservative” obscures more than it reveals about the historian
* His research allows him to ignore the distinction between history and philosophy of history
* The philosophy of history contains a proper history, and history contains a full blown philosophy of history
* The master historians wrote history in the forms of Metaphor, Metonymy, Synecdoche, and Irony; The philosophers of history wrote about the writing of history from positions within this same framework
* Little is gained by understanding a given writers thought or his personality type
* The crisis of historicism was the impossibility of choosing among the different ways of viewing history
* The history of 19th century historical thinking came full circle. A rebellion against the Irony of the late Enlightenment, to the return to prominence of Irony at the beginning of the 20th
* Contemporary historiography is locked within this ironic perspective
* Modern historical thought attacks this ironic perspective from 2 sides
* It seeks to overcome its inherent skepticism
* Moral agnosticism which passes for objectivity and neutrality
October 21, 2022
A challenge for the reader, an ambitious but not completely convincing project.
White attempts to overcome the traditional approaches to the historiography which focuses on ideologies (liberal, radical, conservative, anarchist) and patterns of explanation (mechanicist, formicist, organicist) by introducing categories from semantics/ rhetoric and literatry theory. Metaphorical, Metonymical, Synecdochical and Ironic stand for certain "modes of consciousness" forming the "argument", whereas Epic, Tragedy, Comedy and Satire are patterns of "emplotment" historians and philosophers of history use. He exemplifies this approach with analyses of the works of Ranke, Michelet, Tocqueville, Marx, Nietzsche, Burckhard and Croce. But before that the reader has to pass through a lengthy chapter on Hegel, which seems to have forced many readers to give up due to its incomprehensibility. Once one has gone through it and reached the analyses of the other historians, reading becomes much easier, and one can follow White's argument even if one has not read the respective historians (as in my case with Ranke, Michelet, Burckhard and Croce), and it is inspiring to see the writings you know interpreted in an inconcentional light.
however, the books suffers from three major flaws:
1. the explanation of the key concepts mentioned above is introduced where sketchy and superficially in the introductory chapter. In the further course of reading one begins to understand them better, but a more thorough explanation in the start would have made everything easier.
2. White declares the differentiation between historians and philosophers of history as old-fashioned when it comes to "metahistory", but also in his account is apparent that Hegel and Tocqueville where doing quite different things, juggling with essentialist concepts and bombastic phrases and analysing specific developments in a diligent manner respectively.
3. Where is Max Weber?
White attempts to overcome the traditional approaches to the historiography which focuses on ideologies (liberal, radical, conservative, anarchist) and patterns of explanation (mechanicist, formicist, organicist) by introducing categories from semantics/ rhetoric and literatry theory. Metaphorical, Metonymical, Synecdochical and Ironic stand for certain "modes of consciousness" forming the "argument", whereas Epic, Tragedy, Comedy and Satire are patterns of "emplotment" historians and philosophers of history use. He exemplifies this approach with analyses of the works of Ranke, Michelet, Tocqueville, Marx, Nietzsche, Burckhard and Croce. But before that the reader has to pass through a lengthy chapter on Hegel, which seems to have forced many readers to give up due to its incomprehensibility. Once one has gone through it and reached the analyses of the other historians, reading becomes much easier, and one can follow White's argument even if one has not read the respective historians (as in my case with Ranke, Michelet, Burckhard and Croce), and it is inspiring to see the writings you know interpreted in an inconcentional light.
however, the books suffers from three major flaws:
1. the explanation of the key concepts mentioned above is introduced where sketchy and superficially in the introductory chapter. In the further course of reading one begins to understand them better, but a more thorough explanation in the start would have made everything easier.
2. White declares the differentiation between historians and philosophers of history as old-fashioned when it comes to "metahistory", but also in his account is apparent that Hegel and Tocqueville where doing quite different things, juggling with essentialist concepts and bombastic phrases and analysing specific developments in a diligent manner respectively.
3. Where is Max Weber?
May 9, 2014
Очень опасная книга - для нынешнего времени на здешних территориях. Я бы запретил - ну, чтобы все сразу кинулись ее читать.
Хейден Уайт наглядно показывает, до чего произвольны любые проекции истории на мозг современного человека, а собственно историку дает необходимый (но не исчерпывающий) ассортимент инструментов создания исторического нарратива, эдакую матрицу интерпретации "фактов", "событий", "процессов" и "документов". Выбирай не хочу - и валяй твори собственную, по сути, историю. Не удивлюсь, если Фоменко его читал. История после нее никогда уже не будет прежней.
Ну и да - Уайт, конечно, виконианец в своем подходе. Потому я и читал их параллельно.
