White on Metahistory and the Role of the Historian
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Saturday 12 July 2025 is the 97th anniversary of the birth of Hayden V. White (12 July 1928–05 March 2018), who was born in Martin, Tennessee, on this date in 1928.
White has been sufficiently influential to win himself enemies. He was a particular target of Geoffrey Elton in Elton’s 1990 Cook lectures. Elton rightly noted the relationship between White’s work and literary criticism, and that’s an interesting story in itself — that is to say, how exactly this came about has a history of its own — how continental philosophy came to be mixed with literary criticism, and literary critics started to frame their work in quasi-philosophical terms. And Elton, with his characteristic literary verve, makes White sound like an imbecile. Elton says that, according to White:
“…the work of Ranke and Burckhardt owes its repute not to ‘the nature of the “data” they used to support their generalizations or the theories they invoked in explaining them’; what matters, it appears, are ‘the consistency, coherence, and illuminative power of their respective visions of the historical field’. Furthermore, since nothing depends on the materials employed or the reasoning applied, these historians also cannot be refuted; and if there is no valid argument possible, it must follow that all reconstructions are of equal value, which means of no value independent of writer and reader.”
A more sympathetic account of White, if I understand him correctly, is that of Keith Jenkins. Jenkins has argued that the Carr-Elton debate has been effectively replaced by the Rorty-White debate. Given Elton’s criticisms of White, we could just as well say that the debate has transitioned from Elton’s attack on Carr’s positivism to Elton’s attack on White’s post-modernism. In the book that makes the case for the changing of the guards in the debate, On ‘What is History?’: From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White, Jenkins says the following of White:
“White’s most succinct response to the question of what is history, is that it is a narrative discourse, the content of which is as much imagined/invented as found. We also know some of the reasons why White thinks this: because in the construction of their historical narratives historians inevitably combine known or found parts (facts) with ultimately unknown and thus imagined/ invented wholes; because the attempt to make truth claims about the past beyond the level of the statement and/or the chronicle based upon some sort of correspondence between the stories they tell and the stories lived in the past, breaks down when it is realised that there are no stories in the past to correspond to — that past ‘events’ just don’t have in them the shapes of stories. Additionally, we know how White’s definition of history when combined with his general textualism problematicises any kind of realist empiricism and/or mimeticism, points to the inescapable present-centredness and positional nature of all historical interpretations/readings, queries old distinctions between ‘proper’ history and historicism by virtue of, for example, their common metahistorical status, and generally ideologises all history in whatever case.”
You might see this as an exciting take on history, or you might see it as a damning indictment of what history has become in the minds of some of its practitioners. Whether you find it interesting or repellant, I’m going to count Elton as a hostile critic of White, and Keith Jenkins as a sympathetic critic of White. My purpose to appealing to the judgments of both a hostile and a sympathetic critic are to point out what they attribute in common to White.
White’s conception of history, according to these critics, relies heavily on the historian. History is made by the historian. But does the historian make his history out of whole cloth? Does he make his history arbitrarily to suit himself? Does the historian simply make it up as he goes? We’ve seen these problems before, particularly in the work of Giovanni Gentile, who identified res gestae, the deeds done in history, with historia rerum gestarum, the record of deeds done. I mentioned this distinction in my first episode of Today in Philosophy of History, since it occurs in both of the classic expositions of philosophy of history by W. H. Walsh and William Dray, who noted that “history” can mean past actuality or it can mean the account of past actuality. This distinction has long dogged philosophy of history, and philosophers like Gentile and White represent attempts to overcome the distinction and restore unity to the whole of historical thought.
On a superficial level we can all agree that histories are written by historians, but the question becomes how much constraint the historian is under in crafting his history. Elton implies that there’s dangerously little constraint, and more is needed. We can think of Elton’s position as asserting the moral imperative of being true to the past. Jenkins implies that recognizing the relative lack of constraint is a necessary step in honestly assessing the historical record. We can think of Jenkins’ position as the moral imperative to recognize the role of the historian in history, and to accept the consequences of this role.
