[In the following review, Ermarth offers a positive assessment of Metahistory.]

Metahistory is a daring, ingenious, and sometimes bewildering tour de force. White has produced a profoundly original “critique of historical reason,” based not upon the usual fare of idealist metaphysics or the logic of predictive science but upon linguistics—a discipline that may become the novum organon of the twentieth century. The author presents a unified field theory of history, which takes its departure from the linguistic structures and figurative language implicit in the historical writing of the great practitioners—Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, Burckhardt—and theorists—Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Croce—of the “classical age” of history.

The novelty of the work lies not with its components but in their systematic combination and deft application to concrete issues. In fairness it must be said that White's style of exegesis is almost impossible to recapitulate in abbreviated form; one must see it at work. He acknowledges his debt to structuralism, the typology of explanations of Stephen Pepper, the literary criticism of Kenneth Burke and Northrop Frye, Karl Mannheim's sociology of knowledge, and above all, Vico's “new science” and its vision of history as a cycle of consciousness rooted in poetic tropes and figures of speech. From this formidable arsenal White has fashioned a “poetic logic” of historical discourse that enables him to cut across (or below) the conventional categories and schools of historical thought.

The method is uniformly and unabashedly formal: White asserts that the historian confronts his data in a manner akin to that by which a grammarian approaches a new language. The historical work consists of various manifest and latent “levels of engagement”: esthetic, epistemological, and ethical—but all patently linguistic in nature. The historian must employ a mode of emplotment—Romantic, Tragic, Comic, or Satirical; a mode of explanation—Formist, Mechanistic, Organicist, or Contextualist; and a mode of “ideological implication”—Anarchist, Radical, Conservative, or Liberal. Internal affinities and homologies among these modes constitute the interpretive strategy or “style” of the work. The strategies can be reduced to four “linguistic protocols,” corresponding to Vico's four master tropes of Metaphor, Metonymy, Synecdoche, and Irony. These tropes provide the “deep grammar” of the historical account.

History is not a realistic transcription “wie es eigentlich gewesen ist” but a linguistic construct (“verbal icon”) of figures of speech entailing vast but largely hidden assumptions. History is not mimesis but poesis. White's thesis plumbs the paradox implicit in the two senses of “literal” conveyed in the notion of a literal past: we must perforce think “in terms of our terms”—a self-evident but highly unsettling observation (White cites Nietzsche: “Our science is still the dupe of linguistic habit”). In delineating four different styles of realism, White shows that their standard of objectivity is defined by internal relations among the levels of engagement: there is no historical Ding an sich. Ranke's history is no more objective than Croce's, any more than the German language is “truer” than French; they are simply and irreducibly different systems of discourse.

White has taken considerable pains to avoid system-mongering, but his analysis suffers from a certain hardening of the categories. The solemnly upper-case concepts confer a somewhat vatic quality to the work. Although he admits that the best thinkers tended to mix their metaphors and figures, his tracing of homologies tends to assume an almost ritualistic predictability. We are not obliged to take at face value the historicist claims for the “diversity” and “individuality” of things, but in White's bal démasqué the surfaces get lost in the deeper paradigm. The tendency to see Irony lurking behind every post is sometimes more bothersome than illuminating. The resolution of dialectics into a trope—for example, in Marx's analysis of the riddle of money—is elegant but ultimately unpersuasive. White's occasionally arcane coinages—“motifically-encoded,” “de-ideologized,” “de-naming”—turn the latent level into plain archetypal murk. One might also be led to challenge his purely formal and ultimately reflexive model of language. To use the structuralist terms, historical discourse is parole as well as langue: it has semantic reference to an experienced world in addition to syntactic structure. “Discourse is not life”—as the structuralists never tire of reminding us—but that does not make it nonrecitative music or symbolist poetry. However falteringly or obliquely (that is, metaphorically), historical discourse concerns itself with real existence as well as formal coherence. One wonders at White's wholesale adoption of formalism, especially in light of his own careful treatment of the objections of Hegel and Croce to precisely this position.

White avows that his book is framed in the Ironic mode—appropriate to a discipline, and epoch, which has lost its customary certainties and “historical faith.” The reader cannot fail to recognize that his perspective is the residual outcome of the very doctrinal antagonisms toward which it is deployed. But there is a visionary as well as critical thrust to his thesis: after indicting academic historians for their “theoretical torpor” and complacent consensus model of historiography, he suggests that history, if conceived mythopoetically, can change the world as well as interpret it. There is a position “beyond Irony” that furnishes the grounds for a new historical consciousness liberated from its old habits and shibboleths. White has provided a comprehensive theoretical framework that transcends the cordon sanitaire between “history proper” and the various forms of philosophy of history. Despite a few dark and tight corners, this impressive synthesis casts a very new light.