Хейден Уайт наглядно показывает, до чего произвольны любые проекции истории на мозг современного человека, а собственно историку дает необходимый (но не исчерпывающий) ассортимент инструментов создания исторического нарратива, эдакую матрицу интерпретации "фактов", "событий", "процессов" и "документов". Выбирай не хочу - и валяй твори собственную, по сути, историю. Не удивлюсь, если Фоменко его читал. История после нее никогда уже не будет прежней.
Ну и да - Уайт, конечно, виконианец в своем подходе. Потому я и читал их параллельно.
November 18, 2022
very very good very very very good
July 29, 2009
Studies of the 'poetic elements' of history - writing by the master historians / philosophers of history of the 19th c. Compelling readings of Hegel, Michelet, Tocqueville, Ranke, Burkhardt, Marx, Nietzsche, and Croce. Plus other nineteenth century wackos too.
White likes to play with an oddball four-square structuralism: four tropes (metaphor, metonym, synecdoche, irony), four emplotments (romance, comedy, tragedy, satire), four explanatory strategies (formalist, mechanistic, organismic, contextualist), four ideological implications (anarchist, radical, conservative, liberal). This leads to White's use of Capital Letters. Things don't always fit nicely into fours, and I guess it gets interesting when he tries to deal with this fact.
White likes to play with an oddball four-square structuralism: four tropes (metaphor, metonym, synecdoche, irony), four emplotments (romance, comedy, tragedy, satire), four explanatory strategies (formalist, mechanistic, organismic, contextualist), four ideological implications (anarchist, radical, conservative, liberal). This leads to White's use of Capital Letters. Things don't always fit nicely into fours, and I guess it gets interesting when he tries to deal with this fact.
September 20, 2018
While some parts are really hard to read, other parts are quite fun and I love White's ironical and sometimes almost taunting writing. As a historian himself he probably knew when writing how some aspects of his thesis would enrage those historians who take themselves to seriously. His main argument that historiography has thus far only been literary representations of past events that just like other literature can be categorized can only be regarded as close to the truth; yet, the consequences of this are still open and this book is thus a good read for present historians to overthink their perspectives, methodological uses and start to move closer to the natural sciences in both its ambition, scientific writing, and methodological practices.
September 4, 2022
White’s idea of analyzing some great historians by their overall mood or trope is brilliant. I think everyone I know sees the world from an overall perspective. For me, the dominant mode is jealousy, and I intend to write a book someday called “1001 Petty Jealousies,” or perhaps I’ll call it “My Life with Facebook.”
November 8, 2011
will possibly change the way you understand the world.
December 18, 2017
Great book. Read it if you are interested in history, philosophy of history, intellectual history, or historiography even generally. This is were our discipline and writing style came from.
March 17, 2020
White seeks to classify forms of history from the 19th century in a "meta-history".
His focus is wholly in terms of classification as if the classification has meaning in-itself. He understands some of what is at stake -- in the forms of history -- but by not focusing on the role history can play (for instance, to create power-structures, or to legitimatize certain kinds of psychotechnology) White creates a very dry tome where the "action" of his analysis is simply flipping between categories for his subject historians.
The result is that in his analysis is that he loses sight of what is at stake in his analysis. Putting one historian in one category vs another is NOT meaning by itself. Furthermore these historians have different influences on them which leads them to approach history in the way that they do.
This approach castrates his analysis because White expects the categories themsleves to carry meaning instead of the political implications of the categories historians choose.
White's approach might be useful for historians if they are then aware of their rhetorical approach. However, this is "stupid" because it presents a form of thoughtlessness. White's final historian, he valorizes as "getting it right" although he doesn't explain why this approach is best. Instead, White expects us to take his approach as the best one for history ignoring the fact that history of the past is always the justification/foundation for meaning of present actions.
White's approach is an example of "using the method while critiquing it". He prizes the "ironic" approach because he thinks this presents the most variation in meaning. He does not instead see that this approach, like all them, simultaneously creates meaning as meaning can only be made in contrast. This can create a false sense of objectivity, since meaning is in context as much as it is in message.
All in all, White seems like an expert academic attempting a critical-theory/linguistics' discourse analysis approach to history. A major problem with White is that he takes historians as the primary instigators of philosophical systems about history while he critiques them. He does not engage more advanced theories of rhetorical analysis available today to examine historians. I am not sure why he took this approach. Perhaps he thought the research of others was "out of bounds" even though they offer more advanced platforms for analysis.
Instead, White opts to treat everyone in terms of being a historian while critiquing their analysis. This is problematic because, on the one hand, White problematizes the discourse of history (What is history? Who gets to speak? How do they create history in their approach?) -- yet on the other hand he takes history as a discipline for granted -- as though, duh, we know what history is. We just have to find the best version all the while he is questioning what history is.
This reads as though someone who is an expert at their field thought they can write a book about their field in terms of another field without looking to see what others have already done that could help him. This approach is not too interesting as it reads like a New Formalist reading of texts -- as though his form of categorization was somehow objective. It's not. Within his text, his categories run across each other because their boundaries are in some sense, blurry and open to interpretation. Historians may adopt general approaches to their subject but they do not stick wholly to one artifice.
