[In the following review of The Content of the Form, Gross commends White's insightful ideas, but suggests that his “dense” and “formidable” prose may limit his audience.]

Hayden White begins “Foucault's Discourse: The Historiography of Anti-Humanism,” the longest of the eight substantial essays in The Content of the Form, with the observation that the work of Michel Foucault “is extraordinarily difficult to deal with in any short account.” The same is certainly true of White's own work. White describes his book as “some of the work I have done over the last seven years in historiography and theory of narrative and on the problem of representation in the human sciences.” The essays are sophisticated theoretically, informed throughout by contemporary continental critics and philosophers. Like Foucault, Ricoeur, Jameson—some of the writers discussed at length here—White's own writing can be rather formidable, so dense as to be almost impenetrable. Certainly a problem in his book is that the practitioners of the dominant positivist, empiricist, antitheoretical school of historiography with whom he wants to argue are not likely to read very far, to listen to much of his argument.

That is a shame, because White connects many different insights of modern critical theory in ways which illuminate both historical practice and the practice of the historian. White is usually seen as a “formalist,” and indeed one way of characterizing The Content of the Form, like his earlier work, is in terms of the attention paid to the form as opposed to the content in historical narratives. White seeks consistently to foreground the effects, the constitutive character, of discourse itself. Thus his typical rhetorical or tropological analysis.

White is concerned here with “systems of meaning production” in culture, with the function of any discursive information, as it is produced and interpreted in any given context. Of all the thinkers whose work he considers, White seems to agree most with Foucault; he sums up that thinker's position as follows: “What is always at work in discourse—as in everything else—is ‘desire and power.’” White agrees, and he argues persuasively that the discourse of knowledge, of education, always masks its relations to power and presents itself as dealing only with neutral, objective truth. A central function of the discipline of history, according to White, has been to discipline desire, to banish from historical narration radical discontent with the present and commitment to a fundamentally different future. Throughout his book White uses his familiarity and facility with modern theory to demystify notions of transparency or objectivity in intellectual discourse and to fix our attention squarely on the process of meaning production in all its complex and contradictory unfolding.