one can sudy nly

wbat ne bas

frst

dreamed abul.

tsacbelard
TrE PSCHOANLYSIS oF FRE

nocToN: Trr PoTcS oF rsoy

This book is a history of historical consciousness in nineteenth-century Europe, but it is also meant to contribute to the current discussion of the robem of historicl knowledge. s such, it represents both an account of the development of historical thinking during a specific period of its evolution and a general theory of the structue of that mode of thought which is called
"histrica1."

What does it mean to think historiclly, and what are the unique characteristics of a specifically historicl method of inquiry? These questions were debated thrughout the nineteenth century by historians, philosophers, and social theorists, but usually within the context of the assumptin that unam_ biguous answers couId be provided for them. "istory" was considered to be a specific mode of existence, "historical consciousness" a distinctive mode f lhgught and "historical knowledge" an autonomous domain in the spec-

trum of the human and physical sciences. n the twentieth century, however, considerations of these questions have been undertaken in a somewhat less self-confident mood and in the face of an apprehension tht definitive answers to them may not be possible. Con_ tinental European thinkers-from Va16ry and eidegger t Sartre, L6viStrauss, and Miche] Foucaut_have cast serious doubts on the value of a specifically "historical" consciousness, stressed the fictive character of histori-

METASToR

the cal reconstructions, and challenged history's claims to a place among a produced have sciences.1 t the Same t1me, Anll_American philosphers

of historical thinking, a literature which, taken as a whole, iustifies serius a genuine art'2 doubts abut history's status as either a rigorous science or The effect of these two lines f inquiry has been to create the impressiol himself that the histrical cnsciousnes, o., .ri"h Western man has prided than a more since the beginning of the nineteenth century y- e_]tt]e civilization theoretical is toitre ideological position from which Western it but views its relationship not nly-to .rltur., and civi]izations preceding in space'a als to those cntemporary *itt it in time and contiguous with -it Westspecifically a as cnsciusness historica] view n short' it is possible to sociindustrial modern, of superiority presumed the ft.irAi.e ily which

function massive t'ody of literature on thelpistemological status and cultural

"r" ety can be etroactively substantiated. 'My or.' ana]vsis ot t," deep structure of the historical imagination f the nineteenth-centul Europe is intended to provide a new perspective on prot knowledge' of historica functin current debate over the nature and of the ceeds on two leve]s of inquirv. t seeks to analyze, first, the works secand, historiography Eurpean recgnized masters of nineieenth_century

ond]the wrks f the foremost phitosphers of history of that same period. genera] uose is to determine the iamily characteristics of the different of the coiceptins oi th. hirtorical process hich actually appear in the works theories possible classic narrators. nother ai is to determine the different bf vhich historical thinking r,as justified 'by the philsophers 'of histoy of lvork that time. n oder to realiie these aims, r'ill consider the histoical of the form in as vhat it most manifest] is-that is to say, a verba] structre past of icon' a narrative prose discouise that purports to be a model, or were by structures ,.,d pro..rres in the interest of explining ht they
epesenting them'a
1See my "The Burden of istory"' History nd Theory,5, no. 2 (966)-: l-34, fo For the more a discussion of the grounds f thii reo1t against historical consciousness' 966), pp' (London, Mind The Sge L v i-Strauss, Claude see recent manifestations, Ehrmann ed. in Structrism' ]acques and idem, "i)vertre to 1e Cru et e cuit," The be cnsuited: ''r_r' may aso Foucault Miche1 worksby (New iork, 966), o. 47-48.Two z99fr'; ork, (New p. ryz), de af ihingr''n ichnocy of th uman Sciences pp' z64ft' ad' L'Achoogie du soir (Paris, 969), "Philo2 The substance of this d"brt. hrs been ably summarized by Louis o. Mink, (|une, no. 21, etphysic,s, 4 of Reie Understanding,'' istoical sophical Analysis and

,,.i.nt.j in lvil1iam . Drry,

re66).
3 See Foucault , The a ere, of course,

,q).z-q8,Mostofthepositionstakenby-themainparticipantsinthedebateae ed,., Philosophical Anaysis nd History (New York,

sion of this poblem, see Ren6 el1ek, Concepts

(w;ter;) literary criticisri, th. probl.* of "realistic" liteary

,.rg. opon coniideration of the most

ode of Things, pp. 367_73.

vexed problem
epresentation'

of Citicism (New Haven and

For a discusLondon,

in

modern

NTR.oDcTIoN

My method, in short, is formaist. lrill nt try to decide whether a given historian's work is a better, or mre correct, account of a specific set of events r segment of the historical Process than some other historian's
1963), pp. 22r_'5. n general, my own approach to the problem, as it appeas vithin the context of histoiogaphy, follows the example of rich Auebach, imesb: The Repe' senttio of Reality inWesten Litetue (Princeton, 1968). The whole question of the "fictive" epesentation of "eality" has been handled profoundly, vith special reference to the visual arts, in E. . Gombrich, Art and llusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictoi Reesentation (London and New ok, 196o). Gombich himself finds the origin of pictorial ealism in Western art ir the effort f Geek artists to translate into visual tems the narrative techniques of epic, tragic, and historical writers. Chapter 4 of At and llusion, on the differences between the conceptual overdetermination of mythicaly oriented Near Easten art and the naative, antimythica at of the Greeks, can be proEtably compared with the famous opening chapter of uerbach's Mimesis, which iuxtaposes the styles of narrative to be found in the Pentateuch and ome. Needless to say, the two analyses of the career of "realism" in Western art offered by Auerbach and Gombrich differ considerably. uebach's study is egelian throughout and Apocalyptic in tone, while Gombrich works within the Neo_Positivist (and anti-egelian) tradition represented most pominently by Kat Popper. But the two orks address a comnon poblem_that is, the natue of "realistic" representation, which is the prob|ern fo modern historiography. Neither, however, takes up analysis of the cucial oncept of histoica repesentatin, even though both take ',hat might be called "the historica] sense" as a central aspect of "realism" in the arts. have, in a sense, reversed their formulation. They ask: what are the "historicat" components of a "realistic" art? ask: what are the "artistic" e]ements of a "realistic" historiography? n seeking to ansve the latter question, have depended heavily on two literary theorists rvhose works epresent vitual philosophical systems: Northop Frye, The Anatomy of Citicism: Four Essays (Princeton, 1957); and Kenneth Burke, Gamm of oties (Berkeey and Los ngeles, 1969). have also profited from a reading of the French Structuralist critics: Lucien Goldmann, Roland Bathes, Michel Foucault, and |acques Derida. should 1ike to stess, howeve, that regad the latter as being, in genera, captives of tropologica strategies of interpretation in the same way that thei nineteenth-century counterpats wee. Foucault, fo example, does not seem to be aware that the categories he uses for analyzing the history of the human sciences ae ittle more than frmalizations of the tropes. have pointed this out in my essay, "Foucau1t Decoded: Notes from Underground,'' istory and Theoy, 12 no. (97): z3-54' n my view, the rvhole diseussion of the nature of "ealism" in literature flounders in the failure to assess critically what a genuinely "historical" conception of "reality" consists of. The usual tactic is to set the "historical" over against the "mythical," as if the former were genuinely emiical and the latter were nothing bt concetual, and then to locate the ealm of the "fictive" between the two poles. Literatue is then vieved as being more or less elistic' depending upon the atio of empirical to conceptual elements contained within it. Such, for example, is the tactic of Frye, as vell as of uebach and Gombrich, although it should be noted that Frye has at least conned the problem in a suggestive essay, "New Directions from old," in Fbls of dentity (New Yok, 1963), which deals tvith the relations among history, myth, and philosophy of history. of the phiosophers who have dealt rvith the "fictive" element in historical naative, have found the folowing most helpful: W. B. Gal1ie, Phiosophy nd th istoicl Undestanding (New York, 1968); Athur C. Danto, Anlytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge, 1965); and Louis o. Mink, "The utonomy of istorical Undestanding," in Philosohical AnIysb nd Hbtory, ed. Day, esp.pp. 79-86.