So all in all, while White's attempt is heroic, in terms of range and depth, his approach is self sabotaging because his approach is not stable nor does it present the meaning he thinks it does because his approach is not stable. Some of his analysis is insightful, and well thought out. Much of it is merely his jibber jabber as he tries to classify one historian one way or another way, as though that will help us understand how to place a historian.
Perhaps this is how comparative literature works. I don't know. But what is the point of a survey of 19th century history if it only tells us about what is "good" history based on its own internal classification instead of letting us decide what is good history based on how a certain deployment of narrative creates history and the society that reads it?
All in all, the internal classification is largely meaningless as it is his opinion. As a tool it lacks the "teeth" of showing us what good history should do by showing us what history is. And history isn't just classification of the past because anyone can create a list of categories.
His focus is wholly in terms of classification as if the classification has meaning in-itself. He understands some of what is at stake -- in the forms of history -- but by not focusing on the role history can play (for instance, to create power-structures, or to legitimatize certain kinds of psychotechnology) White creates a very dry tome where the "action" of his analysis is simply flipping between categories for his subject historians.
The result is that in his analysis is that he loses sight of what is at stake in his analysis. Putting one historian in one category vs another is NOT meaning by itself. Furthermore these historians have different influences on them which leads them to approach history in the way that they do.
This approach castrates his analysis because White expects the categories themsleves to carry meaning instead of the political implications of the categories historians choose.
White's approach might be useful for historians if they are then aware of their rhetorical approach. However, this is "stupid" because it presents a form of thoughtlessness. White's final historian, he valorizes as "getting it right" although he doesn't explain why this approach is best. Instead, White expects us to take his approach as the best one for history ignoring the fact that history of the past is always the justification/foundation for meaning of present actions.
White's approach is an example of "using the method while critiquing it". He prizes the "ironic" approach because he thinks this presents the most variation in meaning. He does not instead see that this approach, like all them, simultaneously creates meaning as meaning can only be made in contrast. This can create a false sense of objectivity, since meaning is in context as much as it is in message.
All in all, White seems like an expert academic attempting a critical-theory/linguistics' discourse analysis approach to history. A major problem with White is that he takes historians as the primary instigators of philosophical systems about history while he critiques them. He does not engage more advanced theories of rhetorical analysis available today to examine historians. I am not sure why he took this approach. Perhaps he thought the research of others was "out of bounds" even though they offer more advanced platforms for analysis.
Instead, White opts to treat everyone in terms of being a historian while critiquing their analysis. This is problematic because, on the one hand, White problematizes the discourse of history (What is history? Who gets to speak? How do they create history in their approach?) -- yet on the other hand he takes history as a discipline for granted -- as though, duh, we know what history is. We just have to find the best version all the while he is questioning what history is.
This reads as though someone who is an expert at their field thought they can write a book about their field in terms of another field without looking to see what others have already done that could help him. This approach is not too interesting as it reads like a New Formalist reading of texts -- as though his form of categorization was somehow objective. It's not. Within his text, his categories run across each other because their boundaries are in some sense, blurry and open to interpretation. Historians may adopt general approaches to their subject but they do not stick wholly to one artifice.
So all in all, while White's attempt is heroic, in terms of range and depth, his approach is self sabotaging because his approach is not stable nor does it present the meaning he thinks it does because his approach is not stable. Some of his analysis is insightful, and well thought out. Much of it is merely his jibber jabber as he tries to classify one historian one way or another way, as though that will help us understand how to place a historian.
Perhaps this is how comparative literature works. I don't know. But what is the point of a survey of 19th century history if it only tells us about what is "good" history based on its own internal classification instead of letting us decide what is good history based on how a certain deployment of narrative creates history and the society that reads it?
All in all, the internal classification is largely meaningless as it is his opinion. As a tool it lacks the "teeth" of showing us what good history should do by showing us what history is. And history isn't just classification of the past because anyone can create a list of categories.
August 7, 2024
AN ATTEMPT TO IDENTIFY THE "STRUCTURAL COMPONENTS" OF SEVERAL 19TH CENTURY THINKERS
Hayden White (born 1928) is professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz, having recently retired from the position of Professor of comparative literature at Stanford University. He has also written 'The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation,' 'Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect,' etc.
