Hayden White
Encyclopedia
Hayden White is a historian
in the tradition of literary criticism
, perhaps most famous for his work Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe
(1973). He is currently professor emeritus
at the University of California, Santa Cruz
, and he recently retired his position of professor of comparative literature
at Stanford University
.
in 1951 and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Michigan
(1952 and 1955, respectively). While an undergraduate at Wayne State, White studied history under William J. Bossenbrook, who inspired several undergraduates who later went on to achieve academic distinction in the field of history, including White, H. D. "Harry" Harootunian, and Arthur C. Danto (The Uses of History).
philosophy of history
by brushing away previous distinctions and debates and by rejecting the notion of causality
in history. He proposed a return to the historical text, which, he thought, had been abandoned in favor of the study of other works in the philosophy of history. He wanted historians to have linguistic skepticism and to question their use of language. Perhaps most controversial is his defense of the idea that "the techniques or strategies that [historians and imaginative writers] use in the composition of their discourses can be shown to be substantially the same, however different they may appear on a purely surface, or dictional, level" (Tropics of Discourse 121).
(1973), White extended the use of tropes from a linguistic usage – figures of style – to general styles of discourse, underlying every historian's writing of history. He believed histories to be determined by tropes, in as much as the historiography
of every period is defined by a specific trope. For White, the metaphor may be the most useful trope, and historical explanation "can be judged solely in terms of the richness of the metaphors which govern its sequence of articulation" (Tropics of Discourse 46). White used the work of historians and philosophers of history in the nineteenth century - specifically, that of G. W. F. Hegel, Jules Michelet
, Leopold von Ranke
, Alexis de Tocqueville
, Jacob Burkhardt, Karl Marx
, Friedrich Nietzsche
, and Benedetto Croce
- as embodiments of particular historiographical tropes and political/moral aims.
White did not see tropes as incompatible with the historian's freedom in his actual writing of history. He justified his position – among other ways – on the basis of the historical unfolding of tropes (from metaphor
to metonymy
, synecdoche
, and finally irony
); he placed himself within the ironic historiographical tradition, one that allowed certain elements of the absurd and of contradiction. These ideas can be seen in light of White's support of the idea of narrative as an essential constituent of historical experience and method. He writes in The Content of the Form (1987) that "A true narrative account...is less a product of the historian's poetic talents, as the narrative account of imaginary events is conceived to be, than it is a necessary result of proper application of historical "method" (27). Referring to Paul Ricoeur
, by whom he was strongly influenced, White writes, "plot is not a structural component of fictional or mythical stories alone; it is crucial to the historical representations of events as well" (51).
The traditionally positivist American historical profession has not known what do to with White. Norman Levitt
has pointed White out as "the most magisterial spokesman" for relativistic
post-modernist historiography, where "[w]hen one particular narrative prevails, the dirty work is invariably done by 'rhetoric', never evidence and logic, which are, in any case, simply sleight-of-language designations for one kind of rhetorical strategy" (Archaeological Fantasies 267). White, however, can also be seen as a traditional moralist, and he has asked of historical and fictional narrative “…on what other grounds [than moralism] could a narrative of real events possibly conclude? […] What else could narrative closure consist of than the passage from one moral order to another? ("The Value of Narrativity" 283). White himself denies being a relativist or post-modernist, averring the reality of events in the past is not contradicted by literary portrayals of those events.
. White v. Davis, 13 Cal.3d 757 (1975). In 1972, while a professor of history at UCLA and acting as sole plaintiff, White brought suit against Chief of Police Edward M. Davis
, alleging the illegal expenditure of public funds in connection with covert intelligence gathering by police at UCLA. The covert activities included police officers registering as students, taking notes of discussions occurring in classes, and making police reports on these discussions. White v. Davis, at 762. The Supreme Court found for White in a unanimous decision. This case set the standard that determines the limits of legal police surveillance of political activity in California
; police cannot engage in such surveillance in the absence of reasonable suspicion of a crime ("Lockyer Manual").
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...
in the tradition of literary criticism
Literary criticism
Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals...
, perhaps most famous for his work Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe
Metahistory
Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe is a historiography book by Hayden White first published in 1973.On the second page of his Introduction Hayden White stated:...