METsToRY

account f them; rather, wil seek to identify the structural components of

thse accounts.

'hs being given, ho',ever, it is immediately apparent that the works produced by these thinkers represent aternative, an-seemingy mutually exclusive, conceptions bth of the Sane Segments of the historical Process and f the tasks of historical thinking' Considered purey as verbal itructures, the wrks they produced aPpear to have radicaly different forma] characteristics and t dispse the conceptual apparatus used to explain the same sets of data in fundamentally different ways. on the most superficial 1evel, for example, the rork of one historian may be diachronic oi processinary in nature (stressing the fact of change and transformation ln the historical process), rhile that of aother may be synchronic and static in form (stressing the fact of structural continuity). Again, rvhere one historian may iake it as his task to reinvoke, in a lyrical or poetic manner, the "spirit" of a past age, another may take it as his task to penetrate behind the ivents in order to disclose the "Iaws" or "principles" of which a particurar age's "spirit" is only a manifestation or phenomenal form. or, to note onJ othei fundameta] difference, some historians conceive their work primarily as a contributin to the illumination of current socia problems and conflicts, while others are inclined to suppress such presentist concerns and to try to determine the extent to which a given period of the past differs from their own, in what appears to be a predominantly "antiquarian" frame of mind. n sum, considered purely as formal verbal structures, the histories pro_ duced by the master historians of the nineteenth century display radically different conceptions of what "the historical work" should onsist of. n

to the study of historical thinking in the nineteenth century.

nized models of possible ways of conceiving history: historians such as Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, and Burckhardt; and philosophers of history such as Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Croce. n the cnsideration of such thinkers, wi1l moot the issue of which represents the most correct approach to histoical study. Their status as possible mde]s of histrica] representation or conceptualization does not depend upon the nature f tn "dat'' they used to support their generalizations or the theories they invoked to explain them; it depends rather upon the consistency, coherence, and iluminative power of their respective visions of the historical field. This is why they cannot be "refuted," or their generalizations "disconfirmed,,, either by appeal to new data that might be turned up in subsequent research or by the elaboration of a new theory for interpreting the sets of events that comprise their objects of representation and analysis. Their status as models of historical narration and conceptualizatin depends, ultimatey, on the preconceptual and specificalv poetic nature of their perspectives on history and its Processes. l1 this assume as a justification of a frma]ist ,pproa"h

n ny view, this procedure justifies losophers of distinctively classic

achievement, those who still serve as recog-

concetration on historians and phi_

NTRoDcToN

order, therefore, to identify the family characteristics of the difierent kinds of historical thinking prduced by the nineteenth century, it is first necessary to make clear what the ideal-typical structure of the "historical work" might consist of. once such an ideal-typical structure has been worked out, will have a criterion for determining which aspects of any given historical work or phi1osophy of history must be cnsidered in the effort to identify its unique structuraI eIements. Then, by tracing transformations in the ways histrical thinkers characterize those elements and dispose them in a specific narrative in order to gain an "explanatory affect," shu]d be able to chart the funda_ mental changes in the deep structure of the historical imagination for the period under study. This, in turn, will permit one to characterize the different historical thinkers of the perid in terms of their shared status as partici_ pants in a distinctive universe of discourse within which different "styles" of historical thinking were possible.

,--

T he T

heory of the Hibtoncl W ok

begin by distinguishing among the following levels of conceptualization in the historical work: (r) chronicle; (z) story; (3) mode of emplotment; (4) mode of argument; and (5) mode of ideo1ogical implication- take ';chronicIe" and "Story" to refer to "primitive elements" in the historicl ccount, but both represent Processes of selection and arrangement f data from the unpocessed histoic ecord in the iterest of rendering that record more comprehensible to an udience of a particular kind' s thus cnceived, the historical work represents an attempt to mediate among what will calI the histoic fied, the unprocessed historicl racord, other historic ccounts,

and an audience. First the elements in the historical field are organized into a chronicle by the-arangement of the events to be dealt with in the temporalorder of their ccurence; then the chronicle is organized into a story by the fur$er arrangement of the events into the components of a "spectacle" or process of happening, which is thought to possess a discernible beginning, middle, and end. This trnsformtion of chronicle into story is effected by the characterization of some events in the chronicle in terms of inaugural motifs, of others in terms of terminating motifs, and of yet others in terms of transitional motifs. An event hich is simply reported as having happened at a certain time and place is transformed into an inaugurating event by its characterizatin as iuch: "The king went to Westminster on une 3, 3zr. There the fateful meeting occurred between the king and the man who was ultimatelV to challenge him for his throne, though at the time the hvo men appeared to be destined to become the best of friends. . . ." transitionaI motif, on the other hand, signals to the reader to hold his expectations about the signifi-

eSToR

cance of the events cntained in it in abeyance uti] some terminating motif "while the king was iourneying to westminster, he was has been provided: ^by his advisers that his enemies awaited him there, and that the informed

settlement advantageous to the crown were meage." A ierminating motif indicates the apparent end or resolution of a process or situation oI tension, "on pil 6,1333, the Battle of Balybourne was fought. The forces of the king wre victorious, the rebels routed. The resulting Treaty of Howth Cast1, fune /, 333, brought peace lhe realm-though it vas to be an uneasy eace, consumed in the flames of religious strife seven years later." When , gir", set of events has been motifically encoded, the .erde. has been provided with a stol; the chnicle of events has been transformed into a completed diachronic pocess, about which one carr then ask questions as if he r,vere dealing with a synchronic structure of relationprospects

of a

ships.s

istorical stories trace the sequences of events that lead from inaugurations to (provisional) terminations f socia] and cultural PrceSSeS in-a way that chinicles are not required to do. Chronicles are, strictl speaking, open_ ended. n principle thev have no inugurfions; they simply 'begin" when the chronier starts recording events. nd the1, have no culminations or resolutions; thev can go on indefinite]v. Stories, hovever, have a discenible form (even when thaiform is an image f a state of chaos) which marks off the events contained in them from the other events that might appear in a comprehensite chrnicle of the vears coveed in their unfo}dings. f is sometimes said that the aim of the historian is to explain the past by "finding," "identifving," or ."uncol'ering" the "stories" that lie buried in chronic1es; and that the difference betr,een "history'' and "fiction" resides in the fact that the historian "finds" his stories, whereas the fiction r'rite "invents" his. This conception f the historian's task, however, obscures the
5 The distinctions amng chronicle, stry, and p]ot which hat,e tried io develop in this section mav ha,e moe l,,r]ue fo, the analysis of historical rvorks than for the study of 1iterarl fictions. Uniike 1iterary fictions, suh as the novel, historical works ae made up of events that exist utside the consciousness of the witer. The events reported in a novel can be invented in a wa.v that they cannot be (or ae not supposed to be) in a history' This makes it diftcult t distinguish between the chronicle of events and the story being to1d in a literary fiction. n a sense, the "story" being to1d in a novel such as Mann's uddenbooks is indistinguishable from the "chronicle" of events reported in the vork, even though \'e can distinguish between the "chronic1e-story" and tlre "piot" (which is that of an ronic Tragedv). Unlike the novelist, the historian confronts a veritable chaos of eents leady constituted', out of ',vhich he must chose the elements of the story he wou]d tell. e makes his story by including some events and excluding othes, by stessing some and subordinating others. This process of exclusion, stress, and subordination is carried out in the interest of constituting d iltory of aticull kind''hat is to say, he "emplots" his story. On the distinction between story and p1ot, see the essays by Shklovsky, Eichenbaum, and Tomachevsky, epresentatives of the Russian School of Fomalism, in Russin Foml' ist Citicism: Fou ssys, ed. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln, Neb., 1965);

and Frye, Anatomy, PP.

