N10-METAHISTORY

1Richard L. W. Clarke LITS3301 Notes10

HAYDEN WHITE, METAHISTORY (1973)

White, Hayden. Metahistory: the Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1973.

Introduction: the Poetics of History

White begins by pointing out that this book is a “history of historical consciousness in thenineteenth century” (1) at the same time that it is a contribution to the “discussion of theproblem of historical knowledge” (1). It offers an “account of the development of historicalthinking during a specific period of its evolution and a general theory of the structure ofthat mode of thought which is called ‘historical’” (1). He asks, “[w]hat does it mean tothink historically, and what are the unique characteristics of a specifically historical methodof inquiry?” (1). These were questions debated by a whole host of thinkers at that timewho assumed that there were “unambiguous answers” (1), history being “considered aspecific mode of existence, ‘historical consciousness’ a distinctive mode of thought, and‘historical knowledge’ an autonomous domain in the spectrum of the human and physicalsciences” (1). By the twentieth century, there was a growing feeling that “definitiveanswers . . . may not be possible” (1). White points out that a variety of “Continentalthinkers” (1) have “cast serious doubts on the value of a specifically ‘historical’consciousness, stressed the fictive character of historical reconstructions, and challengedhistory’s claims to a place among the sciences” (1-2). Moreover, “Anglo-American” (2)Analytic philosophers questioned the “epistemological status and cultural function ofhistorical thinking” (2) and cast doubts on it as “either a rigorous science or a genuine art”(2). The thrust of much of this critique was to view “historical consciousness as aspecifically Western prejudice by which the presumed superiority of modern, industrialsociety can be retroactively substantiated” (2).

White intends his own “analysis of the deep structure of the historical imaginationof nineteen-century Europe” (2) as a “new perspective on the current debate over thenature and function of historical knowledge” (2) by investigating the “works of therecognised masters of nineteenth-century European historiography” (2) as well as those ofthe “foremost philosophers of history of the same period” (2). His goal is to “determinethe family characteristics of the different conceptions of the historical process” (2) whichactually appear in the works of the classic narrators” (2). His goal is to “consider thehistorical work as what it most manifestly is – that is to say, a verbal structure in the formof a narrative prose discourse that purports to be a model, or icon, of past structures andprocesses in the interest of explaining what they were by representing them” (2). His“method is, in short, formalist” (3) but not with a view of saying “whether a givenhistorian’s work is a better, or more correct account of a specific set of events or segmentof the historical process than some other historian’s account of them” (3-4).

In this book, White discusses the work of the historians Jules Michelet, Leopold vonRanke, Alexis de Tocqueville and Jacob Burckhardt, as well as the philosophers of historyG. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Benedetto Croce. Their representative“models of historical representation or conceptualisation [do] not depend on the nature ofthe ‘data’ they used to support their generalisations or the theories they invoked to explainthem” (4) but, rather, upon the “consistency, coherence, and illuminative power of theirrespective visions of the historical field” (4). Their claims cannot be “refuted” (4) or“disconfirmed” (4) because their “status as models of historical narration andconceptualisation depends . . . on the preconceptual and specifically poetic nature of theirperspectives on history and its processes” (4). Their works “represent alternative, and


seemingly mutually exclusive, conceptions both of the same segments of the historicalprocess and of the tasks of historical thinking” (4). “Considered purely as verbalstructures, the works they produced appear to have radically different formalcharacteristics and to dispose the conceptual apparatus used to explain the same sets ofdata in fundamentally different ways” (4). Some works may be “diachronic orprocessionary in nature (stressing the fact of change and transformation in the historicalprocess)” (4), while others may be “synchronic and static in form (stressing the fact ofstructural continuity)” (4). One may seek to “reinvoke . . . the ‘spirit’ of a past age” (4),while another may seek to “penetrate behind the events in order to disclose the ‘laws’ or‘principles’ of which a particular age’s ‘spirit’ is only a manifestation or phenomenal form”(4). Some may conceive their work as contributing to the “illumination of current socialproblems and conflicts” (4), while others downplay such “presentist concerns” (4) in favourof stressing the “extent to which a given period differs from their own, in what appears tobe a predominantly ‘antiquarian’ frame of mind” (4).

In short, “considered purely as formal verbal structures, the histories produced bythe master historians of the nineteenth century display radically different conceptions ofwhat ‘the historical work’ should consist of” (4). To this end, White will “make clear whatthe ideal-typical structure of the ‘historical work’ might consist of” (5) and thus fashion a“criterion for determining what aspects of any given historical work or philosophy of historymust be considered in the effort to identify its unique structural elements” (5). By “tracingtransformations in the ways historical thinkers characterise those elements and disposethem in a specific narrative in order to gain an ‘explanatory affect’” (5), White hopes to beable to “chart the fundamental changes in the deep structure of the historical imaginationfor the period under study” (5) and thereby categorise the “different ‘styles’ of historicalthinking . . . possible” (5).

The Theory of the Historical Work

White distinguishes the following “levels of conceptualisation in the historical work: (1)chronicle; (2) story; (3) mode of emplotment; (4) mode of argument; and (5) mode ofideological implication” (5). By ‘chronicle’ and ‘story,’ White intends “‘primitive elements’in the historical account” (5) which “represent processes of selection and arrangement ofdata from the unprocessed historical record in the interest of rendering that record morecomprehensible to an audience of a particular kind” (5). The “historical work” (5)“mediate[s] among what I will call the historical field, the unprocessed historical record,other historical accounts, and an audience” (5).

The “elements in the historical field” (5) are “organised into a chronicle by thearrangement of the events to be dealt with in the temporal order of their occurrence” (5). Then, the “chronicle is organised into a story by the further arrangement of the events intothe components of a ‘spectacle’ or process of happening” (5) thought to “possess adiscernible beginning, middle, and end” (5). The “transformation of chronicle into story”(5) is effected by the “characterisation of some events in the chronicle in terms ofinaugural motifs, of others in terms of terminating motifs, and of yet others in terms oftransitional motifs” (5). “When a given set of events has been motifically encoded, thereader has been provided with a story; the chronicle of events has been transformed into acompleted diachronic process, about which one can then ask questions as if he weredealing with a synchronic structure of relationships” (6). Chronicles are in principle “open-ended” (6) in that they have “no inaugurations; they simply ‘begin when the chroniclerstarts recording events” (6), and have “no culminations or resolutions; they can go onindefinitely” (6). By contrast, “[h]istorical stories trace the sequences of events that lead


from inaugurations to (provisional) terminations of social and cultural processes” (6). They have a “discernible form . . . which marks off the events contained in them from theother events that might appear in a comprehensive chronicle of the years covered in theirunfoldings” (6).