He wrote in the Preface to this 1973 book, "I treat the historical work as what it most manifestly is: a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse... as an icon of sets of events presumed to have occurred in times past. In addition... they contain a deep structural content which is generally poetic, and specifically linguistic... which serves as the precritically accepted paradigm of what a distinctively 'historical' explanation should be... One of my principal aims... has been to establish the uniquely POETIC elements in historiography and philosophy of history... Thus I have postulated four principal modes of historical consciousness... Metaphor, Synecdoche, Metonymy, and Irony... I contend that the recognized masters of nineteenth-century historical thinking can be understood... by the explanation of the different tropological modes which underlie and inform their work." (Pg. ix-xi)
He explains, "My method, in short, is formalist. I will not try to decide whether a given historian's work is a better, or more correct, account of a specific set of events or segment of the historical process than some other historian's account of them. Rather, I will seek to identify the structural components of those accounts." (Pg. 3-4)
The philosphers/historians he examines are Hegel, Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, Burckhardt, Marx, Nietzsche, and Croce.
He observes, "Thus, in The Birth of Tragedy (Dover Thrift Editions), Nietzsche opposed two kinds of false Tragic sensibility: that which interprets the Tragic vision in the Ironic mode, and that which interprets it in the Romantic mode. His demolition of these two false conceptions of Tragic consciousness provided him with the means of reinterpreting Tragedy as a COMBINATION of Dionysiac and Apollonian insights, as Tragic apprehensions of the world being discharged in Comic comprehensions of it---AND the reverse." (Pg. 334) He adds, "Nietzsche's purpose as a philosopher of history was to destroy the notion that the historical process has to be explained or emplotted in any particular way." (Pg. 371)
He says, "Croce's critics failed to register adequately the qualification he had placed on philosophy's capacity to know reality and history's power to represent it truthfully. At the conclusion of his Theory & History Of Historiography, Croce denied that men could judge with any certitude the nature of their own age." (Pg. 398)
White's book will be of interest to students of the philosophy of history in the modern age.
Hayden White (born 1928) is professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz, having recently retired from the position of Professor of comparative literature at Stanford University. He has also written 'The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation,' 'Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect,' etc.
He wrote in the Preface to this 1973 book, "I treat the historical work as what it most manifestly is: a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse... as an icon of sets of events presumed to have occurred in times past. In addition... they contain a deep structural content which is generally poetic, and specifically linguistic... which serves as the precritically accepted paradigm of what a distinctively 'historical' explanation should be... One of my principal aims... has been to establish the uniquely POETIC elements in historiography and philosophy of history... Thus I have postulated four principal modes of historical consciousness... Metaphor, Synecdoche, Metonymy, and Irony... I contend that the recognized masters of nineteenth-century historical thinking can be understood... by the explanation of the different tropological modes which underlie and inform their work." (Pg. ix-xi)
He explains, "My method, in short, is formalist. I will not try to decide whether a given historian's work is a better, or more correct, account of a specific set of events or segment of the historical process than some other historian's account of them. Rather, I will seek to identify the structural components of those accounts." (Pg. 3-4)
The philosphers/historians he examines are Hegel, Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, Burckhardt, Marx, Nietzsche, and Croce.
He observes, "Thus, in The Birth of Tragedy (Dover Thrift Editions), Nietzsche opposed two kinds of false Tragic sensibility: that which interprets the Tragic vision in the Ironic mode, and that which interprets it in the Romantic mode. His demolition of these two false conceptions of Tragic consciousness provided him with the means of reinterpreting Tragedy as a COMBINATION of Dionysiac and Apollonian insights, as Tragic apprehensions of the world being discharged in Comic comprehensions of it---AND the reverse." (Pg. 334) He adds, "Nietzsche's purpose as a philosopher of history was to destroy the notion that the historical process has to be explained or emplotted in any particular way." (Pg. 371)
He says, "Croce's critics failed to register adequately the qualification he had placed on philosophy's capacity to know reality and history's power to represent it truthfully. At the conclusion of his Theory & History Of Historiography, Croce denied that men could judge with any certitude the nature of their own age." (Pg. 398)
White's book will be of interest to students of the philosophy of history in the modern age.
June 26, 2022
"ما بعد التاريخ" لهايدن وايت: كتاب صدر العام الماضي عن المركز القومي للترجمة. من ترجمة المخضرم شريف يونس
يبحث هذا الكتاب عن البنى العميقة "الباطنة" التي من المفترض أنها تُملي صور وأنماط معينة لكتابة التاريخ في -لا وعي المؤرخ- و"تحصرها في مجموعة من العلاقات" تحت عناوين المجازات الأربعة: الكناية والاستعارة والمجاز المرسل والتهكم. لكل كتابة "بنية غير واعية" لكل نمط مجازي أيديولوجية خاصة وحبكة درامية خاصة في عقل المؤرخ (رومانسي، تراجيدي، كوميدي، ساخر). أي أنه يطرح الكتابة التاريخية كنوع من الأدب :أو نوع ناقص من الأدب. يشتمل على عناصر خيالية بالضرورة. (البنية الروائية للماضي بعناصرها الأدبية).
