SOURCE: “The Presuppositions of Metahistory,” in History and Theory, Vol. XIX, No. 4, 1980, pp. 39–54.

[In the following essay, Mandelbaum examines the thesis of Metahistory and finds flaws in White's failure to differentiate between the work of historians and philosophers of history, as well as his misconception of historical data, reductive application of linguistic tropes, and acceptance of relativism.]

In the introductory chapter of his Metahistory, Hayden White explicitly sets forth the main presuppositions underlying that work. If one were to examine these presuppositions in the light of his other writings, one might uncover his reasons for accepting them. Such, however, is not my aim. I shall confine my discussion to certain of the views he explicitly embraces, selecting those which are basic to the aspects of Metahistory I especially wish to challenge.

As a point of entry into the closely articulated system of Metahistory, let me first mention the eight persons whom White has chosen as representing the various modes of historical consciousness with which he deals. Four of these he considers to have been the dominant historians of the classic period of nineteenth-century historiography; four he regards as the most important philosophers of history of that century. Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, and Burckhardt are the historians chosen; Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Croce are the philosophers of history. To some extent, one may quarrel with these choices; this is a question to which I shall briefly return. What is initially noteworthy is not whom he has chosen, but the fact that historians and philosophers of history are treated together, a mode of treatment in direct opposition to the widespread assumption (held throughout the nineteenth century, and subsequently) that their aims and methods are not only fundamentally distinct, but are often opposed. His rejection of that view, and his account of what they have in common, is the first of his theses that I shall challenge. What lies behind that thesis is a particular view of what is most fundamental in the writing of history, and it is that view which I shall take as his first and perhaps most fundamental presupposition.

It is White's claim that “history proper” and “philosophies of history” grow out of a common root, differing only in emphasis, not in content: philosophers of history simply bring to the surface and systematically defend views that remain implicit in the works of historians (xi, 428). Unfortunately, White fails to specify with any degree of exactitude what he regards as the essential features in a philosophy of history.¹ If (for the time being) we construe philosophies of history as being, essentially, nothing more than reflection on a significant portion of man's past in order to determine what “meaning,” if any, is to be discerned in it, then one might well say of Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, and Burckhardt that each did have a philosophy of history. On the other hand, were one to choose any single work of theirs (with the possible exception of Burckhardt's posthumous Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen), and were one to consider its aim and its content, one would surely not regard it as similar in these respects to the works usually taken to be representative philosophies of history.

In order to understand what may have led White to overlook or to disregard this obvious point, and therefore to hold that there is no deep difference between historians and philosophers of history, one must consider what he took to be the determining factors in all forms of historical inquiry.² He held that with the exception of those who are only concerned to write “monographs and archival reports” (ix), every historian creates a narrative verbal structure through selecting and arranging the primitive data contained in “the unprocessed historical records”; the elements in such a verbal structure are then arranged in a way that purports to represent and explain past processes; and, according to White, the manner in which these processes are represented reflects the historian's antecedent acceptance of one of four types of “metahistorical” paradigms. White's characterization of the nature of the four types of paradigm will concern us later. What is important to note here is that in labeling them “metahistorical,” White is emphasizing the fact that they are not derived from the data with which the historian works; rather, they are “interpretative strategies” which determine to which data he will attend, and in what ways he will envision the relations among them (428, 430). In short, the narrative structure which an historian creates will have been “prefigured” by the particular paradigm in terms of which he sees the historical world (30–31). Since it is White's contention that exactly the same basic paradigms are to be found in the works of historians and philosophers of history, he rejects the widely-held view that the dissimilarities between the two genres are more fundamental than are their similarities.

