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RE-FIGURING HAYDEN WHITE

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Introduction: A Distinctively Human Life Hans Kellner.......................................................................1PART I. PHILOSOPHY Philosophy, an Introduction Ewa Domanska................................................................111 On the Metaphilosophy of History David Carr...............................................................................152 White's "New Neo-Kantianism": Aesthetics, Ethics, and Politics Frank Ankersmit............................................343 Hayden White and the Crisis of Historicism Herman Paul....................................................................54PART II. NARRATIVE Narrative, an Introduction Frank Ankersmit..............................................................814 Narrative Persistence: The Post-Postmodern Life of Narrative Theory Nancy Partner.........................................815 "Nobody Does It Better": Radical History and Hayden White Keith Jenkins...................................................1056 Metahistory as Anabasis Andrew Baird......................................................................................1247 History: Myth and Narrative: A Coda for Roland Barthes and Hayden White Stephen Bann......................................144PART III. DISCOURSE Discourse, an Introduction Frank Ankersmit.............................................................1658 "The Burden of History" Forty Years Later David Harlan....................................................................1699 The Rhetorical Dialectic of Hayden White Allan Megill.....................................................................19010 Does the Sublime Price Explanation Out of the Historical Market? Hans Kellner............................................21611 History Beyond the Pleasure Principle? Dominick LaCapra..................................................................231PART IV. PRACTICE Practice, an Introduction Ewa Domanska...................................................................25712 Figuring the Malvinas War Experience: Heuristic and History as an Unfulfilled Promise Vernica Tozzi.....................26113 Primo Levi for the Present Judith Butler.................................................................................28214 Hayden White, Historian Richard Vann.....................................................................................0415 Hayden White: An Academic Teacher Ewa Domanska...........................................................................332Bibliography of Hayden White: Works in English...............................................................................351Contributors.................................................................................................................367Index........................................................................................................................371

Chapter One

David Carr

Hayden White's Agenda for the Metaphilosophy of History

As everyone knows, Hayden White's Metahistory changed the philosophy of history for good. Anyone who has wanted to do serious work in the philosophy of history since its appearance in 1973 has had to come to terms with this now-classic work.

White's thesis and his approach are stated in the first two pages of his book. By considering "the historical work" as "a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse," he wants to affirm that "the historical consciousness on which Western man has prided himself since the beginning of the nineteenth century may be little more than a theoretical basis for [an] ideological position." He then lays out his elaborate "theory of the historical work," and proceeds to apply it to the writings of a large collection of celebrated nineteenth-century authors.

I want to call attention to an interesting feature of White's work that has, I believe, gone largely unappreciated. He addresses himself, in the passages quoted above, to "the historical work," and the book received considerable attention for his analyses of the works of historians Leopold von Ranke, Jules Michelet, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Jacob Burckhardt. And much of White's subsequent work has been devoted to extending certain features of his "theory of the historical work" to historians in general, beyond the confines of the nineteenth century. Thus what mattered, for both White and his readers, was the impact of his analyses on our understanding and evaluation of works of history.

A large part of Metahistory is devoted to examining texts that are usually considered not "works of history" at all, but works of philosophy. He deals with as many philosophers of history (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Benedetto Croce) as historians. The common rubric, of course, is "the historical consciousness of the nineteenth century," to which the philosophers, no less than the historians, give expression. Neither they nor their readers, however, would think of them as historians: the difference between history and philosophy, and indeed between history and the philosophy of history, was by the nineteenth century generally accepted. White, of course, finds the elements of his "theory of the historical work" in the writings of the philosophers as well as the historians, namely explanation by formal argument, emplotment, and ideological implication. These elements are discerned in philosophical theories about history, not historical narratives proper. Th us, it is important that Hayden White be recognized for his analysis and evaluation of the philosophy of history in the nineteenth century, and not only for what he says about historians.

This allows us to view Hayden White's work in a significantly different context from the usual one, and to put him into a somewhat different company of thinkers. He is usually viewed, quite correctly, as contributing to the epistemology of history (sometimes called the analytical or critical philosophy of history), which, as a field, is concerned with evaluating historians' claims to knowledge about the past. But he also belongs to the ranks of those twentieth-century philosophers who evaluated the "substantive" claims about the historical process, claims made primarily by nineteenth-century philosophers like Hegel and Marx. To be sure, these two groups of philosophers overlapped to some degree, since some analytic philosophers felt the need to dispose of the substantive philosophy of history before turning to their own epistemological analysis. But other thinkers, not associated with the analytic philosophy of history (Karl Popper and Karl Lwith are good examples), joined in this evaluation, and we can think of this project, the critique of the substantive or "classical" philosophy of history, as constituting a significant chapter in twentieth-century thought, especially in the post-World War II period. Hayden White belongs to this group too, then, and can be seen as part of the mid- to late-twentieth-century reaction to the nineteenth-century philosophy of history.

This project, it seems to me, deserves to be called something other than "metahistory," which many people now use as a generic term for the analysis of works of history; I suggest metaphilosophy of history, or the philosophy of the philosophy of history.

There are good reasons why Hayden White's contribution to this project...