5z-Y, 78-84.

NTRoDUc.To

extent to which "invention" also plays a part in the historian's operations. The same event can Serye aS a different kind f element of many different historical stories, depending on the role it is assigned in a specific motific characterization of the set to which it belongs. The death f the king may be a beginning, an ending, or simply a tansitional event in three different stories. n the chronicle, this event is simply "there" as an element of a series; it does nt "function" as a story element. The histrian arranges the events in the chronicle into a hierarchy of significance by assigning events different functions as story elements in such a way as to disclose the formal coherence of a whole set of events considered as a comprehensible rocess with a discernible beginning, middle, and end. The arrangement of selected events of the chronic]e into a story aises the kinds of questions the historian must anticipate and answer in the course of constructing his narrative. These questions are of the sort: "What happened next?" "ow did that happen?" "Why did things happen this way rather than that?" "ow did it all come out in the end?" These questions determine the narrative tactics the historian must use in the construction of his story. But such questions about the connections between events which make of them elements i a folloable stoty should be distinguished frm ques_ tions f anther srt: "What does it a]] add up to?" "'What is the point of it all?" These questions have to do with the structure of the entire sat of eents cnsidered as a completed story and cal] for a synoptic judgment of the rela_ tionship between a given story and other stories that might be "found," "identified," or "uncovered" in the chronicle. They can be answered in a number of ways. cal] these ways (r) explanation by emplotment, (z) explanation by argument, and (3) explanation by ideological implication.

,z-

xplntion by mplotment

Providing the "meanin g" of a story by identifying the kind of story thaL has been told is calIed explanation by emplotment. f, in the course of narrating his story, the historian provides it with the plot structure of a Tragedy, he hai "explained" it in one way; if he has structured it as a Comedy, he has "explained" it in another way. Emplotment is the way by lvhich a sequence of events fashioned into a story is graduaIly revealed to be a stoy f a particular kind.

Following the line indicated by Northrop Frye in his Aratomy of Citi' cism, identify at least four different modes of empotment: Rornance, Tagedy, Comedy, and Satire. There may be others, such as the Epic, and a given historical accout is likely to contain stories cast in one mode as aspects or phases of the vrhole set of stories empltted in aother mode. But

METASToRY

a given histrian is forced to emp1ot the r,hole set of stories making up his narrative in one comprehensive or rchetypl story form. For example, Michelet cast all of his histries in the Romantic mode, Ranke cast his in the Comic mode, Tocqueville used the Tragic mode, and Burckhardt used Satire. The Epic p1ot structure wuld apPear to be the imp1icit form of chronicle itself. The important point is that every history, even the most "synchronic" or "Structural" of them, rvill be empltted in some way. The Satirical mode provided the formal principles by ,hich the supposedly "nor_narrative"

historiography of Burckhardt can be identified as a "storv" of a particular sort. For, as Frye has shown, stories cast in the ronic mde, of which Satire is the fictinal form, gain their effects precisely by frustrating normal expectatins about the kinds of resolutions provided by stories cast in other modes (Romance, Comedy, or Tragedy, as the case may be).6 The Romance is fundamentally a drama of self-identification symbolized by the heo's transcendence of the world of experience, his victoy over it, and his final liberation from it-the st of drama associated tvith the Grai]

6 am aware tlrat, by using Frye's terminology and classificatin of p1ot structures, throw myself open to criticisn bv those literary theoists vho eithe oppose his taxnomic efforts or have thei own taxonomies t offer in place of his. do not rvish to suggest that Frye's categories are the sole possible ones for classif,ving genes, modes, mythoi, and the 1ike, in literature; but have found them especially usefu1 for tlre aralysis of historica] works. The principa1 criticism of Frye's itera-v theory sees to be that, wlrile his method of analysis works ve11 enough on secnd order literary genres, such as the fairy ta]e or the detective story, it is to rigid and abstract to d justice t such richly textured and multi ]eveled rorks as ing Le, The Remembrnce of Things Pst, o eyen Pardise Lost. This may be tiue; it probablv is. But Fn'e's analr'sis of the principal forms f nrythic and fabulous liteatue sen'es \'e' tr'ell f the erplicatin of the simple fs of emplotment nret rr,ith in such "restricted" at fms as historiogaphy. istorical "stries" tend t fa]l into the categies eaborated bv Fre pecise1y because the historian is inclined to resist cnstruction of the compler peipeteias v,,hich are the novelist's and damatist's stock in tade. Precisel1, because the historian is not (or clails not to be) telling tlre story "for its on sake," he is inclined to emplot his stories in the most conventional forms-as fairy ta]e or detective story on the one hand, as Romance, Comedy, Tagedy, or Satire on

the other.

t may be recalled that the nrmally educated historian of the nineteenth century vould have been raised on a staple of classical and Christian ]iteratue. '1'e mythoi contained in this liteatue vould have povided him ith a fund of story forms on which he could have

drawn for narrative proses. t would be a mistake, however, to assume that even as subtle a historian as Tocquevi11e wo]d be able to shape these story forms to the kinds of purposes that a great poet, such as Racine or Shakespeae, wouId conceive. When his_ torians like Burckhadt, 4arx, Michelet, and Ranke spoke of "Tragedy" or "Comedy," they usually had a very simple notion of rvhat these terms signify. t 'vas different with ege1, Nietzsche, and (to a lesser extent) Crce. s aestheticians, these ihree phi1osophers had a much more complex corceptin of genre, and vrte much more complex hisiories as a result. }Iistorians in general' however criiical they are of their souces, tend to be naive storytellers. For F-ve's ch*racterization of the basic p1ot structures, see ntomy, pp. 158_:38. on Frye, see Geffrey atman, "Ghostlier Demarcations: The Sveet Science of Northrop Frye," in eyond Fomlism: Literry Esso1s, l95B-r97o (New aven and London, 97),pp. z4_4l.

NTRoDUcToN

legend or the story of the resurrection of Christ in Christian mythology. t is a drama of the triumph of good over evil, of virtue over vice, of light over darkness, and of the ultimate transcendence of man over the world in which he was imprisoned by the FaI1. The archetypal theme of Satire is the precise opposite of this Romantic drama of redemption; it is, in fact, a drama of diremption, a drama dominated by the apprehension that man is ultimately a captive of the world rather than its master, and by the recognition that, in the fina] analysis, human consciousness and lvill are always inadeqlate to the

task

of overcoming definitively the dark force of death, which is

man's

unremitting enemy. Comedy and Tragedy, however, suggest the possibility of at least partia liberation from the condition of the Fa1] and povisional release from the divided state in which men find themselves in this world. But these provisional victories are conceived differently in the mythic archetlpes of which the plot stuctures of Comedy and Traged are sublimated forms' n Comedy, hope is held out for the temporary triumph of man over his wr1d by the prospect of occasional reconcilitions of the forces at play in the social and natural worlds. Such reconciliations are symbolized in the festive occasions which the Comic writer traditionally uses to terminate his dramatic accounts of change and transformation. n Tragedy, there are no festive occasions, except false or illusory ones; rather, there are intimations of states of division

among men more terrible than that which incited the tragic agon at the beginning of the drama. Still, the fall of the protagonist and the shaking of the world he inhabits rhich occur at the ed of the Tragic play are not regarded as totally threatening to those ho suvive the agonic test. There has been a gain in csciousness for the spectators of the contest' And this gain is thought to consist in the epiphany of the law governing human existence which the protagonist's exertions against the world have brught
to pass.