كما يعتبر دراسة للصورة الجديدة "التي اتخذها التاريخ حين أصبح يرمي إلى التفسير والفهم" لا مجرد تأريخ تقليدي للوقائع التي يكون المؤرخ جزءًا منها.
من كتابة عادية إلى "التأمل في الوقائع لاكتشاف ما ينظمها ويفسر تحولاتها". مما يخرج لنا رؤية مثل رؤية هيجل مثلا.
يقول شريف يونس المترجم المخضرم في التوطئة صفحة 10:
«يقودنا هذا مباشرة إلى عنوان الكتاب: ما بعد التاريخ، (ميتا هيستوري) وهي كلمة استحدثها وايت، مصممة على غرار كلمة الميتافيزيقا، التي تترجم عادة ما بعد الطبيعة، أو ما وراء الطبيعة، التي كانت في الظهور الأول عبارة عن عنوان لكتاب أرسطو الشهير.(..) لكن معنى هذا "الما بعد" ليس ما يأتي لاحقا، بل العكس: تشير العبارة إلى ما يبنى عليه أو يؤسس الشيء أو الموضوع المذكور عقليًا (ما يؤسس الطبيعة عقليا بالنسبة لكتاب أرسطو) فهو فكر من الدرجة الثانية، فِكر في الفِكر. على هذا المنوال يتناول كتاب ما بعد التاريخ أسس الكتابة التاريخية، أي البنية الباطنية التي تحكمها، مثلما كان كتاب الميتافيزيقا يتناول الفلسفة الأولى؛ أي التصورات الأولى التي تبنى عليها معرفة الطبيعة، مثل الوجود والعلة والجوهر والمحرك الأول للعالم»
والأسس التاريخية في هذا الكتاب أسس تصويرية وبنى مجازية وشعرية. كما سبق الشعر النثر في الظهور بل وفي التأريخ نفسه، وكما سبقت التصورات الميتافيزيقا الفيزيقا بل وانبنت عليها.
وطبعا؛ الكتاب جنوني! وشاق، وبه توليفة ليست للقارئ العادي (casual reader) بدءً من مؤرخي القرن التاسع عشر مثل ميشليه ورانكه وفلاسفة التاريخ مثل هيجل وماركس ونيتشه(مرورا بشوبنهاور وكانط قطعًا) وكروتشه.
في محاولة "لإسقاط أدوات التحليل عليهم كما يتماشى العالم الطبيعي مع الفرضية ليثبتها. لذا سيصعب الاقتباس منه أصلا لأن أي اقتباس منه سيسقط في التأويل (وكل مقتبَس يسقط في التأويل بالضرورة).
كتاب ماتع وشاق!..سأعود إليه فيما بعد إن شاء الله لأني اضطررت إلى تجاوز بعض الفصول لأنه محتم علي قراءة بضع أعمال من يحلل هو أعمالهم بأدواته، وسيصعب فك شفرات وايت دون إلمام ببعض المقدمات.
نأتي للشيء الأهم من كل ما سبق، هذا الكتاب...أهدانيه الأعز. ')^^
والحمد لله رب العالمين.
يبحث هذا الكتاب عن البنى العميقة "الباطنة" التي من المفترض أنها تُملي صور وأنماط معينة لكتابة التاريخ في -لا وعي المؤرخ- و"تحصرها في مجموعة من العلاقات" تحت عناوين المجازات الأربعة: الكناية والاستعارة والمجاز المرسل والتهكم. لكل كتابة "بنية غير واعية" لكل نمط مجازي أيديولوجية خاصة وحبكة درامية خاصة في عقل المؤرخ (رومانسي، تراجيدي، كوميدي، ساخر). أي أنه يطرح الكتابة التاريخية كنوع من الأدب :أو نوع ناقص من الأدب. يشتمل على عناصر خيالية بالضرورة. (البنية الروائية للماضي بعناصرها الأدبية).
كما يعتبر دراسة للصورة الجديدة "التي اتخذها التاريخ حين أصبح يرمي إلى التفسير والفهم" لا مجرد تأريخ تقليدي للوقائع التي يكون المؤرخ جزءًا منها.
من كتابة عادية إلى "التأمل في الوقائع لاكتشاف ما ينظمها ويفسر تحولاتها". مما يخرج لنا رؤية مثل رؤية هيجل مثلا.