White does not completely agree with the view that the “aim of the historian is toexplain the past by ‘finding,’ ‘identifying,’ or ‘uncovering’ the ‘stories’ that lie buried inchronicles” (6) or that the “difference between ‘history’ and ‘fiction’ resides in the fact thatthe historian ‘finds’ his stories, whereas the fiction writer ‘invents’ his” (6). This viewobscures the “extent to which ‘invention’ also plays a part in the historian’s operations”(7). This is because the “same event can serve as a different kind of element of manydifferent historical stories, depending on the role it is assigned in a specific motificcharacterisation of the set to which it belongs” (7). In the chronicle, an “event is simply‘there’ as an element of a series; it does not ‘function’ as a story element” (7). Bycontrast, the historian “arranges the events in the chronicle into a hierarchy of significanceby assigning events different functions as story elements in such a way as to disclose theformal coherence of a whole set of events considered as a comprehensible process with adiscernible beginning, middle, and end” (7). The historian is engaged in “constructing hisnarrative” (7) via the “arrangement of selected events of the chronicle into a story” (7). Questions concerning the “connections between events” (7) such as “‘What happenednext?’ ‘How did that happen?’ ‘Why did things happen this way rather than that?’ ‘How didit all come out in the end?’” (7) shape the “narrative tactics the historian must use in theconstruction of his story” (7). These questions are to be distinguished from others such as“‘What does it all add up to?’ ‘What is the point of it all?’” (7) which concern the “structureof the entire set of events considered as a completed story and call for a synopticjudgment of the relationship between a given story and other stories that might be ‘found,’‘identified,’ or ‘uncovered’ in the chronicle” (7). These latter can be “answered in anumber of way” (7) which White calls “(1) explanation by emplotment, (2) explanation byargument, and (3) explanation by ideological implication” (7).

Explanation by Emplotment

“Providing the ‘meaning’ of a story by identifying the kind of story that has been told iscalled explanation by emplotment” (7). If “in the course of narrating his story, thehistorian provides it with the plot structure of a Tragedy, he has ‘explained’ it in one way,if he has structured it as a Comedy, he has ‘explained’ it in another way” (7). Emplotmentis accordingly the “way by which a sequence of events fashioned into a story is graduallyrevealed to be a story of a particular kind” (7). Following Northrop Frye’s Anatomy ofCriticism, White posits that there are “at least four different modes of emplotment:Romance, Tragedy, Comedy, and Satire” (7). He acknowledges that there may also be“others, such as the Epic” (7). Moreover, a given historical account may “contain storiescast in one mode as aspects or phases of the whole set of stories emplotted in anothermode” (7). However, any historian is “forced to emplot the whole set of stories making uphis narrative in comprehensive or archetypal story form” (8). For example, Michelet casthis histories “in the Romantic mode” (8), Ranke “in the Comic” (8), Tocqueville in the“Tragic” (8), and Burckhardt “Satire” (8). “Epic plot structure would appear to be theimplicit form of chronicle itself” (8). White’s point is that “every history, even the most‘synchronic’ or ‘structural’ of them, will be emplotted in some way” (8). He contends that“stories cast in the Ironic mode, of which Satire is the fictional form, gain their effectsprecisely by frustrating normal expectations about the kinds of resolutions provided bystories cast in other modes (Romance, Comedy, or Tragedy, as the case may be)” (8).


The Romance is “fundamentally a drama of self-identification symbolised by thehero’s transcendence of the world of experience, his victory over it, and his final liberationfrom it – the sort of drama associated with the Grail legend or the story of the resurrectionof Christ in Christian mythology” (8-9). It is a “drama of the triumph of good over evil, ofvirtue over vice, of light over darkness, and of the ultimate transcendence of man over theworld in which he was imprisoned by the Fall” (9). The “archetypal theme of Satire is theprecise opposite of this Romantic drama of redemption” (9) in that it is actually a “dramaof diremption” (9) and “dominated by the apprehension that man is ultimately a captive ofthe world rather than its master” (9) and the “recognition that . . . human consciousnessand will are always inadequate to the task of overcoming definitively the dark face ofdeath, which is man’s unremitting enemy” (9).

Comedy and tragedy “suggest the possibility of at least partial liberation from thecondition of the Fall and provisional release from the divided state in which men findthemselves in this world” (9). These “provisional victories are conceived differently in themythic archetypes of which the plot structures of Comedy and Tragedy are sublimatedforms” (9). In comedy, “hope is held out for the temporary triumph of man over his worldby the prospect of occasional reconciliations of the forces at play in the social and naturalworlds” (9). These reconciliations are “symbolised in the festive occasions which theComic writer uses to terminate his dramatic accounts of change and transformation” (9). These are “reconciliations of men with men, of men with their world and their society” (9). The “condition of society is represented as being purer, saner, and healthier as a result ofthe conflict among seemingly inalterably opposed elements in the world” (9) which arerevealed as ultimately “harmonisable with one another, unified, at one with themselvesand the others” (9). In tragedy, there are “no festive occasions” (9) but “intimations ofstates of division among men more terrible than that which incited the tragic agon at thebeginning of the drama” (9). The “fall of the protagonist and the shaking of the world heinhabits” (9) is compensated for by a “gain in consciousness for the spectators of thecontest” (9) which consists in the “epiphany of the law governing human existence whichthe protagonist’s exertions against the world have brought to pass” (9). Thereconciliations at the end of tragedy are more “sombre” (9) than those in comedies, “morein the nature of the resignations of men to the conditions under which they must labour inthe world” (9) which are in turn thought to be “inalterable and eternal” (9) and withinwhich men must learn to work. They “set the limits on what may be aspired to and whatmay be legitimately aimed at in the quest for security and sanity in the world” (9).

