The Presuppositions of Metahistory

In the introductory chapter of his Metahistory, Hayden White explicitly sets forth the main presuppositions underlying that work. If one were to examine these presuppositions in the light of his other writings, one might uncover his reasons for accepting them. Such, however, is not my aim. I shall confine my discussion to certain of the views he explicitly embraces, selecting those which are basic to the aspects of Metahistory I especially wish to challenge. As a point of entry into the closely articulated system of Metahistory, let me first mention the eight persons whom White has chosen as representing the various modes of historical consciousness with which he deals. Four of these he considers to have been the dominant historians of the classic period of nineteenth-century historiography; four he regards as the most important philosophers of 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 are treated together, a mode of treatment in direct opposition to the widespread assumption (held throughout the nineteenth century, and subsequently) that their aims and methods are not only fundamentally distinct, but are often opposed. His rejection of that view, and his account of what they have in common, is the first of his theses that I shall challenge. What lies behind that thesis is a particular view of what is most fundamental in the writing of history, and it is that view which I shall take as his first and perhaps most fundamental presupposition. It is White's claim that proper and philosophies of history grow out of a common root, differing only in emphasis, not in content: philosophers of simply bring to the surface and systematically defend views that remain implicit in the works of historians (xi, 428). Unfortunately, White fails to specify with any degree of exactitude what he regards as the essential features in a philosophy of history.' If (for the time being) we construe

Epistemology · Presupposition · Philosophy · Philosophy, History, and Historiography

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