يقول شريف يونس المترجم المخضرم في التوطئة صفحة 10:
«يقودنا هذا مباشرة إلى عنوان الكتاب: ما بعد التاريخ، (ميتا هيستوري) وهي كلمة استحدثها وايت، مصممة على غرار كلمة الميتافيزيقا، التي تترجم عادة ما بعد الطبيعة، أو ما وراء الطبيعة، التي كانت في الظهور الأول عبارة عن عنوان لكتاب أرسطو الشهير.(..) لكن معنى هذا "الما بعد" ليس ما يأتي لاحقا، بل العكس: تشير العبارة إلى ما يبنى عليه أو يؤسس الشيء أو الموضوع المذكور عقليًا (ما يؤسس الطبيعة عقليا بالنسبة لكتاب أرسطو) فهو فكر من الدرجة الثانية، فِكر في الفِكر. على هذا المنوال يتناول كتاب ما بعد التاريخ أسس الكتابة التاريخية، أي البنية الباطنية التي تحكمها، مثلما كان كتاب الميتافيزيقا يتناول الفلسفة الأولى؛ أي التصورات الأولى التي تبنى عليها معرفة الطبيعة، مثل الوجود والعلة والجوهر والمحرك الأول للعالم»
والأسس التاريخية في هذا الكتاب أسس تصويرية وبنى مجازية وشعرية. كما سبق الشعر النثر في الظهور بل وفي التأريخ نفسه، وكما سبقت التصورات الميتافيزيقا الفيزيقا بل وانبنت عليها.
وطبعا؛ الكتاب جنوني! وشاق، وبه توليفة ليست للقارئ العادي (casual reader) بدءً من مؤرخي القرن التاسع عشر مثل ميشليه ورانكه وفلاسفة التاريخ مثل هيجل وماركس ونيتشه(مرورا بشوبنهاور وكانط قطعًا) وكروتشه.
في محاولة "لإسقاط أدوات التحليل عليهم كما يتماشى العالم الطبيعي مع الفرضية ليثبتها. لذا سيصعب الاقتباس منه أصلا لأن أي اقتباس منه سيسقط في التأويل (وكل مقتبَس يسقط في التأويل بالضرورة).
كتاب ماتع وشاق!..سأعود إليه فيما بعد إن شاء الله لأني اضطررت إلى تجاوز بعض الفصول لأنه محتم علي قراءة بضع أعمال من يحلل هو أعمالهم بأدواته، وسيصعب فك شفرات وايت دون إلمام ببعض المقدمات.
نأتي للشيء الأهم من كل ما سبق، هذا الكتاب...أهدانيه الأعز. ')^^
والحمد لله رب العالمين.
September 26, 2025
White argues that history, unlike science, is a non-neutral argument that employs various narrative constructions according to the author's style to make their argument. Further, the author argues that there is no one true way to write history, despite the changing popularity of tropes over time.
There are modes of narrative construction that authors of historical writing employ to make their argument. Unlike science, which often has a unified consensus that stands the test of time, history is an argument that changes over time according to the style of the author. The three categories that the author uses are modes of emplotment, argument, and ideological implication. Modes of emplotment are the genres that the story uses to reveal its information. The four modes of emplotment are romantic, tragic, comic, and satirical. Modes of argument include formist, mechanistic, organicist, and contextualist. These are logical structures of explanation that parallel a scientific or philosophical approach to present historical arguments. White calls the work before us Formist.
Despite the intentions of the author, every historical writer has an ideological assumption baked into their writing, which makes us consider the political implications of all work. All of these ideologies argue for scientific reason and rationalism, but generally have different assumptions about society.
A weakness of this approach is the fundamental simplification of methods into a 4x4 grid. Often, arguments and methods are complex and cannot be easily put into a box, making this approach problematic in some ways. However, this can present a simplified approach to understanding overarching trends of historical periods and the overall trends of historical writers. For example, Marx is described as radical and mechanistic with an underlying trope of metonymy.
Additionally, it is a great way to conceptualize how many different historians can come to different conclusions despite the same data.
There are modes of narrative construction that authors of historical writing employ to make their argument. Unlike science, which often has a unified consensus that stands the test of time, history is an argument that changes over time according to the style of the author. The three categories that the author uses are modes of emplotment, argument, and ideological implication. Modes of emplotment are the genres that the story uses to reveal its information. The four modes of emplotment are romantic, tragic, comic, and satirical. Modes of argument include formist, mechanistic, organicist, and contextualist. These are logical structures of explanation that parallel a scientific or philosophical approach to present historical arguments. White calls the work before us Formist.
Despite the intentions of the author, every historical writer has an ideological assumption baked into their writing, which makes us consider the political implications of all work. All of these ideologies argue for scientific reason and rationalism, but generally have different assumptions about society.
A weakness of this approach is the fundamental simplification of methods into a 4x4 grid. Often, arguments and methods are complex and cannot be easily put into a box, making this approach problematic in some ways. However, this can present a simplified approach to understanding overarching trends of historical periods and the overall trends of historical writers. For example, Marx is described as radical and mechanistic with an underlying trope of metonymy.
Additionally, it is a great way to conceptualize how many different historians can come to different conclusions despite the same data.
November 20, 2024
profoundly irritating work of cultural analysis applying itself to a study of how history is figured in the works of Marx, Hegel, Nietzsche, Michelet, Croce and others. White's orientation is avowedly post-structuralist and his identification of literary devices such as Irony, Metaphor, Metonymy, Synecdoche where he believes his targets want causality and rationality to be is the point here.