Romance and satire seem to be “mutually exclusive ways of emplotting theprocesses of reality” (9). (The very notion of a “Romantic Satire” [9] is a “contradiction interms” [9], though a “Satirical Romance” [9] is a “form of representation intended toexpose, from an Ironic standpoint, the fatuity of a Romantic conception of the world” [9].) One can speak of a “Comic Satire” (10), a “Satirical Comedy” (10), a “Satirical Tragedy”(10) and a “Tragic Satire” (10), but these are different from a ‘Comic Romance’ or a ‘TragicRomance’: “Comedy and Tragedy represent qualifications of the Romantic apprehension ofthe world . . . in the interest of taking seriously the forces which oppose the effort athuman redemption naively held up as a possibility for mankind in Romance” (10). It is“possible for the Romantic writer to assimilate the truths of human existence revealed inComedy and Tragedy respectively within the structure of the drama of redemption whichhe figures in his vision of the ultimate victory of man over the world of experience” (10). Satire, by contrast, “represents a different kind of qualification of the hopes, possibilitiesand truths of human existence revealed in Romance, Comedy and Tragedy” (10). It viewsthese “Ironically in the atmosphere generated by the apprehension of the ultimateinadequacy of consciousness to live in the world happily or to comprehend it fully” (10). It


“presupposes the ultimate inadequacy of the visions of the world dramatically representedin the genres of Romance, Comedy and Tragedy” (10). The “Satirical mode ofrepresentation signals a conviction that the world has grown old” (10) and “preparesconsciousness for its repudiation of all sophisticated conceptualisations of the world andanticipates a return to a mythic apprehension of the world and its processes” (10).

These “four archetypal story forms” (10) of Tragedy, Comedy, Romance and Satire“provide us with a means of characterising the different kinds of explanatory effects ahistorian can strive for on the level of narrative emplotment” (10). It allows us todistinguish between diachronic and synchronic narratives, the former stressing “structuraltransformation” (10) and the latter “structural continuity” (10) or “stasis” (10). These arenot “mutually exclusive ways of emplotting the historical field” (10) but, rather, representa “difference of emphasis in treating the relationship between continuity and change in agiven representation of the historical process” (10). Tragedy and Satire are “modes ofemplotment” (11) favoured by those historians who “perceive behind or within the welterof events” (11) an “ongoing structure of relationships or an eternal return of the Same inthe Different” (11). By contrast, Romance and Comedy stress the “emergence of newforces or conditions out of processes that appear . . . to be changeless in their essence orto be changing only in their phenomenal forms” (11). In sum, each of these “archetypalplot structures has its implications for the cognitive operations by which the historianseeks to ‘explain’ what was ‘really happening’ during the process of which it provides animage of its true form” (11).

Explanation by Formal Argument

“Another level” (11) on which the historian seeks to “explicate ‘the point of it all’ or ‘whatit all adds up to’” (11) is that of “explanation by formal, explicit, or discursive argument”(11). Such an “argument provides an explanation of what happens in the story byinvoking principles of combination which serve as putative laws of historical explanation”(11), that is, the historian “explains the events in the story . . . by construction of anomological-deductive argument” (11). (According to the so-called ‘deductive-nomological’ or d-n model, scientific arguments are deductive in nature with at least onenatural law statement among its premises.) The argument can be “analysed into asyllogism” (11), the “major premise of which consists of some putatively universal law ofcausal relationships” (11), the “minor premise of the boundary conditions within which thelaw is applied” (11), and a “conclusion in which the events that actually occurred arededuced from the premises by logical necessity” (11). The “most famous of such putativelaws is probably Marx’s so-called law of the relationship between the Superstructure andthe Base” (11) and according to which the latter, “comprised of the means of productionand the modes of relationship among them” (11) affects the former, consisting of “socialand cultural institutions” (11), as well as other more “banal observations” (11) such as“what goes up must come down” (11). They are usually “tacitly invoked” (11) in thecourse of attempts to explain phenomena like the Great Depression. Whether or not theyare valid claims, they function as the “premises of nomological-deductive arguments bywhich explanations of events given in the story are provided” (12) which are to bedistinguished from the “explanatory affect gained by his emplotment of his story as a storyof a particular kind” (12). In White’s view, this points to the “protoscientific character ofhistorical explanation” (12). White distinguishes between the “emplotment of the eventsof a history considered as elements of a story” (12) and the “characterisation of thoseevents as elements in a matrix of causal relationships presumed to have existed in specificprovinces of time and space” (12). The historian is “doing both art and science” (12),


engaging in both “investigative operations” (12) and “narrative operation[s]” (12), seekingboth to “represent ‘what happened’ and ‘why it happened as it did’” (12) and to “provide averbal model, in the form of a narrative, by which to explain the process of developmentleading from one situation to some other situation by appeal to general laws of causation”(12).

However, in White’s view, “history differs from the sciences . . . not only over thelaws of social causation” (12) used “to explain a given sequence of events, but also overthe question of the form that a ‘scientific explanation’ ought to take” (12). White pointsout that “natural scientific and historical explanations” (12) do not necessarily have the“same formal characteristics” (12). There is no consensus “whether the kinds of laws thatmight be invoked in scientific explanations have their counterparts in the realm of the so-called human or spiritual sciences, such as sociology and history” (12). Where thephysical sciences “appear to progress by virtue of the agreements, reached from time totime among members of the established communities of science, regarding what will countas a scientific problem, the form that a scientific explanation must take, and the kinds ofdata that will be permitted to count as evidence in a properly scientific account of reality”(12-13), among historians “no such agreement exists, or ever has existed” (12). Historicalexplanations are “based on different metahistorical presuppositions about the nature of thehistorical field” (13) which “generate different conceptions of the kind of explanations thatcan be used in historiographical analysis” (13). “Historiographical disputes on the level of‘interpretation’ are in reality disputes over the ‘true’ nature of the historian’s enterprise”(13). During the “sixteenth century, . . . there were as many different conceptions of ‘thescientific enterprise’ as there were metaphysical positions” (13): each of the “conceptionsof what ‘science’ ought to be ultimately reflected different conceptions of ‘reality’ and thedifferent epistemologies generated by them” (13). Similarly, “disputes over what ‘history’ought to be reflect similarly varied conceptions of what a proper historical explanationought to consist of and different conceptions, therefore, of the historian’s task” (13). White is thinking here of the “alternative, though not necessarily mutually exclusive,interpretations of the same set of historical events, or . . . different answers to suchquestions as ‘What is the true nature of the Renaissance?’” (13). These divergences arereally reflective of “different notions of the nature of historical reality and of theappropriate form that a historical account, considered as a formal argument, ought totake” (13).