(1973). He is currently professor emeritus
Professor
A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...
at the University of California, Santa Cruz
University of California, Santa Cruz
The University of California, Santa Cruz, also known as UC Santa Cruz or UCSC, is a public, collegiate university; one of ten campuses in the University of California...
, and he recently retired his position of professor of comparative literature
Comparative literature
Comparative literature is an academic field dealing with the literature of two or more different linguistic, cultural or national groups...
at Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
.
Education
White received his B.A. from Wayne State UniversityWayne State University
Wayne State University is a public research university located in Detroit, Michigan, United States, in the city's Midtown Cultural Center Historic District. Founded in 1868, WSU consists of 13 schools and colleges offering more than 400 major subject areas to over 32,000 graduate and...
in 1951 and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...
(1952 and 1955, respectively). While an undergraduate at Wayne State, White studied history under William J. Bossenbrook, who inspired several undergraduates who later went on to achieve academic distinction in the field of history, including White, H. D. "Harry" Harootunian, and Arthur C. Danto (The Uses of History).
Historiography
White rejected the post-CollingwoodianR. G. Collingwood
Robin George Collingwood was a British philosopher and historian. He was born at Cartmel, Grange-over-Sands in Lancashire, the son of the academic W. G. Collingwood, and was educated at Rugby School and at University College, Oxford, where he read Greats...
philosophy of history
Philosophy of history
The term philosophy of history refers to the theoretical aspect of history, in two senses. It is customary to distinguish critical philosophy of history from speculative philosophy of history...
by brushing away previous distinctions and debates and by rejecting the notion of causality
Causality
Causality is the relationship between an event and a second event , where the second event is understood as a consequence of the first....
in history. He proposed a return to the historical text, which, he thought, had been abandoned in favor of the study of other works in the philosophy of history. He wanted historians to have linguistic skepticism and to question their use of language. Perhaps most controversial is his defense of the idea that "the techniques or strategies that [historians and imaginative writers] use in the composition of their discourses can be shown to be substantially the same, however different they may appear on a purely surface, or dictional, level" (Tropics of Discourse 121).
Metahistory
In MetahistoryMetahistory
Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe is a historiography book by Hayden White first published in 1973.On the second page of his Introduction Hayden White stated:...
(1973), White extended the use of tropes from a linguistic usage – figures of style – to general styles of discourse, underlying every historian's writing of history. He believed histories to be determined by tropes, in as much as the historiography
Historiography
Historiography refers either to the study of the history and methodology of history as a discipline, or to a body of historical work on a specialized topic...
of every period is defined by a specific trope. For White, the metaphor may be the most useful trope, and historical explanation "can be judged solely in terms of the richness of the metaphors which govern its sequence of articulation" (Tropics of Discourse 46). White used the work of historians and philosophers of history in the nineteenth century - specifically, that of G. W. F. Hegel, Jules Michelet
Jules Michelet
Jules Michelet was a French historian. He was born in Paris to a family with Huguenot traditions.-Early life:His father was a master printer, not very prosperous, and Jules assisted him in the actual work of the press...
, Leopold von Ranke
Leopold von Ranke
Leopold von Ranke was a German historian, considered one of the founders of modern source-based history. Ranke set the standards for much of later historical writing, introducing such ideas as reliance on primary sources , an emphasis on narrative history and especially international politics .-...
, Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville was a French political thinker and historian best known for his Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution . In both of these works, he explored the effects of the rising equality of social conditions on the individual and the state in...
, Jacob Burkhardt, Karl Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
, Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...
, and Benedetto Croce
Benedetto Croce
Benedetto Croce was an Italian idealist philosopher, and occasionally also politician. He wrote on numerous topics, including philosophy, history, methodology of history writing and aesthetics, and was a prominent liberal, although he opposed laissez-faire free trade...
- as embodiments of particular historiographical tropes and political/moral aims.
White did not see tropes as incompatible with the historian's freedom in his actual writing of history. He justified his position – among other ways – on the basis of the historical unfolding of tropes (from metaphor
Metaphor
A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...
to metonymy
Metonymy
Metonymy is a figure of speech used in rhetoric in which a thing or concept is not called by its own name, but by the name of something intimately associated with that thing or concept...