The reliance of history upon the historian raises a number of questions, so I’m going to engage in a little digression in an attempt to clarify a point that’s at issue, though the relevance of it might not seem obvious, so bear with me. In a few episodes I’ve talked about philosophers who’ve tried to call attention to the “working historian” or the “practicing historian.” In my episode on Siegfried Kracauer I quoted Kracauer that Ranke’s methodological reflections, “…have the advantage of resulting not from a pottering about with a set of abstractions but from his undiluted experience as a practicing historian” Morton White wrote that his book Foundations of Historical knowledge, “is intended to be an account of history as practised by historians…”And White went on to appeal to the “professional historian” in an implicit paradigm case argument for the proper scope of history, i.e, we learn from historians what history is concerned with. For Kracauer, philosophers’ abstractions are the problem, while, for Morton White, historians are our guide for what history is supposed to be. I could make a joke here about what happens when a working historian becomes unemployed, but I don’t want to trivialize the issue at stake, which I take to be an important one, even when I disagree with those who pursue this approach.
This idea has a parallel in philosophy of mathematics, such that several philosophers of mathematics have tried to emphasize what mathematics is to the working mathematician, with the implicit contrast being what mathematics is to philosophers. Many traditional philosophers of mathematics worked on problems like the way in which mathematical entities exist or fail to exist, but this isn’t a problem that actually comes up in mathematics, so it’s not something that greatly concerns the working mathematician. So the appeal to the working mathematician was to get away from specifically philosophical problems, though to me it seems perfectly reasonable that philosophers would want to work on specifically philosophical problems. I call this the philosophy of mathematical practices, and it’s associated particularly with the work of Thomas Tymoczko, who unfortunately died rather young, and several other prominent figures in philosophy of mathematics.
This idea that there can be a philosophy of the practice of some discipline can obviously be generalized across disciplines, and, if we do this, one of the disciplines we’ll come to will be history, and we could similarly formulate a philosophy of historical practices. Another implication here is that a philosophy of the practices of some discipline may be distinct from a philosophy of that discipline, with the latter idea being associated with what philosophers have thought about a discipline rather than what its practitioners have thought about a discipline. Now, with history, we have an entire discipline — or a sub-discipline if you prefer — that we call historiography, which is when historians reflect on the practices of their discipline. So there’s a sense in which historiography is already a philosophy of historical practices, and there’re a growing number of contemporary philosophers who identify their work not as philosophy of history, but rather as philosophy of historiography. We could take this distinction between the philosophy of history and the philosophy of historiography to coincide with the implicit distinction between a philosophy of history as philosophers have traditionally engaged with the discipline, and a philosophy of historical practices. A philosophy of historical practices, or, if you like, a philosophy of historiography, places the working historian at the center of philosophy of history.
What Elton criticized in the work of Hayden White, and what Jenkins — I think — approves of in White’s work, also places the historian at the center of history, but I wanted to make this digression about a philosophy of historical practices and the working historian because I think the way in which White places the historian at the center of history is distinct from how a philosophy of historical practices places the historian at the center of history. If we take Morton White’s paradigm case argument, the professional historian defines the proper scope of history. History is what historians write books about. This makes the historian central to the definition of history, but it doesn’t necessarily follow from this that the historian has complete freedom to emplot their histories as romance, as comedy, as tragedy, or as satire.
In Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, White identifies Michelet, Ranke, de Tocqueville, and Burckhardt all as historical realists, but argues that Michelet writes history as romance, Ranke writes history as comedy, de Tocqueville writes history as tragedy, and Burckhardt writes history as satire. Thus all of them being historical realists is in some sense less significant than the narrative devices they employ to present history. If we think of realism as a constraint on what the historian says about past actuality — and we don’t have to think of it like that — then realism here takes a back seat to emplotment.