The recnciliations which occur at the end of Comedy are reconciliations of men with men, of men with their vrorld and their society; the condition of society is epresented as being purer, saner, and heathier as a result of the conflict among seemingly inalterably opposed elements in the world; these elements are revealed to be, in the long run, harmonizable with one another, unified, at oe with themselves and the thers. The reconciliations tlrat occur at the end of Tragedy are much more somber; they are more in the nature of resignations of men to the conditions under whict they must labor in the world. These conditions, in turn, are asserted to be inalterable and eterna, and the implication is that man cannot change them but must work within

them. They set the limits on what may be aspired to and what may be egiiimately aimed at in the quest for securi and sanity in the uzorld. Romance and Satire would aPear to be mutully exclusie ways of emplotting the processes of reality. The very notion of a Romantic Satire repiesents a contradiction in terms. can legitimately imagine a Satirica

10

METHSTORY

Romance, but what wouId mean by that term would be a form of repre_ sentation intended to expose, from an ronic standpint, the fatuity of a Romantic conception of the world' on the other hand, however, can speak of a Comic Satire and a Satirical Comedy, r of a Satirical Tragedy and a Tragic Satire. Bt here it shuld be noted that the reIation between the genre (Tragedy or Comedy) and the mode in which it is cast (Satirical) is different from that which obtains between the genre of Romance and the modes (Comic and Tragic) in which it may be cast. Comedy and Tragedy represent qulifictions of the Rmantic apprehension of the world, considered as a oppose the effort ProceSS, in the interest of taking seriously the foces which for mankind in possibility held up as a at human redemption naively if the former even take conflict seriousy, Romance. Comedy and Tragedy fces and opposed econcilition of eventuates in a vision of the u]timate man on the opposing forces the latter in a reeltion of the nature of the f the truths assimilate other. nd it is possible for the Romantic write to the within human existence revealed in Comedy and Tragedy respectively structure of the drama of redemption rvhich he figures in his vision of the

ultimate victory of man over the world of experience. But Satire represents a different kind f quaification of tlre hopes, possibilities, and truths of human existence revealed in Romance, Comedy, and Tragedy respectively. t views these hopes, possibilities, ad truths ronically, in the atmosphere generated b1, the apprehension of the ultimate inadequacy of consciousness to live in the world happilv or to comprehend it fuly' Satire presuPposes the ultimte indequcy of the visions f the world dramatically represented in the genres of Romance, Comedy, and Tragedy alike. As a phase in the evolution of an artistic style or literary tradition, the advent f the Satirical mode of representation signals a conviction that the word has grov/n ld. Like philosophy itsef, Satire "paints its gray on gray" in the awareness of its own inadequacy as an image of reality. t therefore prepares consciousness fr its repudiation of all sophisticated conceptualizations of the wrld and anticipates a return to a mythic apprehensin of the worId and its rocesses. These four archetypal story foms provide us with a means of characterizing the different kinds of explanatory affects a historian can strive for on the

it allows us to distinguish between of the sort produced by Michelet and dichronic, r processionary, narratives narratives written by Tocqueville and Ranke and the synchroic, or static, Burckhardt. n the former, the sense of structural transformation is upper_ mst as the principal guiding representation. n the latter, the sense f structural continuity (especially in Tcqueville) or stasis (in Burckhardt) predominates. But the distinction between a synchronic and diachronic representation of historical reali should not be taken as indicating mutually exclusive ways of emplotting the historical fie1d. This distinction points merely t a difference of emphasis in treating the relationship between con_
level of narrative emplotment. And

INTRODUCTION

1
a

tinuity and change in a given representation of the historical process as

vrhole.

Tragedy and Satire are modes of emplotment vrhich are consonant with the inierest of those historians wh perceive behind or within the welter of evets contained in the chronicle an ongoing Structure of relatioships or an eternal return of the Same in the Different. Romance and Cmedy stress the emergence of new forces or conditios out of processes that appear at first glanci either to be changeless in their essence or to be changing only in their phenomenal frms. But each of these archepal plot structures has its impliation for the cognitive operations by which the historian seeks to "explain" what was "realy happening" during the process of which it provides an
image of its true form.

,z- xplntion by Fonal Argument

n addition to the leve] of conceptualization on which the historian emplots his narrative account of "what happened," there is another level on which he may seek to explicate "the point of it all" or "what it a1l adds up to" in the end. on this level can discern an oPeration which caIl explanatin by formal, explicit, or discursive argument. Such an argument provides an explanation of what happens in the story by invoking principles of combinatiJn which Serve as putative aws of histrical explanation. on this ]eve] of conctualization, the historian explains the events in the story (or the form of th events which he has imposed upon them through his emplotment of them in a particular mode) by construction of a nmoIogical-deductive argument. This argument can be analyzed into a syllogism, the major premise of which consists of some putatively universal lav of causa1 relationships, the minor premise of the boundary conditions vrithin which the law is applied, and a ioncusion in which the events that actually ccurred are deduced from the premises by logical necessity. The most famous of such putative laws is probably Marx's so-called law of the relationship between the Superstructure and the Base. This law states that, whenever there is any transfoma_ tion i the Base (comprised of the means of production and the modes f relationship among them), there will be a transfrmation in the comPonents of te Superstructure (social and cultural institutions), but that the reverse relationship does not btain (e.g., changes in consciousness do not effect changes in the Base). Other instances of such putative laws (such as "Bad money drives out good," or even such banal observations as "What goes up must come do\/n") are usually at least tacitly invoked during the course oi the historian's efforts to explain such a phenomenon as, say, the Great Depression or the FaIl f the Roman Empire. The commonsensical or con_ ventina] nature of these Iatter generalizations does not afiect their status as