White accordingly draws on Stephen Pepper’s World Hypotheses to distinguishbetween “four paradigms of the form that a historical explanation, considered as adiscursive argument, may be conceived to take: Formist, Organicist, Mechanistic, andContextualist” (13). The “Formist theory of truth aims at the identification of the uniquecharacteristics inhabiting the historical field” (13-14). The Formist “considers anexplanation to be complete when a given set of objects has been properly identified, itsclass, generic and specific attributes assigned, and labels attesting to its particularityattached to it” (14). The “task of historical explanation is to dispel the apprehension ofthose similarities that appear to be shared by all objects in the field” (14) by stressing the“uniqueness of the particular objects in the field or the variety of the types of phenomenawhich the field manifests” (14). The Formist mode is found in the work of “Herder, Carlyle,Michelet, in the Romantic historians and the great historical narrators, such as Niebuhr,Mommsen, and Trevelyan” (14). Though some may “make generalisations about thenature of the historical process” (14), Formists stress the “uniqueness of the differentagents, agencies, and acts which make up the ‘events’ to be explained . . . not the ‘ground’or ‘scene’ against which these entities arise” (14). Formism is “essentially ‘dispersive’ inthe analytical operations it carries out on the data, rather than ‘integrative’” (15). The


Formist “explanatory strategy tends to be wide in ‘scope’ – ample in the kinds ofparticulars it identifies as occupying the historical field” (15) and thus to lack “conceptual‘precision’” (15). Such historians “usually make up for the vacuity of their generalisationsby the vividness of their reconstructions of particular agents, agencies, and actsrepresented in their narratives” (15).

By contrast, “Organicist world hypotheses and their corresponding theories of truthand argument are relatively more ‘integrative’ and hence more reductive in theiroperations” (15). The Organicist depicts the “particulars discerned in the historical field ascomponents of synthetic processes” (15). At its heart, there is a “metaphysicalcommitment to the paradigm of the microcosmic-macrocosmic relationship” (15) as aresult of which there is a strong “desire to see individual entities as components ofprocesses which aggregate into wholes that are greater than, or qualitatively differentfrom, the sum of their parts” (15). Historians in general like Ranke, “‘nationalistic’historians” (15) like Mommsen and “Idealists” (15) like Hegel all “tend to structure theirnarratives in such a way as to depict the consolidation or crystallisation, out of a set ofapparently dispersed events, of some integrated entity whose importance is greater thanthat of any of the individual entities analysed or described” (15). Such historians are“more interested in characterising the integrative process than in depicting its individualelements” (16), which gives their accounts an “‘abstract’ quality” (16) as well as anorientation “toward the determination of the end or goal toward which all the processesfound in the historical field are presumed to be tending” (16). Some (like Ranke) might“resist the inclination to specify what the telos of the whole historical process might be,and content” (16) themselves with “certain provisional teloi, intermediary integrativestructures such as the ‘folk,’ the ‘nation,’ or . . . ‘culture’” (16). Organicists tend to“eschew the search for the laws of historical process, when the term ‘laws’ is construed inthe sense of universal and invariant causal relationships” (16) such as “Newtonian physics”(16) or “Darwinian biology” (16), tending to prefer to “talk about the ‘principles’ or ‘ideas’that inform the individual processes discerned in the field and all the processes taken as awhole” (16) which are “seen as imaging or prefiguring the end toward which the process asa whole tends” (16) rather than as “causal agents” (16). Such principles “function not asrestrictions on the human capacity to realise a distinctively human goal in history . . . butas guarantors of an essential human freedom” (16).

“Mechanistic world hypotheses” (16) are “similarly integrative in their aim” (16) buttend to be “reductive rather than synthetic” (16). To use Burke’s terminology, “Mechanismis inclined to view the ‘acts’ of the ‘agents’ inhabiting the historical field as manifestationsof extrahistorical ‘agencies’ that have their origins in the ‘scene’ within which the ‘action’depicted in the narrative unfolds” (17). Mechanism “turns upon the search for causal lawsthat determines the outcome of processes discovered in the historical field” (17), the“objects” (17) thought to inhabit the historical field being “construed as existing in themodality of part-part relationships, the specific configurations of which are determined bythe laws that are presumed to govern their interactions” (17). A Mechanist such as “Taine,Marx” (17) or “even Tocqueville” (17) “studies history in order to divine the laws thatactually govern its operations and writes history in order to display in a narrative form theeffects of those laws” (17). For this reason, an Organicist historical account has the “sametendency toward abstraction as that of the Organicist” (17), the “individual entities” (17)being “less important as evidence than the classes of phenomena to which they can beshown to belong” (17), which are “in turn less important . . . than the laws theirregularities are presumed to manifest” (17). Ultimately, a Mechanist explanation is“considered complete only when he has discovered the laws that are presumed to governhistory in the same way that the laws of physics are presumed to govern nature. He then


applies these laws to the data in such a way as to make their configurationsunderstandable as functions of those laws” (17). The “particular attributes of a giveninstitution, custom, law, art form, or the like, are less important as evidence than thespecies, class, and generic typifications which, on analysis, they can be shown toexemplify” (17) and which are in turn “less important than the laws of social structure andprocess which govern the course of Western history, to whose operations they attest” (17). Like Organicism, Mechanism is accused of being “‘reductive’ of the variety and colour ofthe individual entities in the historical field” (17).

White argues that rather than “take refuge in so ‘impressionistic’ a conception ofhistorical explanation” (17) as that offered by Formism, one can “embrace a Contextualistposition, which as a theory of truth and explanation represents a ‘functional’ conception ofthe meaning or significance of events discerned in the historical field” (17). The“informing presupposition of Contextualism” (17) is that historical events may be“explained by being set within the ‘context’ of their occurrence” (18). They are explainedby the “revelation of the specific relationships they bore to other events occurring in theircircumambient historical space” (18). The historical field “on first glance appears to lackcoherence and any discernible fundamental structure” (18) but, unlike the Formists who“consider entities in their particularity and uniqueness – i.e., their similarity to, anddifference from, other entities in the field” (18), the Contextualist explains “‘whathappened’ . . . by the specification of the functional interrelationships existing among theagents and agencies occupying the field at a given time” (18). The “determination of thisfunctional interrelationship” (18) is effected by what philosophers such as Isaiah Berlinterm “colligation” (18), that is, by picking out the “‘threads’ that link the individual orinstitution under study to its specious sociocultural ‘present’” (18). This is the “dominantprinciple of explanation” (18) found in the “work of Jacob Burckhardt” (18). Avoiding the“radically dispersive tendency of Formism and the abstractive tendencies of Organicismand Mechanism” (18), Contextualism strives instead for a “relative integration of thephenomena discerned . . . in terms of ‘trends’ or general physiognomies of periods andepochs” (18). The “rules of combination for determining the family characteristics” (18) ofthe historical events portrayed are not “equivalent to the universal laws of cause and effectpostulated by the Mechanist or the general teleological principles postulated by theOrganicist” (18). Rather, they are viewed as the “actual relationships . . . presumed tohave existed at specific times and places, the first, final, and material causes of which cannever be known” (18). The Contextualist proceeds by “isolating some . . . element of thehistorical field” (18), whether it be “as large as ‘the French Revolution’ or as small as oneday in the life of a specific person” (18), and then proceeds to “pick out the ‘threads’ thatlink the event . . . outward, into the circumambient natural and social space within whichthe event occurred, and both backward in time, in order to determine the ‘origins’ of theevent, and forward in time, in order to determine its ‘impact’ and ‘influence’ on subsequentevents” (18). The Contextualist approach “can be regarded as a combination of thedispersive impulses behind Formism . . . and the integrative impulses behind Organicism”(19). Contextualism organises the historical field “into different provinces of significantoccurrence, on the basis of which periods and epochs can be distinguished from oneanother” (19). The “flow’ of historical time is envisaged by the Contextualist as a wavelikemotion . . . in which certain phases or culminations are considered to be intrinsically moresignificant than others” (19). Contextualist explanatory strategies incline accordinglytowards “structuralist” (19) or “synchronic representations of segments or sections of theprocess, cuts made across the grain of time as it were” (19). To “aggregate the variousperiods he has studied into a comprehensive view of the whole historical process” (19), theContextualist must move “toward either a Mechanist reduction of the data in terms of the