Before examining what led White to stress what he took to be the similarity between historians and philosophers of history, let us consider some of the respects in which they do in fact differ. In the first place, White fails to note that with the possible exception of some attempts to write universal histories, every historical inquiry is limited in scope, dealing with what is recognized to be only one segment or one aspect of human history. Most philosophers of history, on the other hand, have traditionally embarked on sweeping surveys of what they have regarded as the whole of the significant past, in an effort to establish some one basic principle of explanation which would render intelligible the course it had followed.³ Their purpose in doing so may be said to be an attempt to justify some particular evaluative attitudes toward various segments or elements in that history. One does not find even the most “philosophical” of historians committing himself to such a project. To be sure, as I have pointed out, one may say of various historians that “they have a philosophy of history,” in the sense that they more or less consistently evince certain underlying evaluative attitudes toward the materials with which they deal. To that extent, White is correct in what he claims concerning Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, and Burckhardt. Nevertheless, it is implausible to hold that their works, taken either individually or as a whole, were written primarily for the sake of establishing the truth of a particular interpretation of the historical process; yet this is clearly what constitutes the aim of any philosophy of history. The immediate concern of historians may better be characterized in terms of attempts to understand and depict what happened at particular times and in particular places. Therefore, even though their works often reflect a definite and distinctive view of overall characteristics to be found in the historical process, these works are histories, not philosophies of history.

A second and related difference between historians and philosophers of history lies in the fact that every philosopher of history seeks to find a principle of explanation, or of interpretation, which illuminates every significant aspect of the historical process. No such belief has been characteristic of historians, at least not since the mid-eighteenth century. Instead, historians have generally come to regard it as essential to preserve flexibility when dealing with different times and different peoples, rather than to expect that there is some particular principle of explanation which is equally applicable to all. Furthermore, most are inclined to employ different modes of explanation to deal with different dimensions of social life, rather than using a single set of categories when explaining the nature and changes in, say, the economic, the political, and the intellectual aspects of a society's life. Any insistence on either or both of these forms of pluralism completely undermines the legitimacy of the kind of claim that every philosopher of history must make—namely, that there is some one principle which, when adequately grasped, serves to reveal the meaning of all essential aspects of human history. For this reason, if for no other, the presuppositions of historians and of philosophers of history are strikingly opposed.

A third point at which there are fundamental differences between the aims of an historian and of a philosopher of history lies in the latter's absolute commitment to the view that there is some discernible lesson, or “meaning,” in human history. Such a meaning is viewed as providing a way to assess the significance of various past events, to determine the attitude which should be adopted with respect to conflicts within the present, and to help envision what the future will ultimately bring. While philosophers of history have occasionally acknowledged that the meaning they attribute to history was derived from other sources, most have claimed that it arose directly out of an intensive study of the historical past. They have apparently also believed that the same meaning would be acknowledged by all who studied the past in equal depth and with equal intensity.

This claim has often been challenged by historians. They have argued that philosophers of history do not derive meaning from history, but attribute meaning to history as a way of justifying their own antecedent evaluative beliefs. Not only can historians cite instances in which this appears to have been true, but they can quite convincingly argue that the events of human history, taken as a whole, are far too complex and ambiguous to support the claim that there is any single meaning to be directly derived from them. A philosopher of history might possibly reply that there is no great difference in principle between this and what is involved in such interpretations of history as are to be found in Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, and Burckhardt, each of whom had singled out certain forces or tendencies which they regarded as dominant factors in the historical field. However, any supposed parallel between these two endeavors does not hold. Historians such as Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, and Burckhardt did not claim to have arrived at their understanding of these forces through a comprehensive survey of the whole past; instead, they had simply dipped successively into the historical stream at various points and were generalizing concerning significant resemblances which they found at these points.⁴ Thus, instead of claiming that there is some dominant pattern running through the process as a whole, determining how each of its elements will develop, they were singling out what they took to be the important common elements in various historical situations; it was with respect to their attitudes toward these elements that they may be said to have had “a philosophy of history.” This, however, only justifies characterizing them in a very loose sense as “philosophers of history.” Their situation exactly parallels that in which, after examining a practicing scientist's works, one might say that he has “a philosophy of science,” without thereby either asserting or implying that he is “a philosopher of science.”

As we have noted, what led White to blur the distinction between the works of historians and those of philosophers of history was his view that both reflect an acceptance of one or another metahistorical paradigm which serves to organize the primary data with which they are concerned. Having noted some points at which histories and philosophies of history are obviously different, I shall now consider this presupposition which led to White's attempt to bring them exceptionally close together.

