Hayden White

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Hayden White(1928-) is an 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 professor of comparative literature at Stanford University.

White rejected the post-Collingwoodian 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 favour of the study of other works in the philosophy of history. He asked that historians become "linguistic skepticists [sic]", and that they question their use of language.

In Metahistory (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. 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.

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 metonymy to metaphor, 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).

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, p. 267).