His account of Marx owes a lot to Foucault so the Moor's shifting between different levels of abstraction, grasp of form as emergent and shaped by content and vice versa is sort of folded into the usual stageist, mechanistic and deterministic mould that bad-faith critics of his work harp on: the invented a thing called Dialectical Materialism in 1846 and its trajectory is Primitive Communism -> Feudalism -> Capitalism -> Communism and he threw it at every problem, you get the idea.
It makes me sound like a reactionary - and a very out of touch one because I don't think this stuff is as fashionable as it was anymore - but I really believe that it is profoundly deleterious to put this stuff into the hands of undergraduates (as happened to me) without first instructing them on the rules people like Hayden are trying to break and why it was once seen as worthwhile. I was put onto this by a chapter in Jameson's A Singular Modernity, a more patient man than me
His account of Marx owes a lot to Foucault so the Moor's shifting between different levels of abstraction, grasp of form as emergent and shaped by content and vice versa is sort of folded into the usual stageist, mechanistic and deterministic mould that bad-faith critics of his work harp on: the invented a thing called Dialectical Materialism in 1846 and its trajectory is Primitive Communism -> Feudalism -> Capitalism -> Communism and he threw it at every problem, you get the idea.
It makes me sound like a reactionary - and a very out of touch one because I don't think this stuff is as fashionable as it was anymore - but I really believe that it is profoundly deleterious to put this stuff into the hands of undergraduates (as happened to me) without first instructing them on the rules people like Hayden are trying to break and why it was once seen as worthwhile. I was put onto this by a chapter in Jameson's A Singular Modernity, a more patient man than me
March 3, 2025
I’m cognizant of the fact that I am but a mere plebeian among historians and probably am not smart enough to understand this sort of theory.
However.
This book was genuinely such a slog to get through that I couldnt even begin to tell you about what it contributes to a greater historiography.
An attempt at literary analysis of societal retellings? An attempt to convince readers of the profession’s innate irony? Does it really matter if history is told through the lens of some kind of divine tragedy? Do historians Actually Working in the field or in the archives actually care about this kind of thing?
Not sure. Couldn’t tell you. It is of my personal (and very humble) opinion that theory writers often over-complicate their language in order to cover up any holes in their greater arguments—or perhaps Im just not smart enough to read this kind of stuff.
Someone probably could—but it’s not me.
Hayden White is a smart guy who knows he’s a smart guy, who talked out of his ass for 450 pages in order to place this theoretical slop in front of me. Thanks, buddy!
I would be pleased to know what working historians who are actively attempting to broaden the field think about theoretical texts like this. (I am barely one of them, I am—again—but a peasant in the grander scheme of things.)
However.
This book was genuinely such a slog to get through that I couldnt even begin to tell you about what it contributes to a greater historiography.
An attempt at literary analysis of societal retellings? An attempt to convince readers of the profession’s innate irony? Does it really matter if history is told through the lens of some kind of divine tragedy? Do historians Actually Working in the field or in the archives actually care about this kind of thing?
Not sure. Couldn’t tell you. It is of my personal (and very humble) opinion that theory writers often over-complicate their language in order to cover up any holes in their greater arguments—or perhaps Im just not smart enough to read this kind of stuff.
Someone probably could—but it’s not me.
Hayden White is a smart guy who knows he’s a smart guy, who talked out of his ass for 450 pages in order to place this theoretical slop in front of me. Thanks, buddy!
I would be pleased to know what working historians who are actively attempting to broaden the field think about theoretical texts like this. (I am barely one of them, I am—again—but a peasant in the grander scheme of things.)