There’s another philosopher that I haven’t yet discussed individually, and that is the British idealist F. H. Bradley, who wrote an early work titled The Presuppositions of Critical History, which also, in its own way, puts the historian at the center of history and philosophy of history. Hopefully next year, fate willing, I’ll mark the anniversary of Bradley’s birth with a profile of his philosophy of history, and that will be another opportunity to elaborate on the role of the historian in history. If you’ve read some of my other profiles you may have noticed that I’ve written profiles of a number of historians who superficially don’t seem to have anything to do with philosophy or philosophy of history. So, for example, historians like Anna Comnene, Gregory of Tours, Carl Stephenson, and Hans Zinsser didn’t write any philosophical or even methodological works. I’ve also written several profiles about archaeologists like V. Gordon Childe, Henri Frankfort, and Leonard Woolley, who were interested in the reconstruction of history and not the philosophical foundations of their discipline. Some of these profiles have been, frankly, vaguely inspired by Hayden White, since I hold with White that all history has philosophical presuppositions, including the history reconstructed by archaeologists.
For me, the interesting thing about reading Gregory of Tours is finding the conception of the world and of history implicit throughout his work. This is like excavating a conceptual framework from a history, which Foucault called the archaeology of knowledge. When we engage in the archaeology of knowledge for some historical milieu radically different from our own, such as the early Frankish kingdoms of Gregory of Tours or the high Byzantine period of Anna Comnene, we’re forced to confront fundamental philosophical presuppositions, and the contrast with our own fundamental philosophical presuppositions helps to make us aware of our own presuppositions, which are usually invisible to us because we are the fish and our presuppositions are the water in which we swim, as I discussed in my episode on George Herbert Mead.
I’m willing to go even farther than the claim that all history has philosophical presuppositions and argue that all science, even (if not especially) the most narrowly-conceived positivist exercises in science, has foundational philosophical presuppositions, but I’m going to save this argument for a separate series of talks on the philosophy of science — if I live to complete it, or even to start it. If we think of archaeology as a science distinct from history this follows in an obvious way, i.e., that science has philosophical presuppositions, but I would extrapolate scientific dependence on philosophy to all disciplines. I said that finding philosophical presuppositions in history is what interests me in some historians, and that this has some resemblance to White’s project. Elton was also critical of White for this.
“…White holds history proper and the philosophy of history to be the same thing, with the philosophers making explicit what in the historians’ work is merely implicit. In view of the sad fact that virtually no philosopher of history seems ever to have tried to work out a historical problem in the manner of the genuine historian — they display instead a remarkable skill in picking on the uninstructive verbiage of the textbooks for their illustrations of historical work — I cannot find this identification altogether convincing.”
I don’t think it’s accurate to say that White fully identified history with philosophy of history, but we can leave that aside. Clearly, there’s a close relation between the two in White’s work. White attributes to Hegel the view that philosophy brings order out of the historian’s chaos:
“…his analysis of the various forms that a strictly historical representation of past reality might take appeared to condemn historiography to the status of only a protoscience, if philosophy were not invoked to bring order out of the chaos of the conflicting accounts of the past which historiography necessarily engendered.”
White is one of those philosophers, like Nietzsche, who is sometimes criticized as though he held the view that he is attributing to others, and criticizing in others, as White is here attributing to Hegel the idea that history isn’t yet a science and can only be made a proper science through philosophy. I’m not sure if this is exactly what Elton attributed to White, but this is related in an interesting way to another criticism that Elton makes.
One of the charges that Elton lays against White is that White is willing to resurrect the ancient question as to whether history is an art or a science. For Elton this is a criticism, but from my point of view it’s all to the good. The question fell out of fashion not because it was answered, but because philosophers and historians got tired of talking about it, and no one could offer a knock-down argument for one side or the other. Bertrand Russell called this the March Hare’s solution — I’m tired of this; let’s move on — which he deprecated in philosophy of mathematics when his eponymous paradox had been exhaustively discussed and no one had a solution. Both historians and mathematicians got on with things, despite the failure of philosophers to solve the riddles they’d found.