‘timeless’ laws . . . presumed to govern them or an Organicist synthesis of those data interms of the principles . . . presumed to reveal the telos toward which the whole process istending over the long haul” (19).

Though any of these four models of explanation may be utilised in a given history,“they have not enjoyed equal authority” (19) among professional historians. “Formist andContextualist models have tended to prevail as the main candidates for orthodoxy” (19)among “academic historians” (19), for which reason “Organicist or Mechanist tendencies . .. have been regarded as unfortunate lapses from the proper forms that explanations inhistory” (19) should take and, in the case of Hegel and Marx, for example, as a “fall intothe nefarious ‘philosophy of history’” (20). In short, Organicism and Mechanism are“heterodoxies of historical thought” (20) and often condemned, in works such as KarlPopper’s The Poverty of Historicism, as being guilty of “myth, error, or ideology” (20). Ithas also been argued that “‘scientism’ – the duplicitous aping of scientific method andillegitimate appropriation of science’s authority” (20) by Organicists and Mechanists can beavoided by excluding these two approaches in favour of “empirical” (20) historiography bywhich history can be “elevated into a rigorous ‘science’” (20). But, White argues, there are“no apodictic epistemological grounds for the preference of one mode of explanation overanother” (20). The marginalisation of Organicism and Mechanism “must be based onextra-epistemological considerations” (20) and “reflects only a decision on the part ofhistorians” (20) which “would appear to rest on precritically held opinions about the formthat a science of man and society has to take” (20-21), opinions that are accordingly“ethical, and specifically ideological, in nature” (21). “Radicals” (21) contend that the“professional historian’s preference for Contextualist and Formist explanatory strategies isideologically motivated” (21) as it is “in the interests of established social groups” (21) toreject Mechanism “because the disclosure of the actual laws of historical structure andprocess would reveal the true nature of the power enjoyed by dominant classes andprovide the knowledge necessary to dislodge those classes from their positions of privilegeand power” (21). It is accordingly, they also contend, “in the interest of dominant groups .. . to cultivate a conception of history in which only individual events and their relations totheir immediate context can be know . . . because such preconceptions of the nature ofhistorical knowledge conform to the ‘individualist’ preconceptions of ‘Liberals’ and the‘hierarchical’ preconceptions of ‘Conservatives’” (21). The claim by Radicals to “havediscovered the ‘laws’ of historical structure and process” (21) are thought by Liberals to be“similarly motivated ideologically” (21). They are “usually advanced in the interest ofpromoting some programme of social transformation, in either a Radical or a Reactionarydirection” (21). The “same applies to those ‘principles’ by which Idealist philosophers ofhistory purport to explicate the ‘meaning’ of history in its totality” (21): these are “alwaysoffered in support of ideological positions that are retrograde or obscurantist in theirintentions” (21).

There is, according to White, an “irreducible ideological component in everyhistorical account” (21). This is “because history is not a science, or is at best aprotoscience with specifically determinable nonscientific elements in its constitution” (21). This is because the “very claim . . . to have determined some kind of formal coherence inthe historical record brings with it theories of the nature of the historical world and ofhistorical knowledge itself which have ideological implications for attempts to understand‘the present’” (21). The claim to “have distinguished a past from a present world of socialthought and praxis, and to have determined the formal coherence of that past world,implies a conception of the form that knowledge of the present world also must take,insofar as it is continuous with that past world” (21). “Commitment to a particular form ofknowledge predetermines the kinds of generalisations which one can make about the


present world, the kinds of knowledge one can have of it, and hence the kinds of projectsone can legitimately conceive for changing that present or maintaining it in its presentform indefinitely” (21).

Explanation by Ideological Implication

Defining ideology as a “set of prescriptions for taking a position in the present world ofsocial praxis and acting upon it (either to change the world or to maintain it in its presentstate) . . . attended by arguments that claim the authority of ‘science’ or ‘realism’” (22)(rather than as a synonym, as in the classic Marxian account, for the socially-mouldednature of human consciousness deriving from the individual’s location in the class-structure), White follows Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia in arguing that there are“four basic ideological positions: Anarchism, Conservativism, Radicalism and Liberalism”(22). White acknowledges other possible positions – for example, the Apocalypticist who“bases his prescriptions for action on the authority of divine revelation, the Reactionary onthat of a class or group practice which is seen as an eternally valid system of socialorganisation, and the Fascist on the unquestioned authority of the charismatic leader” (23)– but these others do not think it necessary to “establish the authority of their cognitivepositions on either rationalist or scientific grounds” (23), for which reason their “theories ofsociety and history . . . are not regarded as being responsible to criticism launched fromother positions, to ‘data’ in general, or to control by the logical criteria of consistency andcoherence” (23).

By contrast, the four basic ideological positions “represent value systems that claimthe authority of ‘reason,’ ‘science,’ or ‘realism’” (23). They are committed to “publicdiscussion with other systems that claim similar authority” (23) and to “make sense out of‘data’ uncovered by investigators of the social process” (23). These four labels function as“designators of general ideological preference rather than as emblems of specific politicalparties” (24) and “represent different attitudes with respect to the possibility of reducingthe study of society to a science and the desirability of doing so; different notions of thelessons that the human sciences can teach; different conceptions of the desirability ofmaintaining or changing the status quo; different conceptions of the direction that changesin the status quo ought to take and the means of effecting such changes; and, finally,different time orientations . . . toward past, present, or future as the repository of aparadigm of society’s ‘ideal’ form” (24). White adds that there is no necessary correlationbetween choice of emplotment, formal argumentation and ideological position.