April 11, 2024
يبدا وايت بعرض منهجيته في تحليل التاريخ تعتمد على دراسة الاستعارة و هذا الجانب لم افهم كيف توظف من الكتاب و الجانب السياسي او ايدولوجي
و الحبكة يستخدمه الكاتب في دراسة القرن تاسع عشر
ينتاول هردر الذي قال ان الانسان يوجد فيه كل بذور القوة و لكن لم يوظفه باقي و الانسان الكائن الوحيد يمتلك هذي القوة
بين جميع المخلوقات و لكن لم يكتشفه و لهذي و هو يشعر بالاضطراب امام الواقع بسبب احساسه بستحقاق متفوق على الواقع
و تكلم عن ماركس و نظريته المثيرة في تجريد القيمة من الشيء و تحليل خطورة ان القيمة تأتي من قيمة الاستبدال
و بعده نيتشه و فكرة ان الضمير هو اساسه التاريخ الدين و المدين تحفيزي للالم او حفظه في الذاكرة كدين للشخص اذنبت بحقه
هو يجعل الدين موجود الكتاب واسع و فهمي له كان بسيط بعض الشيء معنه لغة الكتاب ليست صعبة لكن الصعوبة تأتي من محتوى الكتاب و خاصة نظرية المؤلف يحتاج قراءة ثانية
و الحبكة يستخدمه الكاتب في دراسة القرن تاسع عشر
ينتاول هردر الذي قال ان الانسان يوجد فيه كل بذور القوة و لكن لم يوظفه باقي و الانسان الكائن الوحيد يمتلك هذي القوة
بين جميع المخلوقات و لكن لم يكتشفه و لهذي و هو يشعر بالاضطراب امام الواقع بسبب احساسه بستحقاق متفوق على الواقع
و تكلم عن ماركس و نظريته المثيرة في تجريد القيمة من الشيء و تحليل خطورة ان القيمة تأتي من قيمة الاستبدال
و بعده نيتشه و فكرة ان الضمير هو اساسه التاريخ الدين و المدين تحفيزي للالم او حفظه في الذاكرة كدين للشخص اذنبت بحقه
هو يجعل الدين موجود الكتاب واسع و فهمي له كان بسيط بعض الشيء معنه لغة الكتاب ليست صعبة لكن الصعوبة تأتي من محتوى الكتاب و خاصة نظرية المؤلف يحتاج قراءة ثانية
July 20, 2025
Have a secret love for this kind of structuralist, systematic nerdiness. It's not nearly as dry as say Metz's application of linguistic categories to cinema (Metz loves a good list/table in the most boring way). Love the proliferation of modes, the extension of structuralist analysis to synecdoche and Irony (rather than just metonymy and metaphor). Love when theorists really dive into the linguistics and not just the secondary appropriations of linguistics (not just Levi Strauss). One day I'll pay my dues to Michael Silverstein whose work I really like but have never really written on.
November 27, 2025
I could have given this book 4 stars, I’ll come back to this and think about it again. There was some really smart through lines that White picked out, and a huge survey of documents/books, although at times this summary and actual discussion of the work was not enough close reading to get me interested and made the experience a bit of a slog.
September 24, 2022
I skimmed this book for a university presentation and found it fascinating - while the concept of biased history is not exactly new, the linguistic & literary focus of this book made it a refreshing read. Thoroughly enjoyed
December 13, 2017
A very difficult book to read, but it really opened my mind and enlightened me a whole lot!
And of course - it helped me a lot in my studies :-)
And of course - it helped me a lot in my studies :-)
January 31, 2022
The first book I read for my Japanese Film History course lol. Hard to read but worth the effort.
December 3, 2024
interesting but dry :(
August 19, 2024
“There can be no ‘proper history’ which is not at the same time ‘philosophy of history’; (2) the possible modes of historiography are the same as the possible modes of speculative philosophy of history; (3) these modes, in turn, are in reality formalizations of poetic insights that analytically precede them and that sanction the particular theories used to give historical accounts the aspect of an ‘explanation’; (4) there are no apodictically certain theoretical grounds on which one can legitimately claim an authority for any one of the modes over the others as being more ‘realistic’; (5) as a consequence of this, we are indentured to a choice among contending interpretative strategies in any effort to reflect on history-in-general; (6) as a corollary of this, the best grounds for choosing one perspective on history rather than another are ultimately aesthetic or moral rather than epistemological; and, finally, (7) the demand for the scientization of history represents only the statement of a preference for a specific modality of historical conceptualization, the grounds of which are either moral or aesthetic, but the epistemological justification of which still remains to be established.”
April 29, 2014
I must admit that I found this book really confusing and it took me quite a while to get through it. The basic idea is interesing, the linguistic, narrative and poetic nature of history. The apparatus White is using is confusing at times and I don't think his theoretical world corresponds to the actual analysis he is doing of the historical and philosophical texts. I expected a structuralist, linguistic examination of parts of texts but in the end his analysis is about the different ways of realism in 19th century historiography and philosophy of history. He makes interesting statements and I think he made a great starting points of presenting his ideas on historiography and its fictive elements. I somehow wish he had applied his theoretical apparatus the way he had described in the introduction though. Anyway, Hayden White is a must read for all historians and literary critics: Objectivity and a technical language can't exist in humanist studies.
Read
March 30, 2014Second go round on this behemoth. Not in the least interested in the 'deep structure' White 'digs up', (corpses don't scare me anymore) but I am interested in what he has to say about Ranke, Burkhardt, et.al. and how they approach history/historiography in a more genetic sense. Even after finishing introduction again it strikes me how at odds many of White's listed conclusions are with his structuralist/foundationalist methodology. While the conclusions seem reasonable the path to them is just weird.
January 11, 2010
It seems like Hayden White always comes up in my conquest/colonial classes and for good reason. Even though he's a bit of a formalist, I like White's clarity of thought. I guess you could call me a White sympathizer.
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