In offering his account of what he termed “the levels of conceptualization” in an historical work, White took as his starting point the data contained in “the unprocessed historical record” (5). He identified these data as the primitive elements in the historical field. The historian, he held, must first arrange such data in temporal order, thus producing “a chronicle”; he must then connect them in a way that transforms this chronicle into “a story”; this is the beginning of the odyssey that leads to the production of an historical work. This, however, is surely not the way in which any present-day historian would actually work; nor would even the earliest of historians have done so. No historian is confronted at the outset of his inquiries with an unprocessed historical record, with a bank of data devoid of all order, to which he must impart whatever order it is to possess. Rather, every historian will, from the outset, be confronted not by raw data but by earlier accounts of the past; embedded within those accounts will be almost all the data with which he is to work. Data not included within one account, but included within another, will lead him to alter one or the other; he must in any case fit these accounts together to obtain a larger, more consistent, and presumably more accurate “story” than any which his predecessors had produced. Nor will all of the accounts of his predecessors appear to be connected: when they deal with different times and places, large gaps may appear between them. In order to fill such gaps, the historian must seek other accounts which will provide data that serve to connect what was previously unconnected; or he must, on his own initiative, seek out such data for himself. In either case, his awareness of the existence of gaps within what White termed “the historical record” conclusively shows that this record does not consist of unorganized raw data—data which are simply “there,” and which have no inherent connections with one another until the historian has impressed an order upon them.

It may perhaps be objected that this criticism of White is unfair: that his analysis of the levels of conceptualization which are present in an historical work was intended to be taken as a purely analytic account, and not an attempt to trace a series of successive steps by means of which any historical work has ever actually been created. Such may indeed have been White's intention, but it would in no way alter the point of the foregoing criticism. Analytically considered, what White designates as “the primitive elements” with which historians work, and which serve as their data, are documents, legends, records, and the remains of earlier human activities, or else they are prior accounts concerning the events under investigation. If an historian is to make use of such materials for historical purposes, he cannot regard them as if they were nothing but parchment, slabs of stone, or sheaves of paper; he must view them as relating to various kinds of human activities with which he is familiar through his own direct experience, supplemented by knowledge derived from what has been said by others. Thus, the most basic level on which historical data can be interpreted will be as meaningful elements embedded in an intelligible context. Therefore, from an analytic no less than from a genetic point of view, even the simplest data with which an historian works are not unconnected atomic elements which lack all intrinsic order. What to the historian are “data”—that is, what constitutes “the given” for him—possess connections among themselves which exist prior to, and independently of, the ways in which he subsequently comes to order them. It is for this reason that I reject the first of White's presuppositions.

Turning to a second basic presupposition in Metahistory, we find White assuming, without examining alternatives, that the order bestowed by the historian on his materials represents a poetic act (for example, x, 4, and 30). It appears as if he took this for granted simply because when one looks at an historical work as “what it most manifestly is,” one finds it to be “a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse” (2). In regarding an historical work in this light, and not considering what else it may also be, it is natural that White should turn to the theory of literature in order to identify the various metahistorical paradigms which, as he believes, control the work of historians. He finds such paradigms in four fundamental linguistic tropes. I shall not be concerned with the details of his use of these tropes, but I shall argue that White's approach leaves out of account what has generally—and, I think, rightly—been regarded as the basic intent of historical works: to discover, depict, and explain what has occurred in the past.

I wish first to take note of the fact that simply because every historical work is a verbal structure, and can be considered as such, it by no means follows that this provides the most basic level at which all of its structural aspects are to be understood. An eyewitness may, for example, give a narrative account of the sequence of events that led to an accident, a chemist may describe a series of experiments whereby he succeeded in disproving a previously held theory, a physician may trace the course of a patient's illness from its onset to his death, a traveler may tell us what befell him on his journeys before reaching his destination, and each of these would be a narrative, and would have the general structure which White (following Gallie and Danto) attributes to narratives.

To refuse to regard narratives of this sort as anything more than particular verbal structures would be capricious: as interpreted by a listener, the basic structure of each will be determined by the relationships among the events narrated, not by the manner of their narration. These relationships among the events may have been brought out clearly, or they may have been obscured in the telling, but they will have existed prior to the narration and will be independent of it. So, too, with historical works which, to some extent, these simple narrations resemble. Furthermore, White himself should not attempt to deny that the relationships depicted in an historical narrative exist prior to the act of narration, since that assumption was implicit in his characterization of an historical work. While every such work is, as he tells us, “a verbal structure in the form of narrative prose,” it is more than this, for it “purports to be a model, or icon, of past structures and processes in the interest of explaining what they were by representing them” (2). Therefore, unless there is absolutely no basis for the claim that historical narratives do represent past structures and processes, and serve as icons which represent relationships that actually obtained, much of their structure—like the structures of the simple narratives I have cited—is not attributable to the narrator but is already present within the elements with which he has chosen to deal.

