[In the following review, Grosskurth offers a positive assessment of Metahistory, which she hails as a “deliberately provocative book.”]

Professor Hayden White of Wesleyan University is nothing if not bold. He has an amplitude of mind which does not quail before the expectation of offending the most formidable of foes. In an article published last year in History and Theory, ‘Foucault Decoded: Notes from Underground,’ he pointed out the delusions under which French structuralists were deceiving themselves. Undisturbed by the murmurs of irritation, he has now in effect taken on all historians in a large book, Metahistory, whose subtitle The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe is applicable only insofar as he analyzes the work of several major historians of the period to demonstrate that since the nineteenth century ‘most historians have affected a kind of wilful methodological naïvete.’ This provocative phrase he had already employed in an earlier article (‘The Burden of History,’ History and Theory, v, 2, 1966).

From the outset—and there is a long introductory section of his explanation of procedure—he undertakes to demonstrate that historians have inherited an unsystematic, unscientific approach, a flaw that could be rectified if they recognized the limitations of the ‘linguistic protocol’ they were actually employing. As White defines his book, it is a ‘history of historical consciousness in nineteenth-century Europe, but it is also meant to contribute to the current discussion of the problem of historical knowledge.’ History he defines as ‘a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse that purports to be a model, or icon, of past structures and processes in the interest of explaining what they were by representing them’ (Professor White is addicted to italics).

What in effect Metahistory is attempting to do is to create a methodology for history such as Northrop Frye provided for literary criticism in The Anatomy of Criticism—namely, to categorize and classify the types and conventions of particular literary forms. In sum, this suggests that White, like Croce, regards history as an art; but an art which should be regulated by exigent artistic laws. While most historians would probably agree with White's view that pluralistic approaches to art are desirable, it is likely that many of them would dispute his contention that language creates consciousness, a view compounded by the fact that the historian is dealing with events outside the consciousness of a particular individual. Here we encounter a chicken and egg dilemma.

In order to demonstrate his point, White analyzes the work of Hegel, Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, Burckhardt, Marx, Nietzsche, and Croce. Although he finds Croce the most attractive of these historians because of his aesthetic bias, he does not suggest that there has been progress in historical approaches, simply a variety of attitudes in which each figure has presented his vision of history in particular rhetorical terminology. Inevitably each stumbled into contradictions through ignorance of a consistent mode of language to represent his vision of the past. We can assume, then, that the great historians would have been greater still if only they had had a coherent terminology to describe what they were doing.

It is a bold, fascinating, and deliberately provocative book that White has written. ‘History,’ I heard a student once remark, ‘is a mystery.’ What would White say if confronted with such—probably to him—a dismissive and unsophisticated statement? The student presumably meant that history was an elusive past from which historians made excavations to extract some facts to which in turn they attributed a personal significance. If I read him correctly, White would agree with the attitude that history can never be historiography or a quasi-science or that there is a single means of pouncing upon its elusiveness. Nevertheless, while he is prepared to accept such basic premises, at the same time he believes that historians can improve and enlarge their ‘discipline’ by frankly accepting the literary nature of their enterprise.

Metahistory is irritating and pretentious, and it may be that it has created more problems than it has solved. But if problems engender fresh attitudes to so-called ‘disciplines,’ so much the better.