, synecdoche
Synecdoche
Synecdoche , meaning "simultaneous understanding") is a figure of speech in which a term is used in one of the following ways:* Part of something is used to refer to the whole thing , or...
, and finally irony
Irony
Irony is a rhetorical device, literary technique, or situation in which there is a sharp incongruity or discordance that goes beyond the simple and evident intention of words or actions...
); he placed himself within the ironic historiographical tradition, one that allowed certain elements of the absurd and of contradiction. These ideas can be seen in light of White's support of the idea of narrative as an essential constituent of historical experience and method. He writes in The Content of the Form (1987) that "A true narrative account...is less a product of the historian's poetic talents, as the narrative account of imaginary events is conceived to be, than it is a necessary result of proper application of historical "method" (27). Referring to Paul Ricoeur
Paul Ricoeur
Paul Ricœur was a French philosopher best known for combining phenomenological description with hermeneutic interpretation...
, by whom he was strongly influenced, White writes, "plot is not a structural component of fictional or mythical stories alone; it is crucial to the historical representations of events as well" (51).
The traditionally positivist American historical profession has not known what do to with White. Norman Levitt
Norman Levitt
Norman Jay Levitt was a mathematician at Rutgers University. He was born in The Bronx and received a bachelors degree from Harvard College in 1963. He received a PhD from Princeton University in 1967...
has pointed White out as "the most magisterial spokesman" for relativistic
Relativism
Relativism is the concept that points of view have no absolute truth or validity, having only relative, subjective value according to differences in perception and consideration....
post-modernist historiography, where "[w]hen one particular narrative prevails, the dirty work is invariably done by 'rhetoric', never evidence and logic, which are, in any case, simply sleight-of-language designations for one kind of rhetorical strategy" (Archaeological Fantasies 267). White, however, can also be seen as a traditional moralist, and he has asked of historical and fictional narrative “…on what other grounds [than moralism] could a narrative of real events possibly conclude? […] What else could narrative closure consist of than the passage from one moral order to another? ("The Value of Narrativity" 283). White himself denies being a relativist or post-modernist, averring the reality of events in the past is not contradicted by literary portrayals of those events.
Lawsuit against the LAPD
White figured prominently in a landmark California Supreme Court case regarding covert intelligence gathering on college campuses by police officers in the Los Angeles Police DepartmentLos Angeles Police Department
The Los Angeles Police Department is the police department of the city of Los Angeles, California. With just under 10,000 officers and more than 3,000 civilian staff, covering an area of with a population of more than 4.1 million people, it is the third largest local law enforcement agency in...
. White v. Davis, 13 Cal.3d 757 (1975). In 1972, while a professor of history at UCLA and acting as sole plaintiff, White brought suit against Chief of Police Edward M. Davis
Edward M. Davis
Edward Michael Davis was the chief of the Los Angeles Police Department from , and later a California State Senator from and an unsuccessful Republican candidate for the United States Senate in 1986...
, alleging the illegal expenditure of public funds in connection with covert intelligence gathering by police at UCLA. The covert activities included police officers registering as students, taking notes of discussions occurring in classes, and making police reports on these discussions. White v. Davis, at 762. The Supreme Court found for White in a unanimous decision. This case set the standard that determines the limits of legal police surveillance of political activity in California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
; police cannot engage in such surveillance in the absence of reasonable suspicion of a crime ("Lockyer Manual").
Further reading
- Re-Figuring Hayden White, Edited by Frank AnkersmitFrank AnkersmitFranklin Rudolf Ankersmit is professor of intellectual history and historical theory at the University of Groningen....
, Ewa Domanska, and Hans Kellner. ISBN 9780804760034 - Oliver Daddow. "Exploding history: Hayden White on disciplinization", Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, 1470-1154, Volume 12, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 41–58.
- Patrick Finney. "Hayden White and the Tragedy of International History", Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies AssociationInternational Studies AssociationThe International Studies Association was founded by a group of scholars and practitioners in 1959 to pursue mutual interests in international studies. Representing eighty countries, ISA has over three thousand members worldwide and is the most respected and widely known scholarly association in...
's 49th Annual Convention; San Francisco, CA, USA, Mar 26, 2008. - "Hayden White Talks Trash", Interview by Frederick Aldama, Issue #55, May 2001.
External links
- Bibliography of Hayden White.