72

METISToRY

the presumed major premises of nomological-deductive arguments by wtrich expInations of events given in the story are provided. The nature f the geeraIizations only points to the protoscientific character of historical explanation in general, oi the inadequacy of the social sciences fom which such generaIizations, appearing in an appropriately modified and more rigrously stated form, might be borrowed. The important point is that, insofar as a historian offers explanations by which the cnfigurations of events in his narrative are explained in something ]ike a nomlogical_deductive argument, such explanatins must be distinguished from the explanatory affect gained by his emplotment of his story as story of particulr kind. This is not because one might not treat emplot_ ment as a kind of exp]anation by nomological-deductive means. n fact, a Tragic emplotment might be treated as an application of the laws_ that govern human n"to.. and societies in certain kinds of situations; and, insofar as such situations have been established as existing at a certain time and place, those situations might be considered to have been explained by the invocation of the principles alluded to, in the same way that natural events are explained y ident1fication of the universal causal laws that are presumed to govern iheir relationships. might vant to say that, insofar as a historian provides the "plot" by which ihe events in the story he tells are given some kind of formal coherence, he is doing the same kind of thing a scientist does when he identi' fies the elemenis of the nomolgicaI_deductive argument in which his explanation has t be cast. But distinguish here betwee the emplotment of_the events of a history considered as elements of a stry and the characterization of those events as elements in a matrix of causal relationships presumed to have existed in specific provinces of time and space. n short, am for the nomet taking at }ace vaiue the historian's claim to be doing both art and science and the distinction usually drawn bet,een the histoian's iestigtie opertioru on the one hand and his nnrtie opertion on-the other. We grant that it is one thing t represent "vhat happened" and "why it hapthe form of lened as it did," and quite another to provide a verbal model, in from leading process deeopmenf of the explain to by which narrative, causation' larvs of general to by appeal other situatin to sme one situation But history differs from the sciences precisely because historians disagree, not nly ver what are the laws of social causation that they might invoke to explain a given sequence of events, but also over the question of the form tht , "r.i..,tific" xplanation ought to take. There is a long history of dispute over whether natural scientific and historical expanations must have ih. ,r*. formal characteristics. This dispute trns on the problem of whether the kinds of laws that might be invoked in scientific explanations have their counterparts in the realm of the so-called human or spiritual sciences, such as socioiogy and history. The physical sciences aPpear to progress by virtue of the agreeients, reached from time to time among members of the established

NTRoDUcToN

t3

communities of scientists, regarding what vril count as a scientific probIem, the frm that a scientific explanation must take, and the kinds of data that will be permitted to count as evidence in a prperly scientific account of reali. Among historians no such agreement exists, or ever has existed. This may merely reflect the protoscientific nature of the historiographical enterprise, but it is imporiant to bear in mind this congenital disagreement (or lack of agreement) over rvhat counts as a specificaly historical explanation of any given set of historical phenomena. For this means that historical explanations are bound to be based on different metahistorical presuppositions abut the nature of the historical fieId, prupPositions that generate different conceptions of the kind of explntions that can be used in historiographical analysis.

istoriographicaI disputes on the Ievel of "interpretation" are in reality disputes over the "true" nature of the historian's enterise. Fistory reaiS in the state of conceptual anarchy in which the natural sciences existed during the sixteenth century, when there were aS many difierent cnceptions of "the scientific enterprise" aS there were metaphysical psitions. n the sixteenth century, the different conceptions of what "science" ought t be ultimately reflected difierent cnceptions of "reality" and the different epistemologies generated by them. So, too, disputes over what "history" ought to be reflect similarly varied conceptions of what a proper historical explanation ought to consist of and different conceptions, therefore, of the historian's
task.

Needless to say, am not speaking hee of the kinds of disputes which arise on the reviewers' pages of the professional iournals, in which the erudition or precision of a given historian may be questioned. am speaking about the kinds of questions which arise when two or more scholars, of roughly equal erudition and theoretical sophistication, cme to alternative, though not necessarily mutually exclusive, interpretations of the same set of historical events, or to different answers to such questions as "What is the true nature of the Renaissance?" What are involved here, on at least one level of cnceptualization, are different notions of the nature of historical reality and of the appropriate form that a historical account, considered as a formal argument, ought to take. Following the analysis of Stephen C. Pepper in his World Hypotheses, have differentiated four'paradigms of the form that a historical explanation, considered as a discursive argument, may be conceived to take: Formist, Organicist, Mechanistic, and Contextualist.T The Formist theory of truth aims at the identification of the unique
The remarks made with espect to Frye in note 6 apply, muttis mutandi, to Pepper's notion of the basic forms of philosophical eflection. Certainly the greatest philosophersPlato, ristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Mill_esist reduction to the achepes povided by Pepper. f anything, their thought repesents a mediation bet''veen two or more of the kinds of doctrinaire positions which Peppe outlines. Pepper's ideal types do, howeve, provide a very convenient classification of the more simplistic philosophical systems

L4

METAsTRY

characteistics of objects inhabiting the historicaI field. ccodingy, the Forrnist considers an explanation to be complete when a given set of objects has been propery identified, its class, generic, and specific attributes assigned, and labeli atiesting to its particularity attached to it. The obiects alluded to rray be either individualities or collectivities, particulars or r:niversals, concreie entities or abstractins. As thus envisaged, the task of historical explanation is t dispel the apprehension of those similarities that appear to be shared by all otjects in the fie1d. When the historian has established the uriqueneis of the particu]ar objects in the field r the varietv of the types of phe.ro*ena which the field manifests, he has provided a Formist explanation

of the field as such. The Frmist mode of explanatin is to be found in erder, Carlyle, Miche]et, in the Rorantic histrians and the great historical narrators, such as Niebuhr, Mmmsen, and Trevelyan_in any historiography in which the depiction of the variety, color, and vividness of the historical field is taken as th central aim of the historian's rvork. To be Sure, a Formist historian may be inc]ined to make generaIizatins about the nature of the historical process as a whole, as in Carlyle's characterization of it as "the essence of innumerable biogaphies." But, in Formist conceptions of historical explanation, the uniquenss_f the different agents, agencies, and acts which make up the "events" to be explained is central to one's inquiries, not the "ground" r
"scene" against which these entities arise.8
o lvorld views, the kind of general conction of eality vhich we find in historians'hen they sek s plilosohes_that is to say, when they invoke some general notion of being, appea1 to some general theo, f truth and verification, draw ethical implication from truths putativelv established, and so on. Most historians seldom rise above the leveJ of philosophiia sophistication represented by, say, Edmund Burke. The great Whig cetainly had a

world iew, thuqh hardlv what would be recognized as a "phi1osophy." So, too, do most historians, Tocqueville not excepted. By contrast, the greatest philosophers of history tend to work out a philosophy as wel1 as elaborate a wold view. In this sense they are more "cognitive]v responsible" than the historians, ,,vho for the most part simply assume and treat it as if it were a cognitively esponsible philosophical position' on the *o,]d "i.* basic "world h1potheses," see Stephen C. Pepper, Wod yotheses: A Study in idece (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1966), pt. z', pp. 4ft. have found Kenneth Burke's critical terminology most he]p{ul in my attempts to characteize ''hat I have called the "historical fieId" prior to its analysis and reprentation by the historian. Buke maintains that all literary epresentations of reality can be analyzed in terms of a pentad of hypothesized "grammatica" elements: scene, agent, act, agency, and puose. The way these elements are characterized and the relative weights given to them as causal forces in the "dlama" in which they figure eveal the wold viev implicit in every representation of reality. For example, a Materialistic writer will be inclined to stress the element of "scene" (the milieu, ho"vever conceived) over the elements of "agent," "act," "agency," and "puose" in such a way as to make the latter set little more than epiphenomena of the former power. By contrast, an dealist writer wi be inclined to see "puose" everywhee, and will turn "scene" itsel{ into little more than an illusion. See Burke, Gmm of oties, p. 3_2o, for a general discussion. Whi]e he]pful as a device for characterizing a histrian's conception of the unprocessed

NTRoDUCO

15

To use epper's terms, Formism is essentially "dispersive" in the analytical operations it carries out on the data, rather than "integrative," as both