There doubtless were many reasons why White failed to raise this possibility in his discussion, but he does not suggest what they were, and I shall not speculate concerning them. Instead, it may be more fruitful to inquire what there is in the nature of an historical work itself—totally apart from any of the traditional arguments in favor of historical relativism⁵—that might make it plausible for anyone to regard the narrator as entirely responsible for the structure of his narrative. One such feature seems to me to be the historian's freedom to define the subject-matter of his inquiry in almost any way that he chooses.

Every historical work represents a particular choice of subject-matter, and in choosing his subject-matter an historian is carving out a particular segment of the past from the stream of the historical process; the definition of what constitutes that particular segment—why it does not include either more or less than it does—can be viewed as a creative act on the part of the historian. To be sure, in some cases no genuinely creative act may be involved. For example, a run-of-the-mill historian who decides to write the history of a particular period may simply accept some conventional compartmentalization of the historical process, and work within that framework. In other cases, historians may be puzzled by problems that their predecessors failed to investigate, and their subject-matter will be defined by the particular residual problem that they have set out to solve. White would probably be inclined to place works such as these within the same general class to which “monographs and archival reports” belong; it was not with such examples that he was concerned. If, instead, one thinks of the great historians whose works he analyzed, one can see that it is entirely reasonable to regard their ways of envisioning their subject-matter as involving original, creative, expressive acts.

On White's analysis of these “precognitive,” “precritical,” poetic acts the whole argument of his Metahistory turns. He distinguishes three “narrative tactics” which all historians employ: an initial “emplotment,” an implied form of explanatory argument, and an evaluative, ideological component (7). All of these, White claims, are packed into the historian's original creative act. It is therefore that act which not only “prefigures” the general shape of an historical work but determines what kinds of relationships the historian will take into account in analyzing the events with which he deals (cf. 430). As White says of such acts, they are “constitutive of the structure that will subsequently be imaged in the verbal model offered by the historian as representation and explanation of ‘what really happened'” (31).

The various explanatory strategies which the historian can adopt are not, however, unlimited. White holds that each of the three aspects of an adopted strategy—the emplotment, explanatory argument, and ideological component—will assume one of four forms, and he relates these forms to the four fundamental linguistic tropes. He holds that the historian's use of one or another of these tropes represents the deepest level of the historical consciousness, and this is the level at which he seeks to analyze historical works (30–31). In doing so, he wishes to proceed in a purely “formalist” manner; as he says with respect to his method, “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 segments of the historical process than some other historian's account of them; rather, I will seek to identify the structural components of these accounts” (3–4).

So long as he is dealing only with that particular structural component which he identifies as “emplotment,” his formalism raises no special difficulties. In fact, it is his analysis of this element which gives point and substance to his claim that in the historian's original way of envisioning his subject there is already prefigured the overall form that his account will ultimately take. With respect to emplotment, White follows Northrop Frye and distinguishes four forms: Romance, Comedy, Tragedy, and Satire. These terms are not used in order to characterize distinct literary styles, nor to identify the particular types of subject-matter which are present in the works thus emplotted; rather, each refers to a basic attitude on the part of the historian toward the subject-matter with which he is to deal. In Comedy, for example, what is prefigured is the reconciliation of antagonistic forces; in Satire, the attitude is one of irony. Such attitudes are inextricably involved in how the historian envisions his subject: how the beginning of the narrative is related to its end, and which details and what changes in fortune he will emphasize.

Whether White's assimilation of these four forms of emplotment to the four fundamental tropes of poetic discourse can withstand scrutiny is not a matter with which I am concerned: the four forms of emplotment, as White has characterized them, can be accepted independently of any relations they may bear to his theory of tropes. They constitute highly relevant aspects of an historian's work, and White has made an important and suggestive contribution to the theory of historiography in having called attention to them. This cannot, however, be said of his claim that the same linguistic tropes provide the best way to understand the forms of explanatory arguments historians employ, nor the role that ideological factors play in their works. As I shall now suggest, in these cases White's formalist “tropological” account breaks down.