With respect to the “problem of social change” (24), all four positions “recognise itsinevitability but represent different views as to both its desirability and the optimum paceof change” (24). Conservatives are “most suspicious of programmatic transformations ofthe social status quo” (24). Where Conservatives view “social change through the analogyof plantlike gradualisations” (24), Liberals view it “through the analogy of adjustments, or‘fine tunings,’ of a mechanism” (24). Both see the “fundamental structure of society” (24)as “sound” (24) with “some change” (24) being “inevitable” (24), but “change itself isregarded as being most effective when particular parts, rather than structuralrelationships, of the totality are changed” (24). By contrast, Radicals and Anarchists“believe in the necessity of structural transformations, the former in the interest ofreconstituting society on new bases, the latter in the interest of abolishing ‘society’ andsubstituting for it a ‘community’ of individuals held together by a shared sense of theircommon ‘humanity’” (24). With regard to the “pace of the changes” (24), Conservatives“insist on a ‘natural’ rhythm, while Liberals favour . . . the ‘social’ rhythm of theparliamentary debate, or that of the educational process” (24), whereas Radicals and


Anarchists “envision the possibility of cataclysmic transformations” (24): the former aremore aware of the “inertial pull of inherited institutions” (25) and are thus concerned withthe “provision of the means of effecting such changes” (25). In terms of their respective“time orientations” (25), Conservatives tend to “imagine historical evolution as aprogressive elaboration of the institutional structure that currently prevails” (25); Liberals“imagine a time in the future when this structure will have been improved” (25), thoughthey “project this utopian condition into the remote future . . . to discourage any effort inthe present to realise it precipitately, by ‘radical’ means” (25); Radicals seize on utopia as“imminent, which inspires their concern with the provision of the revolutionary means tobring this utopia to pass now” (25); and Anarchists “idealise a remote past of natural-human innocence from which men have fallen into the corrupt ‘social’ state in which theycurrently find themselves” (25). This utopia can be achieved “on a non-temporal plane”(25), that is, “at any time . . . either by an act of will or by an act of consciousness whichdestroys the socially provided belief in the legitimacy of the current social establishment”(25). The four positions are also distinguished by their orientation towards “socialcongruence” (25) or “social transcendence” (25). “Conservatism is the most ‘sociallycongruent’; Liberalism is relatively so. Anarchism is the most ‘socially transcendent’;Radicalism is relatively so” (25). Because “all take the prospect of change seriously” (25),they all share an “interest in history” (25) and a “concern to provide historical justificationfor their programmes” (25). But it is the “value accorded to the current socialestablishment” (25) which explains their “different conceptions of both the form ofhistorical evolution and the “form that historical knowledge must take” (25). They eachconstrue the “problem of historical ‘progress’ . . . in different ways” (25). “What is‘progress’ to one is ‘decadence’ to another” (25), with the “‘present age’” (25) functioningas an “apex or nadir of development” (25). They also “honour different paradigms of theform that arguments meant to explain ‘what happened in history’ must take” (25), the“different paradigms of explanation” (26) reflecting the “more or less ‘scientistic’orientation of the different ideologies” (26). Though Radicals and Liberals believe in the“possibility of studying history ‘rationally’ and ‘scientifically’” (26), they have “differentconceptions of what a rational and scientific historiography might consist of” (26). Theformer seek the “laws of historical structures and processes” (26), the latter the “generaltrends or main drift of development” (26). For Conservatives and Anarchists, a“distinctively historical knowledge requires a faith in ‘intuition’ as the ground on which aputative ‘science’ of history might be constructed” (26), but the latter is inclined towardsthe “essentially empathetic techniques of Romanticism” (26), while the former is inclinedto “integrate his several intuitions of the objects in the historical field into a comprehensiveOrganicist account of the whole process” (26).

Arguing that there are “no extra-ideological grounds on which to arbitrate amongthe conflicting conceptions of the historical process and of historical knowledge appealed toby the different ideologies” (26), White contends that no model of “historical knowledgefavoured by a given ideology” (26) is “more ‘realistic’” (26) or “more ‘scientific’” (26) thanthe others for it is “precisely over the matter of what constitutes an adequate criterion of‘realism’” (26) or “what a specifically historical or social science ought to be” (26) that theydisagree in the first place. He is not concerned, either, to “analyse them as projections ofa given ideological position” (26) but rather with merely “indicating how ideologicalconsiderations enter into the historian’s attempts to explain the historical field” (26). White is of the view that the “ethical moment of a historical work to be reflected in themode of ideological implication by which an aesthetic perception (the emplotment) and acognitive operation (the argument) can be combined so as to derive prescriptivestatements from what may appear to be purely descriptive or analytical ones” (27). A


historian may “‘explain’ what happened in the historical field by identifying the law (orlaws) governing the set of events emplotted in the drama as a drama of Tragic import”(27). Alternatively, s/he may “find the Tragic import of the story he has emplotted in hisdiscovery of the ‘law’ which governs the sequence of articulation of the plot” (27). Eitherway, the “moral implications” (27) of a given historical explanation derives from the“relationship which the historian presumes to have existed within the set of events underconsideration between the plot structure of the narrative conceptualisation on the onehand and the form of the argument offered as an explicit ‘scientific’ (or ‘realistic’)explanation of the set of events on the other” (27). From this perspective, a “set of eventsemplotted as a Tragedy may be explained ‘scientifically’ (or ‘realistically’) by appeal tostrict laws of causal determination or to putative laws of human freedom” (27). In theformer case, the “implication is that men are indentured to an ineluctable fate by virtue oftheir participation in history” (27), while in the latter the “implication is that they can actin such a way as to control, or at least to affect, their destinies” (27). The “ideologicalthrust of histories fashioned in these alternative ways is generally ‘Conservative’ and‘Radical’ respectively” (27). The “implications need not be formally drawn in the historicalaccount itself, but they will be identifiable by the tone or mood in which the resolution ofthe drama and the epiphany of the law that it manifests are cast” (27). Over pp. 27-29,White illustrates his argument above with reference to differences between the work ofOswald Spengler, Marx, Ranke and Burckhardt.

