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Hayden White: INTRODUCTION:
The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe
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the book is a history of historical consciousness in 19th cen Europe, but wants to contribute to the
current discussion of the problem of historical knowledge
what specific does the historical method of inquiry have? What does it mean to think historically?
- these are the main questions in the 19th cen
– HISTORY was considered a specific mode of existence,
– HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS a distinctive mode of thought, and
– HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE as an autonomous domain with the human sciences
20th century – everything changes, these ideas are questioned
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Re-thinking
– Lévi-Straus, Foucault – see historical reconstructions as fictional, re-define the historical
consciousness that the Western civilization used to view its relationship with other cultures, past
and present
he wants to determine the different theories of historical thinking in the 19 th century – in order to do
that, „I will consider the historical work as what is most manifestly is – a verbal structure in the form
of a narrative prose discourse that presents itself to be a model, or icon, of past structures and
porcesses in the interest of explaining what they were by representing them
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) and philosophers of history (Hegel, Nietzsche,
Marx
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Some record events while others searcb for
parallels with the present

What should an ideal HISTORICAL WORK be like and what should it include?
– there are several ways of understanding historical work, which may be seen as:
– CHRONICLE
– STORY
– MODE OF EMPLOTMENT
– MODE OF ARGUMENT
– MODE OF IDEOLOGICAL IMPLICATION
– first, the elements of the historical field are organized into a chronicle by the arrangement of the
events in a chronological order
– then, the chronicle is organized into a story, btw by discerning beginning, middle, end; transitions
are introduced, encodings, explanations → it becomes a completed diachronic process
– → sometimes, historians are seen as the ones who „discover“ stories in
chronicles (historical documents etc)
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– → BUT: There is a fictional character in this work, different historians come up
with different stories based on the same chronicles
– → putting the events found in chronicles into story-friendly narrative order
raises many questions – Why did it happen like this? What caused what? What
is the meaning? What it all adds up to?
– These questions may answered in 3 ways:
– 1) Explanation by emplotment,
– 2) Explanation by argument
– 3) Explanation by ideological implication
1) Explanation by emplotment
- = „providing the meaning of a story by identifying the kind of story that has been told
- different plot structures – Tragedy, Comedy
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The outcome of comedy is a better, healthier condition of
society which, for a while, seemed threatened by a collision of seemingly
opposite forces within the world
- Satire – mutually exclusive with Romance
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A formist considers an explanation to be complete when a given set of
object has been properly identified and labelled
- an ORGANICIST strategy uses the paradigm of the microcosmis-macrocosmic relationship
(infividual entities are components of processes which aggregate into great wholes) – the organicist
is more interested in the integrative processes than in the actual elements – it is therefore more
abstract
- the MECHANISTIC approach – it searches casual, general laws that determine the outcomes of
processes discovered in the historical field
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Each of those approaches bears components of some ideology
- there are 4 basic ideologies regarding study of history:
1
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Conservative – suspicious of change
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Liberal – see social change through the analogy of adjustments and fine tunings
of a mechanism

Historiographical Styles
– there are different historiographical styles based on what combination of modes of emplotment,
argument and ideological implication the historian uses
– some combinations are not possible (e
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Radical ideology cannot be combined with Satirical
emplotment)
– the final historical accounts are, in fact, quite poetic, fictional (though historians may want to deny
it)
The Theory of Tropes
– there are 4 basic tropes in figurative language:
– Metaphor - phenomena can be cahracterized in terms of their similarity to or difference
from one another (analogy, simile)
– Metonymy - part for a whole
– Synecodoche – a part describes a quality of the whole (He is all hearts)
– Irony – figurative negation; while the other three tropes are „naive“ because they believe in
language´s capacity to grasp the nature of things in figurative terms, irony is sentimental
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these tropes may be used to characterize objects in different kinds of figurative discourse

The Phases of 19th Cen Historical Consciousness
– in the first phase, Voltaire, Gibbon, Kant came to view history in ironic terms
– then there was a second group who believed in empathy in history and promoted the metaphorical
approach
– then, due to some disagreements, there was a deep crisis concerned with the question of the proper
attitude with which study of history should be approached
– → in 1830, Hegel identified this crisis as a tension between an Ironic and Metaphorical
mode of study of history → he offered conceiving it in the Synecdochic mode
– during the first third of the 19th cen
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Irony dissolves all belief in the possibility of
positive political actions, it relativizes language