First consider his attempt to reduce the various types of explanatory argument to a linguistic form. Borrowing from Stephen Pepper's World Hypotheses, White distinguishes four types of explanatory argument: Formist, Mechanistic, Organicist, Contextualist. Let us grant that this may be an adequate typology of four characteristically different modes of explanation; let us also grant the somewhat more dubious contention that different thinkers, regardless of the subject-matter with which they deal, tend to accept one of these four types, rejecting each of the others. It would still be necessary for White to show that such a bias is not derived from some specifically theoretical considerations, but actually depends upon the way in which linguistic forms give structure to the thought of various thinkers. I suggest that when this thesis is considered in relation to the history of ideas, it will be recognized as implausible. If, for example, one examines the thought of a mechanist of the seventeenth century, or of an organicist in the later eighteenth or the nineteenth century, one discovers reasons of a specifically historical and philosophical sort why—once having chosen the subject-matter with which he was to deal—such a thinker would view his field in terms of mechanistic or organicist models. For example, in order to account for the dominance of the mechanical explanatory model in the seventeenth century, one has to look to the development of the mechanical sciences in that period; to explain organicist models in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thought, one must look to the anti-Newtonian views which developed out of various physical, biological, and specifically historical concerns with which the Newtonian model was unable to cope. To attribute such change to whatever linguistic modes may perhaps have been dominant in the period would almost surely be an example of the hysteron-protoron fallacy, a putting of the cart before the horse: insofar as one trope rather than another was in fact dominant within the period, it was more likely to have been a reflection of the thought of the period than an independent determinant in giving structure to that thought.

Consider also the ideological and ethical stance involved in the work of any historian. White uses the concept of “ideology” in a somewhat broader than usual sense, including beliefs concerning the nature and aims of a study of society, attitudes toward historical change, and beliefs as to when and where a social ideal has been, or might be, realized (24).⁶ Even when the concept is used in this extended sense, it is difficult to see how an historian's acceptance of one or another ideological stance can be clarified by relating it to one of the four linguistic tropes with which White's tropological approach is concerned. If one seeks to penetrate to what lies below the surface of the attitudes of the Anarchist, the Radical, the Conservative, or the Liberal (the four basic forms of ideology which White takes over from Mannheim), it would seem more fruitful to use other means than those provided by a linguistic analysis. In the first place, it is doubtful whether one can find any common properties determined in terms of linguistic models that would unite all who closely resemble one another in their ideologies. In the second place, it would seem imperative in any given case to try to understand the political and social situation to which the historian was exposed, and to consider his ideological stance not only with reference to it, but also in relation to those factors in his personal life which may have led him to view that situation as he did. It is surely far-fetched to interpret his view of the conflicts inherent in his own time, or his stance toward past and future, or his position regarding the possibility of creating a science of society, as if each of these were to follow from some linguistic predisposition on his part. White offers no arguments to dispel this disquietude: from the outset he has simply assumed that the structure of an historical work is to be treated as a literary structure, and that the four fundamental linguistic tropes provide the basic categories to be used in interpreting all linguistic structures.

The inflexibility of White's approach in nowhere more evident than in the manner in which he treats the history of nineteenth-century historiography. His tropological approach is fundamentally ahistorical: the possibility of organizing an historical account in terms of one of these tropes instead of another is not restricted to any one time or place, but is ever-present. Nevertheless, White attempts to trace a development in the dominant modes of historical thinking in the nineteenth century, moving from an Ironic realism in the Enlightenment through the postures of Romance, Tragedy, and Comedy, to emerge once again, at the end of the century, in a new mood of Irony which he identified with “the crisis of historicism.” He failed to establish this developmental schema through any broad-ranging examination of the various lines of development to be found in the historiography of the period. He paid no attention to the impact of nationalism on historiography, to the importance of Kulturgeschichte, to how, if at all, evolutionary theory in biology influenced historiography, to the rise of social evolutionism among legal historians and social anthropologists, or to the ways in which a sociological interest in “the masses” affected the consciousness of historians. Nor does one find any extended treatment of many of the foremost historians of the period, of Niebuhr or of Maitland, for example. In fact, one cannot escape the impression that the historians and philosophers of history White chose to discuss were selected primarily in terms of their diversity and because of the contrasts between them. Then, having reduced the number of classic nineteenth-century historians to four, and the number of philosophers of history in the same period to four, it was not a task of great difficulty to establish a relatively clear line of development within the period. What is not evident is that the same line of development would have been discernible had White included many more historians, or had he included Comte, John Stuart Mill, and Spencer along with Hegel and Marx among his philosophers of history, or Dilthey, Rickert, Troeltsch, and Spengler along with Nietzsche and Croce.