Organicist and Mechanistic explanations tend to be. Thus, although a Formist explanatry strategy tends t be u,ide in "Scope"-amp1e in the kinds of particulars it identifies as occupying the historical field-its generalizations abut the PrceSSeS discerned in the fieId lvill be inclined to lack conceptual "precision." Romantic historians, and, indeed, "narrative historians" in genera, ae inclined to construct generalizations about the whle histrical fie]d and the meaning of its processes that are s extensive that tlrev bear very little weight as propositions that can be confirmed or disconfirmed by appeal to empirical data. But such historians usually make up for the vacuity of their generalizations bv the vividness of their reconstructions of particuar agents, agencies, and acts represented in theii narratives. Orgnicist world hypotheses and their coesponding theories f truth and

argument are relatively more "integrative" and hence more reductive in their operations. The Organicist attempts to depict the particulars discerned in the histrical field as components of synthetic processes. t the heart of t1re Organicist strategy is a metaphysical commitment to the paradigm of the microcosmic-macrocosmic relationship; and the organicist histrian wi]1 tend to be governed by the desire to see individual entities as cornponents f processes which aggregate into wholes that are greater than, or qualitatively different from, the sum of their parts. Historians rvho work vrithin this strategy of explanation, such as Ranke and most of the "nationalistic" historians of the middte decades of the nineteenth century (von Sybel, Mmmsen, Treitschke, Stubbs, Maitland, etc.), tend to structue their narratives in such a way aS t depict t-re consolidation or crystallization, out of a set f apparently dispersed events, of some integrated entit vhose impotance is greater than that of any f the individual entities analyzed or described in the course of the narrative. dea]ists in general, and dialectical thinkers such as egel specifically,
"histoica] field," Burke's theories are less so for characterizing what the historian might make of the field once it has been "grammatically" encoded. is Rhetoric of otis (Berkeley and Los ngeles, 1965), which is meant to probe the moral dimensions of literary representation, and his Language as Symbolic ction (Berkeley and Los ngeles, 1968), which is meant to proide a secularized version f the medieval "anagogical" Ievel of meaning and signification, ae disappointingly conventional. Buke is certainly right in holding that all literary representations of reality, however "realistic," are in the last analysis allegorical. But, when he goes on to classify the kinds of allegories which might be present within them, he offers litte more than a pastiche of Marxist, Freudian, and anthropological symbologies, which are themselves only allegorical representations of the "reality" they puort simply to analyze. Considered as alegories, histories appear to lend themselves to analysis by the methods advanced by Frye. Considered as a form of ogni' tively responsible discourse, a history seems to be characterizable in Pepper's terminology. nd, consideed as motal tracts, they seem to be accuatey describable in the terms po' vided by Mannheim's band of sociology of knowledge, on which see note r belolv.

L6

METASToR

represent this approach to ihe poblem of expaining the processes discerned in the historical field. T be S1re, aS Pepper notes, historians working in this mode wi1l be more

interested in chaacterizing the integrative rocess than in depicting its individual elements. This is what gives to the historical arguments cast in this mode their "abstract" quality. Moreover, history written in this mode tends to be oriented toward the deterrnination of the end or gol toward which all the processes found in the historical field are presumed to be tending. historian such as Ranke, of course, will consciously resist the inclinatin to specify what the telos of the rvhole historical process might be, and content himself with the effort to determine the nature of certain provisional teloi, intermediary integrative structures such as the "folk," the "nation," or the "cultlre," which he purports to discern in the ongoing historical process. The

determination of the fil end of the whole historical process can be glimpsed, Ranke maintains, only in a religious vision. nd theefore Ranke's work may be taken to be an example of a historiography composed in a specifically Formist mode. But, although Ranke excels at the depiction of events in their particulaity, his naatives ae given their Structure and frmal coheren ce as explutions of the processes he depicts primarily by their tacit appeal to the organicist model of what an appropriate historical explanation ought to be, a model embedded vithin his consciousness as the paradigm of rvhat ny alid explanation of any process in the world ought

t is a characteristic of organicist strategies f explanation to eschew the search fo the ls of historical pocess, rvhen the term "laws" is cnstrued in the sense of uni,ersal and invariant causa] relationships, after the manner of },elvtonian phvsics, Lavoisierian chemistry, or Darwinian biology. The Organicist is inclined to talk about the "principles" or "ideas" that inform the indi,idual processes discerned in the field and a]l the Processes taken as a whole. These principles or ideas are seen as imaging or prefiguring the end torvard which the ocess as a who]e tends. They do not function as causal agents or agencies, except in historians with a decidedly mystical or thegical orientation, in vrhich case they are usually interpreted as mani_ festations of God's puose for is creation. n fact, for the organicist, such priniples and ideas function not as restrictions on the human capacity to realize a distinctively human goal in history, as the "la\,vs" of history can be suPPosed to d in the thought of the Mechanist, but as guarantors of an

to be.

essentiaI human feedm. Thus, although the organicist rnakes Sense out of the historical process by displaying the integrative nature of the historica process taken as a whole, he does not dravr the kinds of pessimistic concluiions that the strict Mechanist is inclined to draw from his reflections on the nmoIogical nature of historica1 being. echnistic wor1d h1potheses are simiIarly integrative in their aim, but

they are inclined to be reductive rather than synthetic.

To put the

matter

NTRoDUcTIoN

t7

part relationships, the specific configuratins of which are determined by the laws that are Presumed t govern their interactions. Thus, a Mechanist such as Buckle, Taine, Marx, or, as wi]l indicate, even Tocqueville, sfudies histry in order to divine the Iaws that actually govern its operations and writes history in order to display in a narrative form the effects f those ]aws. The apprehension of the laws that govern history and the determination f their specific nature may be more or less prominent in the representation of "what was happening" in the historical process at a given time and place; but, insofar as the Mechanist's inquiries are carried out in the search for such laws, his account is threatened by the same tendency toward bstraction as thai of the organicist. e considers individual entities to be less important as evidence than the classes of phenomena to which they can be shown to belong; but these classes in turn are less important to him than the larvs their reguIarities are presumed to manifest. Utimately, for the Mechanist, an explanation is considered complete only when he has discovered the laws that are presumed to govern history in the same way that the laws of physics ae Pesumed to govern nature. e then applies these laws to the data in such a \/ay aS to make their configurations understandable as functions of those laws. Thus, in a historian such as Tocqueville, the particular attributes of a given institution, custom, law, art form, or the like, are less important as eidence than the species, class, and generic typifications which, on anaIysis, they can be shown to exemplify. And these pifications in turn are regarded by Tocqueville-indeed, by Buckle, Marx, and Taine-as less important than the laws of social structure and Process which govern the course of Western history, to whose operations they attest. Obviously, although they are characterized by conceptual precision, Mechanistic conceptions of truth and explanation are thrown open to the charges of lack of scope and tendency toward abstraction in the same way that their Organicist counterparts are. From a Formist point of view, both Mechanism and Organicism appear to be "reductive" of the variety and color of the individua entities in the historical field. But, in order to restore the desired scope and concreteness, one need not take refuge in so "impressionistic" a conception of historical explanation as that represented by Formism. Rather, one can embrace a Contextult position, which as a thery of truth and explanation represents a "functional" conception of the meaning or significance of events discerned in the historical field.

in Kenneth Burke's terms, Mechanism is inclined to view the "acts" of the "agents" inhabiting the historical field as manifestations of extrahistorical "agencies" that have their rigins in the "scene" within which the "action" depicted in the naative unfolds. The Mechanistic theory of explanation turns upon the search for the causal laws that determine the outcomes of Prcesses discovered in the histrica field. The objects that are thought to inhabit the historica] fie]d are construed as existing in the modali of part-