While pre-Romantics refused the ironic view of history (they believed in empathy), Enlightenment thinkers
(Voltaire, Hume, Kant) embraced irony
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1800 – 1830 – 3 distinct schools:
– Romantic
– Idealist
– Positivist
– they all refuser IRONY

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1830 – 1870
– the „mature“ or „classic“ phase
– Tocqueville, Burckhardt
– tried to find the OBJECTIVE perspective
– tried to achieve REALISM, employed metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy
– Marx tried to turn historiography into science

1) The Enlightenment

Between Irony and Metaphor
– all the important cultural movements of the 19th century (Positivism, Idealism, Naturalism, Realism,
Anarchism, Liberalism) claimed to provide a more REALISTIC comprehension of social reality
– they fought between one another – all the ideological disputes of the 19 th century were disputes over
WHO OFFERS THE MORE REALISTIC REPRESENTATION OF SOCIAL REALITY
– they generally refused Enlightenment (seen as IRONICAL and SKEPTIC)
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, historical field was viewed as a chaos of contending forces among which the
historian had to choose
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– Tragedy is seen from the perspective of the agent (as the culmination of an action), while
– Comedy looks back upon the effects of the action, and attains to a vision of
reconciliation
– Comedy logically comes after Tragedy, for Comedy affirms life and its rights against the
Tragedy, which beliefs that all things are doomed to destruction

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for Hegel, the ideal state would be that in which the private interests of its citizens are in perfect
harmony with the common interest
but the fact is that in reality there is an ambivalnce between the Private and the Public in society and
this tension creates the ironic character of the history of human societies

FOUR KINDS OF REALISM IN 19th CEN
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His main effort was to escape Irony, he was
trying to be realistic by embracing Metaphor
he is the author of History of the French Revolution
he emplotted his histories as dramas of disclosure, and he also characterized the Revolution as a
birth process
he even admitted the „moral“ orientation of his work

RANKE – HISTORICAL REALISM AS COMEDY
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Leopold von Ranke was a Prussian historian
he refused not only Romanticism, but also Hegel´s philosophy, the Mechanistic principle,
Positivism
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But his attitude is „ironic in the extreme“,
meaning there is only very little praise in it

BUCKHARDT – HISTORICAL REALISM AS SATIRE

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there are people who think that Buckhardt´s satirical history finally liberated the idea of history from
myth which dominated historical thougth from the middle ages until then
but, Buckhardt simply used another mythos – SATIRE
he condemned Hegel who put everything and placed it into an intellectual, theoretical frame
there is certain melancholy in his work, the satire is bitter and sad
there is a lot of pessimism, though there is a certain germ of faith in the ultimate creative
potential of humanity

THREE:
THE REPUDIATION OF „REALISM“ IN LATE 19-TH CENTURY PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
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18th century had 3 modes of historiography: TRUE, FABULOUS, SATIRICAL
19th century stressed between „true“ history and the philosophy of history

J
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Droysen
– a philosopher of history
– recognized that a historian work with historical materials depends on 4 factors:
– the content of the materials he uses as sources
– the form in which they appear
– the means of historical articulation
– the end purpose of this articulation
Nietsche – viewe both tragedy and comedy „ironically“ - they are both constructs of human mind rather
than „realistic“
KARL MARX - „The Philosophical Defense of History in the Metonymical Mode“
– apprehended the historical field in the Metonymical mode
– Marx´s thought moved between Metonymical apprehensions of the severed condition of mankind in
its social state and synecdochich intimations of the unity he spied at the end of the whole historical
process
– main quiestion: How can man be both immediately determined and potentially free?
– Marx conceived history as a two fold evolution:
– AN ASCENT – man gains power over nature through science and technology
– A DESCENT – man grows alienated from himself and fellow men
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he also views two dimensions of history
– synchronic – the „base“ - an unchanging entity
– diachronic – the tranformations over time