I come now to the third and last of the presuppositions I wish to discuss: White's acceptance of relativism. In a sense, this should not be identified as one of his presuppositions, since it is a necessary consequence of his formalistic, tropological approach. Yet, had he not initially been willing to accept relativism, independently of any argumentation for it, he would have been forced to raise the question of whether an historical work can be adequately interpreted solely as a linguistic structure. Consequently, one may regard White's relativism as a basic presupposition, and one which is no less fundamental than his reasons for treating historians and philosophers of history together, or his view that what gives an historical work its structure is not the result of a careful reconstruction of the past but a creative poetic act. Actually, these presuppositions are interlocking, and I find no others that are equally fundamental in his work.

In considering White's relativism, I shall once again refuse to speculate as to how it was that he may have come to accept it; instead, I shall ask to what extent his account of the historian's work legitimates it. The first point to note is that the four historians with whom White chose to deal were engaged in very different enterprises. There was relatively little overlap in the subject-matters with which they were concerned; where such overlap existed, the scale of their inquiries differed, and the particular facets of the events with which they were concerned also differed.⁷ Therefore, the question whether one of these accounts was “truer” or “more correct” than another would not naturally arise, and White was able to remain wholly within the confines of his formalistic approach. This permitted him to avoid any direct examination of the fundamental issue involved in debates concerning historical relativism: whether it is possible, even in principle, to say of one account that it is truer, or more nearly correct, or more adequate, than another. What took the place of any such direct examination was White's assumption that the structure of every historical account is dependent upon the form which the historian impresses upon his subject-matter. Since White found that different historians had distinctively different “styles,” and were therefore predisposed to use different ways of giving structure to that with which they dealt, he concluded that the only grounds on which one type of account could be given preference over another would be aesthetic or moral, rather than epistemological (xii).⁸

An entirely different situation would have arisen had he compared works concerned with the same subject-matter, which worked on the same scale, and with reference to the same aspects of that subject-matter. He would then have had to consider whether, in spite of differences in style, accounts which purported to represent the same events were congruent or incongruent, whether one or another had failed to consider certain types of data, and whether the inclusion of those data would have altered the representation of what had occurred.

To this, White might perhaps have answered that there was no need for him to enter into such discussions, since the original way in which an historian envisions any segment of the historical process will always be different from the way in which another historian does. That response, however, would be faulty in two respects. In the first place, even though White sometimes stressed the uniqueness of the structural elements in different historical works (for example, 5 and 29), the basis of his analysis lay in an acceptance of Vico's four linguistic tropes. He took these tropes to be recurrent and typical ways of organizing materials, not idiosyncratic characteristics of specific individuals. He identified the “style” of an historian with the particular combination of modes of emplotment, explanatory argument, and ideological stance which characterized that historian's work. Since, however, each of these modes derived from one or another of the four tropes, and since White acknowledged that not all of the numerically possible combinations were mutually compatible (29), the fundamental variations among historians in basic styles were limited. This is a fact which White explicitly recognized (31). Consequently, it should be both possible and meaningful for anyone examining the works of different historians to compare these works, so long as they resembled one another in their modes of emplotment, explanatory argument, and ideological implication. Since each such mode, according to White, serves to explain that which the historian is representing (2 and 7), one would think it possible to ask with respect to these works whether one of them is in some respects superior to another as a “model” or “icon” of the process represented. White makes no such comparisons, and obviously believed it illegitimate to try to make them (for example, xii, 3, 26–27, 432). The apparent justification for this completely relativistic commitment lay in his decision to treat an historical work solely as a linguistic structure, and so long as that point of view is strictly maintained, there is, of course, nothing against which to compare the two linguistic “models” to determine which is the more adequate representation. It was, then, his linguistic approach, and not ultimately a question of the uniqueness of each historical work, that served as justification for White's relativism.