The relation between the philosophical content of history and the distinction between history as an art and history as a science is that this implies some kind of philosophical clarification between what constitutes an art and what constitutes a science. If history and philosophy of history coincide, as Elton attributed to White, then it’s not merely a matter of the relation of history to the arts or to the sciences, it’s also a matter of the relation of philosophy to the arts or the sciences. This is a big problem to solve, and no one is going to give the definitive solution any time soon. And it wasn’t only Elton that took exception to White’s work. A more traditional assessment of White from the perspective of philosophy of history can be found in “The Presuppositions of Metahistory” by Maurice Mandlebaum:
“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.”
I find it interesting that Mandlebaum calls Metahistory a “closely articulated system,” which implies that it is internally coherent and tightly reasoned, but not necessarily in a robust dialogue with other works in history and philosophy of history, and Mandlebaum’s critique of it is an attempt to bring it into some kind of dialogue.
White also has his admirers among philosophers of history. In my episode on Frank Ankersmit I mentioned White many times, since Ankersmit has a talent for making White sound as reasonable as Elton makes him sound unreasonable. Ankersmit notes the reaction against White among academic historians:
“…White became a favorite object of historians’ ire. Since the publication of White’s Metahistory historians — from Gertrude Himmelfarb at one end of the spectrum of historical writing to Carlo Ginzburg at the opposite end — have fulminated against White and condemned his views as a dangerous and irresponsible caricature of what historical writing actually is.”
The very fact that many prominent historians fulminated against White is clear evidence of both the reach and the limits of his influence, so White’s Metahistory didn’t quite sow the chaos that Elton believed it might. Ankersmit also implies that White has been criticized for what he attributed to others, as I mentioned in relation to Elton:
“White demonstrates not that it is impossible to get hold of past reality, but the naiveté of the kind of positivist intuition customarily cherished in the discipline for how to achieve this goal. More specifically, what these positivist intuitions proudly present as historical reality itself is a mere spectral illusion that is created by the historical discipline itself. Surely, there is a historical reality that is, in principle, accessible to the historian. But historians have forgotten about this historical reality and mistaken the product of their tropological encodation of the past for the past itself. Within this reading, not the practicing historian criticizing White but White himself is the realist who reminds us of the difference between reality and mere intellectual construction.”
We could say that historians in criticizing White are making a category error, since they’re attributing White’s views on metahistory to history itself. By the same token, we could say that White, in criticizing historians, is making a category error, since he’s attributing views about history to metahistory. But this complementary formulation of a category error between history and metahistory doesn’t undercut White as cleanly as it undercuts White’s critics, because he’s careful about his formulations of what’s at stake. He was, after all, the one to set the terms of the debate over metahistory.
If we return to the first quote I made from Elton, we can see that there are obvious responses to Elton’s criticisms. Elton quoted White such that what matters in historians is, “‘the consistency, coherence, and illuminative power of their respective visions of the historical field’.” And Elton added,
“…if there is no valid argument possible, it must follow that all reconstructions are of equal value, which means of no value independent of writer and reader.”
But it doesn’t follow that all reconstructions are of equal value if historical reconstructions are assessed on their consistency, coherency, and illuminative power. We could argue in a thoroughly naturalistic way that that accounts of history that hew closest to past actuality are those with the greatest consistency, coherency, and illuminative power. What White is taking for granted is what he calls the historical field. That’s his presupposition. There is a field of historical event upon which historians are widely agreed, and where they differ is how these events are emplotted.
The empirical historian, like Elton, focuses on the historical field, and on those events that aren’t yet enshrined in canonical past actuality. For Elton, all there is is the historical field, and there is no metahistory beyond the historical field. The metahistorian, like White, focuses not on the historical field, but what historians make of the historical field. Both the empirical historian and the metahistorian have their valid spheres of inquiry, and a problem only arises when we mistake one sphere of validity for another.