Marx´s „Capital“
– examines „value“ and its form
– for him, Commodities (=“wealth of societies in which the capitalist method of production prevails“)
are the „elementary units“
– he examines the relationship of commodities and values
– Marx characterized the MONEY form of values as „absurd“
– while commodities exist in reality, values are determinable by the specific amounts of socially
necessary labor expended in their production – but values only exist in people´s minds and they are
based on comparison with commodities, money, etc
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to Marx, „concreted forms of a jelly of human
labor“
– the forms of values are elementary, total, generalized and money
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Marx sees human labor different from animal in that we have a specific idea in our heads before
we start the work (a design), while animals dont

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three motivations for production: impulse to satisfy needs, the capacity to reproduce (=maintain
the species), maintenance of human life in different environments

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furthermore, Marx defines four major types of Socialist consciousness:
– Reactionary
– Conservative (Bourgeois)
– Utopian
– („Scientific“) Communist
– White sees these stages in his own way, as follows:
– Reactionary = metaphorical
– Conservative = metonymical
– Utopian = synecdochic
– Communist = fragmentary, incomplete, flawed
look up: SUPERSTRUCTURE / BASE
what Marx sought to do was to provide an analytical method and a strategy of representation which
would permit him to write about history in the active, reather than the passive voice – the active
voice is that of (leftist) RADICALISM
– Marx´s radicalsm is leftist in that it instists that history is in its mysteries similiar to nature,
for the study of history discovers laws by which one can comprehend both its meaning
and its general direction of development

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NIETZSCHE: The poetic defense of history in the metaphorical mode
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Nietzsche (hereinafter ref to as FN) marked a turning point because he rejected the categories of
historical analysis which historians had used since the 1830s and he denied the reality of
anything like a general historical process upon which these categories may be attuned
FN´s ide of history was not appreciated by professional historians – his purpose was to destroy
belief in a historical past from which men can learn universal truths – for him, there were many
truths, conformed to the motivations of the people who look at the world
for FN, the belief of the universal „truth“ was of Christian origin for they needed one
when FN reflected history, he was trying to determine how history could be transformed into a
kind of TRAGIC ART
– though for FN there is no general purpose or truth in tragic art, rather tragic art is a negation
and destruction of seemingly superior points of view before they harden into life-restricting
concepts
– for FN, the most dangerous of the life-destroying concepts are the concepts of good and
evil (which constitute the basis of morality)
– the most destructive form of illusionism is that which transforms an image into a concept
and then freezes the imagination within the terms provided by the concept
– FN advocated an emplotment of the historical process as Tragedy, but he so redifined the
concept of Tragedy as to deprive it of any moral implications
the history of Western consciousness appears to be nothing but an oscillation in place
acc to FN, life cannot justify itself because it has no need to do so – only man feels a need to justify
his existence because only man (from all the animals) is consious of the absurdity of his being
in short, for FN the whole history of Western man was on great progressive movement from
mere EXISTENCE through ALIENATION to RECONCILIATION, just as the TRAGIC
AGON on the stage
there is no absolute beyond, the only „absolute“ acc to FN is the free individual, liberated from any
spiritual-transcendental impulse
FN´s „THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY“ (=not a book, just a title White)
– a man´s ability to act depends on his ability to forget – man would like to go into the present to
live immediately, but the great weight of the past presses down and bows his shoulders

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the child may enjoy memoryless paradise for a while
1) monumental history provides exemplars of human nobility and teaches us that great things
once existed – it uses the past to condemn the pettiness of the present and to project the historian
himself into the battle for a better future
2) antiquarian history – defined by a respect for origins
3) here comes the concept of critical history, which arises in the impulse to break up from the
past in order to live – the critical historian judges the past, interrogates it remorselessly and
finally condemns it
– FN sees the dangers of these three types of histories as futurism, archaicism, and
presentism
– → for FN, the proposed antidote to all these dangerous forms is historical
consciousness operating in the mode of METAPHOR

FN thinks it is impossible to apply morality to history
but he talks about the weight of history and memory, of bad conscience, the origins of the state in
the debtor-creditor relationships and the emergence of the idea of instrinsically amoreal human
existence
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CROCE:
The Philosophical Defense of History in the Ironic Mode
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White: the case of the philosopher of history is different from that of the historian – the philosopher
of history assumes an Ironic attitude in his seeking to determine the extent to which a given historian
´s work may still be undergirt by unacknowledged presuppositions ar assumptions

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