The informing presupposition of Cntextualism is that events can

be

18

METISToR

explained by being set within the "context" of their occurrence. Why they occurred as they did is to be explained by the revelation of the specific relationships they bore to other events occurring in their circumambient historical space' ere, as in Formism, the histrica] field is apprehended as a "spectacle" or richly textured aras web which on first glance appears to lack coherence and any discernible fundamental structure. But, unlike the Formist, who is iclined simply to consider entities in their particularity and uniqueness-i.e., their similarity to, and difference from, other entities in the accounted for by the specification of the functional interrelationships existing among the agents and agencies occupying the field at a given time. The determination of this functiona iglerrelationship is carried ut by an operation that some modern philosophers, such as w. . Wa]sh-and saiah Berlin, have caIled "co1igation."9 n this operation the aim of expIanation is to identify the "threads" that link the individuaI or institutin under study to its specious sociocultural "present." Examples of this kind of explanatory strategy can be found in any historian worthy of the name, from erodotus to uizinga, but it finds expression as a dominant principIe f explanation in the nineteenth century in the work of |acob Burckhardt. s a strategy of explanation, Contextualism seeks to avoid both the radically dispersive tendency of Formism and the abstractive tendencies of Organicism and Mechanism. t strives instead tor a retie integtion of the phenomena discerned in finite provinces f historical occurrence in terms of "trends" or genera physiognomies of perids and epochs. nsofar as it tacitly invokes rules of combination fr determining the family chaacteristics of entities occupying finite prvinces of historical occurrence, these ru1es are not construed as equivalent to the universal la,s of cause and effect postulated by ihe Mechanist or the genea teleological principles postulated by the organicist. Rather, the are cnstrued as actual relationships that are presumed to have existed at specific times and places, the first, finaI, and material causes of which can never be knorvn.

field-the Contextualist insists that "what happened" in the field can

be

The Contextualist poceeds, Pepper tels us, by isolating some (indeed, ny) element of the historica] field as the subject of study, whether the element be as 1arge aS "the French Revolution" or as smal1 as ne day in the life of a specific Person. e then proceeds to pick out the "threads" that Iink the event to be explained to different areas of the context. The threads are identified and traced outward, into the circumambient natural and social space within which the event occurred, and both backward in time, in order to determine the "rigins" of the event, and forward in time, in order to determine its "imact" and "influence" on subsequent events. This tracig
See W. . Walsh, Intoduction to the Philosohy of istoy (London, 196r), pp. 6o_65; Isaiah Bein' "The Concept of Scientific istory," in Philosohic nlysis nd History, ed. Day, pp. 4o-51' on "coliigation" in general, see the remaks of Mink, "Autonomy," pp. 77 L-7 2.
9

INTRoDUcToN

opeation ends at the point at which the "threads" either disappear into the "context" of some other "event" or "converge" t cause the occurrence of some new "event." The impulse is not to integrate all the events and trends that might be ideniified in the whole historical field, but rather to link them together in a chain of provisional and restricted characterizations f finite provinces of manifestly "significant" occuence. t should be obvious that the Contextualist approach .to the poblem of impulses behind Formism on the oe hand and the integrative irnpulses behind organicism on the other. But, in fact, a Cont-xtualist conception of truth, explanation, and verification appears to be surpassingly modest in what it asks of the historian and demands of the reader. Yet, by virtue of its organization of the historical field into different provinces of significant occurrence, on the basis of which periods and epochs can be distinguished from ne another, Contextua1ism represents an ambiguous solution to the problem of constructing a narrative model of the processes discerned in the historical fie1d. The "flow" of historical time is envisaged by the Contextualist as a wavelike motion (this is explicitly indicated by Burckhardt) in rvhich certain phases or culminations are considered t be intrinsically more significant than others. The operation of tracing threads of occurrences in such a \.vay as to permit the discernment of trends in the process suggests the possibility of a narrative in vrhich the images of development and evolution might predominate. But, actually, Contextualist explanatory strategies incline more toward synchrnic repesentatins of segments or sections of the process, cuts made across the grain of time as it were. This tendency toward the structuralist or synchronic mode of representation is inherent in a Contextualist wrId hypothesis. nd, if the historian who is inc]ined toward Contextua]ism would aggregate the various periods he has studied into a comprehensive viev of the whole historica1 process, he must mve outside the Contextualist framework-tward either a Mechanistic reduction f the data in terms of

historical explanatin can be regaded as a combination of' the dispersive

the "timeless" 1aws that are presumed t govern them or an organicist synthesis of those data in terms of the "principles" that are presumed to reveal the telos toward which the whole process is tending over the ong
haul.
}.ow,

any of these four mode]s of explanation might be used in a historical wrk to provide something 1ike a formal argument of the true meaning of the events depicted in the narrative, but they have not enjoyed equal authority among the recognized professional practitioners of the discipline since its academicization in the ear1y nineteenth century. n fact, among academic historians the Formist and Contextualist models have tended to prevail as the main candidates for orthodoxy. Whenever Organicist or Mechanistic tendencies have appeared in ecognized masters of the craft, as in Ranke and Tocqueville espectivelv, these tendencies have been regarded as rnfortunate lapses from the proper forms that explanations in history may

METASToR

tolard the oganicist and Mechanistic modes of explanation appears to a bias on the part f the professional eJtrb]ish-e''i.- lr it is ganted that organicism and Mechanisr do give insights into any process in the natural and socia wor]ds that cannot be achieve b Formisi and Contextualist strategies, then the exclusion of organicis* ,rd Mebhanism from the canon of othodox historical explanations must be base1 on extra-episternlogical cnsideratins. Commitment to tl-re dispersive techniques of Form_ isr and Cntextua]ism reflects nly a decision on the part of historians nt to attempt the kind of integratins of data that Organicism and Mechanism sanction as a atter of course. This decision, in turn, wou]d aPear t rest on precriticaly held opinions about the form that a science of mn and socie
exPreSS on1y
10

t has been argued, of course, that histor can be liberated from myth, religion, and metaphsics onlv bv the exclusion of organicist and l\{echanistic modes f explanation from its operatins. dmittedly, history cannot therebv be e]evated int a rigrous "science," but the contention is that it can at least avoid the dangers of "scientism"-the duplicitous aping of scientific ethod and iegitimate appropriation of Science'S authority-by this exclusion. For, br, limiting itself to explanation in the modes of Formism and Contextualism, historiography would at least remain "empiica,' and resist the fa]j int the kind of "philosophy f history" practiced by egel and 4arx. But, preciselv because history is not a rigorous science, this hostility

mode of expanation over anothe.

But the grunds for professional historians' hstility to organicist and _ Mechanistic mdes of expanation remain obscre. or, rather, th reasons for this hostili wuld appear to lie in considerations of a specificaly extra_ epistemlogica] sort. For, given the protoscientific nature of historica] studies, there are no apodictic epistemolgical grounds for the preference of one

modes of explanatio in historica thught.1o

tin f a pecuiarly "historical" sort may take. By contrast, Mechanism and organicism have represented lreterodoxies of historical thught, in the opin_ ion of both the main line of prfessional historians and thaiof their defnders philosophers who regard "philosophy f history" as myth, error, 3o'ng or ideology. For example, Karl Popper's influetia] The Poer of Historicism consists of little more than a sustained indictment of these two

n short, for professional historians, Forrism and Contextualism have represented the limits f choice among the possible forms that an explana-

of history."

organicist and Mechanistic terms has come t predominate in a given thinker, such as Hegel on the ne hand and Marx n the other, this impulse has been intereted as the reaso for their fall into the nefarious "philosophy

take. Moreover, when the impulse to explain the historical field

in overtly

Kai R. Popper, The Poety of Historicism (London, l96L ), pp.

'-'s.