The Problem of Historiographical Styles

Here, White argues that a “historiographical style represents a particular combination ofmodes of emplotment, argument, and ideological implication” (29). The various modes“cannot be indiscriminately combined in a given work” (29): for example, a “Comicemplotment is not compatible with a Mechanistic argument” (29) while a “Radical ideologyis not compatible with a Satirical emplotment” (29). This is because there are “electiveaffinities . . . based on the structural homologies . . . discerned among the possible modesof emplotment, argument, and ideological implication” (29) among the various modes. These may be mapped as follows:

Mode of Emplotment Mode of Argument Mode of IdeologicalImplication

Romantic Formist Anarchist

Tragic Mechanistic Radical

Comic Organicist Conservative

Satirical Contextualist Liberal

The “dialectical tension which characterises the work of every master historian usuallyarises from an effort to wed a mode of emplotment with a mode of argument or ofideological implication which is inconsonant with it” (29). This tension, however, “evolveswithin . . . a coherent vision or presiding image of the form of the whole historical field”(30). This “coherence and consistency” (30), this appearance of a “self-consistent totality”(30), gives to his work its “distinctive stylistic attributes” (30). The “grounds of thiscoherence and consistency . . . are poetic, and specifically linguistic, in nature” (30).“Before the historian can bring to bear upon the data of the historical field the conceptual


apparatuses he will use to represent and explain it, he must first prefigure the field – thatis to say, constitute it as an object of mental perception” (30). This “poetic act isindistinguishable from the linguistic act in which the field is made ready for interpretationas a domain of a particular kind” (30). In other words, “before a given domain can beinterpreted, it must first be construed as a ground inhabited by discernible figures” (30)which must in turn be “classifiable as distinctive orders, classes, genera, and species ofphenomena” (30) which “bear certain kinds of relationships to one another, thetransformations of which will constitute the ‘problems’ to be solved by the ‘explanations’provided on the levels of emplotment and argument in the narrative” (30). That is, the“historian confronts the historical field in much the same way that the grammarian mightconfront a new language” (30). His first task is to “distinguish among the lexical,grammatical and syntactical elements of the field” (30), after which he can “undertake tointerpret what any given configuration of elements or transformations of their relationshipsmean” (30). The historian’s job is to “construct a linguistic protocol, complete with lexical,grammatical, syntactical, and semantic dimensions, by which to characterise the field andits elements in his own terms . . . and thus to prepare them for the explanation andrepresentation he will subsequently offer of them in his narrative” (30). This“preconceptual linguistic protocol will in turn be – by virtue of its essentially prefigurativenature – characterisable in terms of the dominant tropological mode in which it is cast”(30). Historical accounts “purport to be verbal models, or icons, of specific segments ofthe historical process” (30). These models are necessary because the “documentaryrecord does not figure forth an unambiguous image of the structure of events attested inthem” (30). To “figure ‘what really happened’ in the past, . . . the historian must firstprefigure as a possible object of knowledge the whole set of events reported in thedocuments” (30). This “prefigurative act is poetic inasmuch as it is precognitive andprecritical in the economy of the historian’s own consciousness” (31) and because it is“constitutive of the structure that will subsequently be imaged in the verbal model offeredby the historian as a representation and explanation of ‘what really happened’ in the past”(31). It is “constitutive not only of a domain which the historian can treat as a possibleobject of (mental) perception” (31) but also of the “concepts he will use to identify theobjects that inhabit the domain and to characterise the kinds of relationships they cansustain with one another” (31). In the “poetic act which precedes the formal analysis ofthe field, the historian both creates his object of analysis and predetermines the modalityof the conceptual strategies he will use to explain it” (31).

White is of the view that there “four principal types” (31) of “possible explanatorystrategies” (31) and these “correspond to the four principal tropes of poetic language”(31). The “theory of tropes provides us with a basis for classifying the deep structuralforms of the historical imagination in a given period of its evolution” (31).

The Theory of Tropes

Drawing on Kenneth Burke’s “The Four Master Tropes,” White identifies the “four basictropes for the analysis of poetic, or figurative, language” (31) as “Metaphor, Metonymy,Synecdoche, and Irony” (31). These tropes “permit the characterisation of objects indifferent kinds of indirect, or figurative, discourse” (31-34). They are “especially useful forunderstanding the operations by which the contents of experience which resist descriptionin unambiguous prose representations can be prefiguratively grasped and prepared forconscious apprehension” (34). In “Metaphor (literally, ‘transfer’)” (34), “phenomena canbe characterised in terms of their similarity to, and difference from, one another, in themanner of analogy or simile” (34). “Through Metonymy (literally, ‘name change’), the


name of a part of a thing may be substituted for the name of the whole, as in the phrase‘fifty sail’ when what is indicated is ‘fifty ships’” (34). In the case of Synecdoche, which isthought by some theorists to be a “form of metonymy” (34), a “phenomenon can becharacterised by using the part to symbolise some quality presumed to inhere in thetotality, as in the expression ‘He is all heart’” (34). Through Irony, “entities can becharacterised by way of negating on the figurative level what is positively affirmed on theliteral level” (34). For example, “blind mouths’” (34), as an illustration of “catachresis”(34), and “‘cold passion’” (34), as an example of “paradox (oxymoron)” (34), are“emblems of this trope” (34). “Irony, Metonymy, and Synecdoche are kinds of Metaphor”(34) but differ in the “kinds of reductions or integrations they effect on the literal level oftheir meanings and by the kinds of illumination they aim at on the figurative level” (34). Metaphor is “essentially representational, Metonymy is reductionist, Synecdoche isintegrative, and Irony is negational” (34). The metaphor “‘my love, my rose,’ ”affirms theadequacy of the rose as a representation of the loved one. It asserts that a similarityexists between two objects in the face of manifest differences between them” (34). The“term ‘rose’ is understood to be a ‘figure’ or ‘symbol’ of the qualities ascribed to the lovedone” (34) who is “identified with the rose, but in such a way as to sustain the particularityof the loved one while suggesting the qualities that she (or he) shares with the rose” (34). If the “phrase were read Metonymically” (34), the loved one would be “reduced to a rose”(34); if it were read Synecdochically, the “essence of the loved one [would be] taken to beidentical with the essence of the rose” (34); and if it were read Ironically, the expressionwould be taken as an “implicit negation of what is explicitly affirmed” (34). In theMetonymical expressions such as the “roar of thunder” (35) or “fifty sail” (34), the “term‘sail’ is substituted for the term ‘ship’ in such a way as to reduce the whole to one of itsparts. Two different objects are being implicitly compared . . . but the objects areexplicitly conceived to bear a part-whole relationship to each other” (34). It is “suggestedthat ‘ships’ are in some sense identifiable with that part of themselves without which theycannot operate” (35). In Metonymy, “phenomena are implicitly apprehended as bearingrelationships to one another in the modality of part-part relationships, on the basis ofwhich one can effect a reduction of one of the parts to the status of an aspect or functionof the other” (35). The reduction “may take the form of an agent-act relationship (‘thethunder roars’) or a cause-effect relationship (‘the roar of thunder’)” (35). This is an“essentially extrinsic relationship” (35).

