Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe

Citation

White, H. (2014). Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (40th anniversary ed.). Johns Hopkins University Press.

Chapter Summary

First published in 1973, the book is a study of historical writing as writing. The fortieth-anniversary edition has a new preface by White, in which he explains why he wrote the book and how reactions to it shaped his later work, and a foreword by Michael S. Roth. The body of about 450 pages is divided into an introduction, three parts and a conclusion, with the analyses organised around eight thinkers: the historians Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville and Burckhardt, and the philosophers of history Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Croce. The headings below follow the contents of the book, with the individual chapters identified by the thinker each treats.

Introduction: The Poetics of History

The introduction (the first 40 or so pages) sets out the theoretical framework. White argues that a historical work contains a deep structural content, "poetic and linguistic" in character, which he calls the metahistorical element and which serves as a paradigm of what counts as an appropriate historical explanation. According to the standard account of the book, he analyses the historical work in layers: the assembling of events into a chronicle, the shaping of the chronicle into a story, and then three kinds of explanatory strategy, by emplotment, by argument and by ideological implication. These are matched, by "elective affinity", with four basic tropes: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony.

Part One: The Received Tradition (The Enlightenment and the Problem of Historical Consciousness, and Hegel)

The first part starts from the Enlightenment's problem of historical consciousness and then turns to Hegel, one of the four philosophers of history the publisher names.

Part Two: Four Kinds of "Realism" in Nineteenth-Century Historical Writing

The second part, which begins at about page 133 of the 2014 edition, is made up of four chapters on Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville and Burckhardt. Each is read as a distinct way of being "realist" in historiography and is linked to one of the four modes of emplotment: romance for Michelet, comedy for Ranke, tragedy for Tocqueville and satire for Burckhardt.

Part Three: The Repudiation of Realism in Late Nineteenth-Century Philosophy of History

The third part opens with a chapter on "Historical Consciousness and the Rebirth of Irony" and then takes three philosophical positions in turn: "The Philosophical Defense of History in the Metonymical Mode" (Marx), "The Poetic Defense of History in the Metaphorical Mode" (Nietzsche) and "The Philosophical Defense of History in the Ironic Mode" (Croce). Wikipedia's summary of the book pairs Marx with metonymy, Nietzsche with metaphor and Croce with irony.

Conclusion

The conclusion draws the argument together. The publisher's description says the book sets out to deprive history of its status as a bedrock of factual truth, to redeem narrative as the substance of historicality, and to show that any distinction between history and ideology based on the presumed scientific character of history is spurious.

Key Concepts

Introduction: The Poetics of History

• Metahistorical element: the latent poetic and linguistic content of a historical text, which determines what the author takes a proper explanation to be.
• Chronicle and story: the two preliminary steps through which events are ordered before they receive a plot.
• Four tropes: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony, the modes of figurative language on which the book's scheme rests.

Parts One and Two

• Emplotment: the archetypal story forms of romance, comedy, tragedy and satire.
• Modes of argument: formist, organicist, mechanicist and contextualist explanation.
• Ideological implication: anarchist, conservative, radical and liberal positions.
• Historical realism: the label under which the four historians of Part Two are compared.

Part Three

• Philosophy of history in the three modes: metonymical (Marx), metaphorical (Nietzsche) and ironic (Croce), as the chapter titles name them.
• The rebirth of irony: the subject of the chapter that opens Part Three, "Historical Consciousness and the Rebirth of Irony".

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• An argument about historical writing. The publisher presents it as the first work in the history of historiography to concentrate on historical writing as writing, and the book makes its claim by close reading of named authors, not by programme alone.
• A clear analytical apparatus. The tropes, modes of emplotment, argument and ideology offer a vocabulary that can be taken up and applied to other historical texts.
• Effect on the field. Frank Ankersmit has argued that the book brought the linguistic turn to the philosophy of history, which is a reason the book is so widely discussed in the study of historical narrative.
• Added context in the new edition. The new preface and the foreword by Michael S. Roth place the book in the history of its reception across history, literary theory and philosophy.

Limitations

• Contested method. The system of fourfold correspondences is the book's central device and its most debated feature. Arthur Marwick, quoted on the Wikipedia page for the book, called it a brilliant analysis of the rhetorical techniques of early nineteenth-century historians while complaining that White had made little acquaintance with what historians write today.
• A narrow corpus. Eight European thinkers are treated, so the book is a study of a particular tradition of historical writing, not a survey of historiography or of the practice of research.
• Dense and abstract. The introduction states the framework in compressed form, and the book assumes familiarity with Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and the nineteenth-century historians it discusses.
• Contested standing. Historians' reactions range from enthusiasm to frustration, so the book is best read together with some of the critical response to it.

Where It Fits in the Course

Within the historical methods course, Metahistory is the most theoretical of the readings. Carr's What Is History? and Bloch's The Historian's Craft are the classic short statements about the nature of historical facts, evidence and method, and Arnold's History: A Very Short Introduction and Tosh's The Pursuit of History introduce the discipline for students. Iggers, Wang and Mukherjee's A Global History of Modern Historiography surveys the history of historical writing across traditions.

White's book is not an introduction to any of these topics. It is best read after one or two of them, once the reader has met the questions about evidence and interpretation that White takes to a different level. It also pairs well with the global history of historiography, which situates the nineteenth-century European tradition White analyses.

How to Use This Book

This is a book for advanced undergraduates and graduate students in history, literary studies or philosophy who already know the basic debates about historical objectivity. Prior reading in nineteenth-century European intellectual history helps, because the chapters presuppose the authors and works discussed.

A practical plan:

• Begin with the introduction, "The Poetics of History". Its framework governs the rest, and many readers consult it again after each part.
• Read the new preface and Roth's foreword in the anniversary edition first if the aim is to understand how the book was received.
• Choose the chapters by the author you know best. A student of Ranke or Tocqueville can read that chapter against the introduction before taking on the whole.
• Read the Part Three chapters together, since Marx, Nietzsche and Croce are the late-century philosophers of history the book sets against the realist historians.
• Use the conclusion for the summary of what the book claims about the relation of history to ideology and narrative.
• Alongside the book, read critical responses and White's later essay collections, such as Tropics of Discourse and The Content of the Form, which the publisher's author note lists among his books.