His rejection of the possibility of comparing different historical accounts is also faulty in a second respect. It is simply not the case that the way in which one historian envisions any segment of the historical process will always be different from another historian's way. Many historians self-consciously set out to show that some account given by a predecessor is mistaken, and they attempt to produce data or arguments to establish their case. It is not that they are looking at the same segment of the past in a different way: they are contending that their predecessor misrepresented the process with which he claimed to be dealing. White failed to discuss inquiries of this sort since they were not typical of the aims and methods of the four historians whose works he had chosen as paradigms. It is even possible that he might be inclined to dismiss these and other problem-oriented types of inquiries as belonging to the class of “monographs and archival reports” (ix) or to “the kinds of disputes which arise on the reviewers’ pages of professional journals” (13). This, however, would be illegitimate, since among such inquiries there are many full-scale treatments of processes that had a long and complex history, such as those which have been concerned to establish the relations between the slavery question and the American Civil War. Taking into account the fact that historians frequently engage in controversies of this sort, and finding that in some cases a consensus develops out of such controversies, White's ready acceptance of relativism is surely inadequate as a characterization of the ways in which practicing historians often view the work in which they are engaged.

On the other hand, if one turns from historical inquiries to consider the works of philosophers of history, one finds that they are almost never in agreement, either with respect to their detailed interpretations or on matters of principle. Nothing on their part in any way corresponds to the responsibility historians accept to document any challenged statement; to their commitment not to exclude from consideration any evidence that may be relevant to the material at hand; and to their recognition of an obligation to consider the criticism of those who do not share their presuppositions, so long as these criticisms directly relate to the accounts they have given of what in fact occurred in the past. We do not find the same scruples in such philosophers of history as Hegel and Marx, who sought to establish a meaning in history through a survey of the past. Instead, they selected only certain aspects of the life of society as a basis for interpreting what was truly significant in that life. They also neglected large segments of the historical past as not belonging within the province of meaningful history. Finally, each tended to take his own interpretative presuppositions as absolute, and did not show either a willingness or an ability to find means of reconciling alternative points of view. Nor would the situation be radically altered were we to turn from those who attempt to sum up the total past in order to establish history's meaning, and consider only those who, like Croce and Nietzsche, considered themselves primarily as philosophic interpreters and critics of Western man's historical consciousness. Once again the scope of such inquiries tended to be severely limited, and the tenor of the arguments was so dogmatic that only those antecedently committed to similar philosophic presuppositions were likely to find themselves in agreement. Thus, in contrast to historical inquiries, different philosophies of history do not represent potentially compatible interpretations, nor complementary points of view. In fact, had there been as many philosophers of history as there have been historians, we would now find ourselves absolutely confounded by their babel of tongues. Because White—flying in the face of tradition—took philosophers of history to be at least as important as historians for any understanding of the historical consciousness, the wild disparities among their works tended to substantiate the relativism he was already inclined to accept.

As I have indicated, one of the basic reasons why White was so ready to accept relativism lay in the fact that he viewed every historical work as a linguistic entity whose structure wholly depended on the original poetic act which prefigured it. This, however, involved treating the statements that historians make as if they had no referents outside of their own work—as if some theory of the syntactics of poetry could supplant all questions concerning the semantics of everyday speech.⁹ I find it one of the oddities of Metahistory that in spite of its “linguistic” approach, it failed to include as part of its implicit theory of language any account of how languages function with respect to their referential uses. So long as this is left out of account, one wonders how the individual statements of any historian are to be understood. Some among them refer to past occurrences whose existence is only known through inferences drawn from surviving documents; but it is not to these documents themselves, but to what they indicate concerning the past, that the historian's statements actually refer. Others among their statements depend upon what had been written in earlier accounts, but here again the object of the historian's reference is not these accounts themselves, but is to the very same entities (or to similar entities) as those to which the earlier accounts had themselves referred. Only a person treating an historical account solely as a literary document would not immediately raise the issue of reference, and with it the question of historical truth. So long as that question is not raised, I am forced to wonder in what sense White can properly characterize an historical work as a model or icon purporting to represent past structures and processes and, in doing so, as being able to explain them.