The same expression would be synecdochic, however, if the “term ‘sail’ wereintended to symbolise the quality shared by both ‘ships’ and ‘sails’” (35). The key thing isto distinguish “those parts which are representative of the whole and those which aresimply aspects of it” (35). Synecdoche consists of an “intrinsic relationship of sharedqualities” (35). Where Metonymy implies a “difference between phenomena construed inthe manner of part-part relationships” (35), Synecdoche construes the two parts in themanner of an integration within a whole that is qualitatively different from the sum of theparts and of which the parts are but microcosmic replications” (35). Hence, the phrase“He is all heart” (35). At first glance, this appears to be metonymic in that the “name of apart of the body is used to characterise the whole body of the individual” (36), but the“term ‘heart’ is to be understood figuratively as designating, not a part of the body, butthat quality of character conventionally symbolised by the term ‘heart’ in Western culture”(36), that is, not as a “part of the anatomy whose function can be used to characterise thewhole body, as in ‘fifty sail’ for ‘fifty ships’” (36). Rather, it is to be construed as a “qualitythat is characteristic of the whole individual, considered as a combination of physical andspiritual elements . . . in the modality of a microcosmic-macrocosmic relationship” (36). Read Metonymically, ‘He is all heart’ “would be reductive” (36) and suggest the “centrality


of the heart to the functioning of the organism” (36). Read Synecdochically, however, it is“integrative rather than reductive” (36), signalling “not simply a ‘name change’ but a namechange designating a totality (‘He’) which possesses some quality (generosity, compassion,etc.) that suffuses and constitutes the essential nature of all the parts that make it up”(36).

The three tropes discussed are “paradigms, provided by language itself, of theoperations by which consciousness can prefigure areas of experience that are cognitivelyproblematic in order subsequently to submit them to analysis and explanation” (36). Thought is thereby “provided with possible alternative paradigms of explanation” (36). Metaphor is “representational in the way that Formism can be seen to be. Metonymy isreductive in a Mechanistic manner, while Synecdoche is integrative in the way thatOrganicism is” (36). Metaphor “sanctions the prefiguration of the world of experience inobject-object terms” (36), Metonymy in “part-part terms” (36), Synecdoche in “object-whole terms” (36). Metaphor promotes “languages of identity” (36), Metonymy“extrinsicality” (36), and Synecdoche “intrinsicality” (36).

These three tropes are “naive” (36) in the sense that they are deployed “in thebelief in language’s capacity to grasp the nature of things in figurative terms” (36-37). Irony is, rather, “sentimental (in Schiller’s sense of ‘self-conscious’)” (37). It is“essentially dialectical, inasmuch as it represents a self-conscious use of Metaphor in theinterest of verbal self-negation” (37). Its “basic figurative tactic . . . is catachresis(literally ‘misuse’), the manifestly absurd Metaphor designed to inspire Ironic secondthoughts about the nature of the thing characterised or the inadequacy of thecharacterisation itself” (37). The “rhetorical figure of aporia (literally ‘doubt’), in which theauthor signals in advance a real or feigned disbelief in the truth of his own statements”(37) is the “favoured stylistic device of Ironic language” (37). The “aim of the Ironicstatement is to affirm tacitly the negative of what is on the literal level affirmed positively,or the reverse” (37). It “presupposes that the reader or auditor already knows, or iscapable of recognising, the absurdity of the characterisation of the thing designated in theMetaphor, Metonymy, or Synecdoche used to give form to it” (37). The expression ‘He isall heart’ “becomes Ironic when uttered in a particular tone of voice or in a context inwhich the person designated manifestly does not possess the qualities attributed to him”(37). Irony is, accordingly, “metatropological, for it is deployed in the self-consciousawareness of the possible misuse of figurative language” (37). It “presupposes theoccupation of a ‘realistic’ perspective on reality, from which a nonfigurative representationof the world of experience might be provided” (37). It “represents a stage ofconsciousness in which the problematical nature of language itself has become recognised”(37), pointing to the “potential foolishness of all linguistic characterisations of reality” (37). It is, as Burke notes, “dialectical . . . in its apprehension of the capacity of language toobscure more than it clarifies in any act of verbal figuration” (37). In Irony, “figurativelanguage folds back upon itself and brings its own potentialities for distorting perceptionunder question” (37). Characterisations of the world “in the Ironic mode are oftenregarded as intrinsically sophisticated and realistic” (37), signalling the “ascent of thoughtin a given area of inquiry to a level of self-consciousness on which a genuinely‘enlightened’ – that is to say, self-critical – conceptualisation of the world and its processeshas become possible” (37). In short, Irony “provides a linguistic paradigm of a mode ofthought which is radically self-critical with respect not only to a given characterisation ofthe world of experience but also to the very effort to capture adequately the truth of thingsin language” (37). It is the “linguistic protocol in which skepticism in thought andrelativism in ethics” (37) are expressed. It is “inherently hostile to the ‘naive’ formulationsof the Formist, Mechanist, and Organicist strategies of explanation” (38). Its “fictional


form, Satire, is intrinsically antagonistic to the archetypes of Romance, Comedy, andTragedy as modes of representing the forms of significant human development” (38). Irony appears “transideological” (38) in that it can be used tactically for the defence” (38)of any position, “speaking against established social forms or against ‘utopian’ reformersseeking to change the status quo” (38). As the “basis of a world view, Irony tends todissolve all belief in the possibility of positive political actions” (38). In its “apprehensionof the essential folly or absurdity of the human condition, it tends to engender belief in the‘madness’ of civilisation itself and to inspire a mandarin-like disdain for those seeking tograsp the nature of social reality in either science or art” (38).

The Phases of Nineteenth Century Historical Consciousness

The “theory of tropes provides a way of characterising the dominant modes of historicalthinking which took shape in Europe in the nineteenth century” (38), allowing White topinpoint the “deep structure of the historical imagination of that period” (38).

Documents

N10-METAHISTORY