I have confined myself to some of the issues involved in White's “metahistorical” thesis; I have wholly neglected questions raised by the subtitle of his book, The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Such questions might be of two sorts. One would involve an assessment of what occupies by far the largest portion of the book, White's interpretations of the thought of the individual historians and philosophers of history with whom he deals. The other would be a consideration of whether the book as a whole is adequate as “a history of historical consciousness in nineteenth-century Europe” (1). In spite of a high regard for several of White's interpretations of the individuals on whom he focused attention, I find (as I have suggested in passing) that his portrayal of the scope of historical thought in the nineteenth century was far too limited; I also find unconvincing his suggestions as to the general course of development that it followed. These, however, are specifically historical issues, and it would take another and quite different paper to discuss them.

Notes

1. His closest approach to doing so, when speaking in his own voice, appears in his concluding chapter, where he identifies a philosophy of history as “a second order of consciousness in which [the philosopher of history] carries out his efforts to make sense of the historical process. [He] seeks not only to understand what happened in history but also to specify the criteria by which he can know when he has successfully grasped its meaning or significance” (428).

   The foregoing characterization covers both “critical” and “speculative” philosophies of history, as one would expect from White's linkage of Nietzsche and Croce with Hegel and Marx. Nevertheless, in most passages he explicitly refers to “speculative” philosophies of history, and he only rarely cites works that are characteristic of the extensive literature dealing with the problems of a “critical” philosophy of history.

   For my own view as to what constitutes a philosophy of history, which I presuppose in much that follows, see “Some Neglected Philosophic Problems Regarding History,” Journal of Philosophy 49 (1952), 317–329.

2. For documentation of the following brief summary, cf. especially ix–xii, 2, 4–5, and 30–31.

3. In this respect, so-called “universal histories” often resemble philosophies of history. Nevertheless, as one can see with both Ranke and Burckhardt, historians attempt to separate themselves from philosophers of history, holding that their primary concern is with the particular and concrete, and not with events merely insofar as they are viewed as exemplifying some particular principle of explanation. On this point, cf. Ranke, Ueber die Epochen der neueren Geschichte, ed., with a preface, by Alfred Dove (Leipzig, 1888), vii–xi and 6–7; Burckhardt, Force and Freedom: Reflections on History [translation of Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, ed. James Hastings Nichols] (New York, 1943), 80–82.

4. A few philosophers of history, such as Reinhold Niebuhr, attempt to establish their positions in essentially the same way. On the difference between Niebuhr's approach and the dominant tradition among philosophers of history, cf. my article, “Some Neglected Philosophic Problems Regarding History,” cited above.

5. As we shall see, White explicitly accepts relativism, but he does not arrive at it, nor defend it, on the basis of any of the traditional arguments for it. Instead, he derives support for it from his view that when different historians give structure to the historical field, they are viewing it in terms of different tropes.

6. He tends to leave out of consideration the specific sense in which Marx and most subsequent analysts have usually used the concept of ideology.

7. For a discussion of how the concepts of “scale” and “perspectives” relate to the issue of relativism, cf. my Anatomy of Historical Knowledge (Baltimore, 1977), especially 151–155.

8. Here White's position differs markedly from that of Stephen Pepper, from whose doctrine of “root metaphors” he borrowed. Pepper held that the issues were fundamentally epistemological; he also believed that it is both possible and reasonable to make use of more than one of the four basic systems in our explanations. In this connection he said, “In practice, therefore, we shall want to be not rational but reasonable, and to seek, on the matter in question, the judgment supplied from each of these relatively adequate world theories. If there is some difference of judgment, we shall wish to make our decision with all these modes of evidence in mind, just as we should make any other decision where the evidence is conflicting” (World Hypotheses [Berkeley, 1942], 330–331).

9. This is a point also made by Michael Ermarth in his generally favorable review of Metahistory (American Historical Review 80 [1975], 961–963).