NTRoDUcToN

2L

"hierarchical" preconceptions of "Conservatives" respeciively. By contrast, the Radica]s' c]aims to have discovered the "laws" of historica Stucture and process are regarded by Libera1 historians as being siriarly motivated ideologically. Such la.,vs, it is maintained, are usually advanced in the interest f promoting some Program of social transformatin, in either a Radicai or a Reactionary direction. This gives to the very search for the laws of historica] Structure and process a bad odor and enders suspect the schoIarship f any historian who claims to be seeking such 1aws. The same applies to those "principles" by which dealist phisophes f history purport t explicate the "meaning" of history in its totality. Such "princip1es," rponents of Contextualist, F'ormist, and Mechanistic conceptins of explanation insist, are aways offered in support of ideological positins that are etrograde or obscurantist in their intentions. There does, in fact, aPpea to be an irreducible ideoIogical component in every historical account f reality. That is to say, simpl because history is nof a science, r is at best a protoscience with specifical1y determinable
some kid of formal coherence in the historical record brings with

t is often contended, especially by Radicals, that ihe pofessinal his_ torian's preference fr Contextualist and Frmist explanatry strategies is ideolgically motivated. For exanrple, Marxists claim that it is in the interests of established social grouPs t reject Mechanistic modes f historica explaation because the disclosure of the actual laws of histricai structure and process would reveal the true nature of the power enjoyed by dominant classes and prvide the knowledge necessary to disldge thse classes frm their psitions of privilege and Po\/er. t is in the interest of dominant groups, Radicals aintain, t cultivate a cnceptin of histr in which oly individual events and their relations to their immediate cntexts can be known, or in which, at best, the arrangement f the facts int Iose typificatins is permitted, because such conceptions of the nature of histoical knlvl_ edge conform to the "individualist" preconceptions f "Liberals'' and tIre

hs t tke. And tlrese opinins, in turn, vould seem t be generally et}ricaI, and specificaIly ileIgical, in nature.

nonscientific eleents in its constitution, the verv claim to have discerned

of the nature of the historica] world and of historical knovledge itself tvhich have ideological implications for attempts to understand "the present," however this "present" is defined. To put it another way, the very claim to have distinguished a past frm a present lvorld of social thought and praxis, and to have determined the formal coherence of that past wrld, implies a cnception of the form that knowedge of the present world also rnust take, insofar as it is continuous with that past world. Commitment to a particular form of knowledge predetermines the kinds of generalizatios one can make about the present wrld, the kinds of knowledge one can have of it, and hence the kinds of projects one can legitimately conceive for changing that
present or fr maintaining it in iis present form indefinitely.

it theories

,]

METASToR

.- xplnation by deologicl mpliction

The ideological dimensions of a hisorica] account reflect the ethical elernent in the historian's assumption of a particular position on the question of the nature of histrical knowledge and the implications that can be drawn from the study of past events for the understanding of present nes. By the term "ideoIogy" mean a set of prescriptions for taking a position i the present world of social praxis and acting upn it (either to change the world or to maintain it in its current state); such prescriptions are attended by arguments that claim the authority of "science" or "realism." Following the analysis of Karl Mannheim, in deoogy nd Utopi,I postulate four basic
ideoogical positions: Anarchism, Conservatism, Radicalism, and Liberalism.11
rr have simplified Mannheim's classificatin of the main types of ideologies and the philosophies of history that sustain them. n his essay "Pospects of Scientific Politics," Mannheim lists fe "epresentative ideal ti,pes" of political cnsciousness which arose in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, two of which are species of Conservatism (one

"bureauratic," the other "historicist"). need not make that distinction here, since the "bureaucatic" form can be said to stand ove against all ideologically inspired efiorts at transformation of the socia] order. am concerned with the work of intellectuals 'vho seek to tansform or sustain the status quo bi, appeal to specific conceptions of the histoica process. s far as knorv, no lristorian or philosopher f lristory has written in such a way as to promote the aititude of the "bureaucratic Conservative." s have defined Conservatism, hoi,ever-that is, as a defense not of an idealized past but of the present social dispensation_"Consen,atii'e historicism'' as conceived by annheim would cnstitute the natural refuge of the "bureaucratic Consen,ative." See Mannheir, deology nd Utopi: An ntoduction to the Sociology of noedge (New ork, 1946), pp. ro4ff., ad idem, "Consenati'e Thought," in Essays in Sociog1' nd SociI Psycholgy, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (New York, 1953), pp. 7+64' Mannheim also listed "Fascism" among the ideal types of modern political consciousness. hal,e not used this category, for it vou]d be anachronistic if applied to nineteenthcentury thinkers. nstead, hae used the category of "Anarchism," which, in Mannheim's vievr, is the pecu1ia1y nineteenth'century form that pocalyptical political thinking takes. t will be recalled that in his essay "The Utopian Mentality" Mar-rnheim iisted {ou idea] pes of utopian thinking, each epresenting a distinctive Stage in ihe evolution of the Inodern plitica1 consciousness. These were orgiastic Chiliasm (the millenarian tradition epresented by the Anabaptists in the sixteenth century), the Liberal-humanitarian idea, the Conservative idea, and the Socialist-Communist utopia. See deology nd Utbi, p' 79o_222. narchism ivas the seclaized form that orgiastic Chiliasm took in the nineteenth century, while Fascism is the form it has taken in the twentieth century. See ibid., p. z33. What makes Anarchism unique in the history of pocayptical plitics is the fact that, unlike both Chiliasm and Fascism, it seeks to be cognitively responsible-that is to say, it seeks to provide ational Iustifications for its irrational postue. In m-v vielv, narchism is the ideological implication f Romanticism, appeared wheever Romanticism appeared throughout the nineteenth century, and has fed into Fascism in the twentieth century in the same way that Romanticism has. Mannheim tried to link Romanticism rvith Consevatism in a systematic way when, in reality, in their early nineteenth-century manifestations, they merely happened to be contempoary lvith each other. The philosophy of history generated by the Romantic mythos does not envision that notion of a fuly integrated community realizable in historical time vhich inspies the

NTRODUcTo

2)

There are, of course, other metapolitical positions. Mannheim cites the Apocalypticisrn of the early modern reigius sects, the position f the Reactionary, and that of the Fascist. But these positions are in essence authoitarian in a vay that the nineteenth-century forms of the ideologies listed above are not. The Apocalypticist bases his presciptions for action on the authori of divine reveIation, the Reactionary on that of a c]ass or gro practice which is seen as an eternally valid system of social organization, and the Fascist on the unquestioned authority f the charismatic leader. And, although spokesmen for these viewpoints mav engage in polemics vith representatives of other positions, they do not regard it as necessary to establish the authority of their cognitive positins on either rationalist or scientific grounds. Thus, although they may offer specific theories of society and histy, these theories are not regarded as being responsible t criticisnr launched from other positions, to "data" in general, or t control by the
logical criteria of consistency and cherence.
represent value systems that claim the athority

systems that claim a similar authorit. t renders them epistemoiogically seIfconscious in a way that the representatives of "authoritarian" systems are nt, and it commits them t the effort t make sense out of "data" uncovered by investigators of the social process working from alternative points of view. n short, the nineteenth-centurv forms of narchism, Consevatism, Radicalism, and Liberalism are "cognitivel responsib]e" in a way that their "authoritarian" counterparts are not.12

The four basic ideological positions ldentified by Mannheim, hovever, of "reason," "Science," or "realism." This claim tacitly commits them to public discussion rvith other

Conservative to hymns of praise to the social status quo. What is unique about Romanticism is its indiidulisflc moment, that egorsm which inspires be]ief in the desiability of a perfect narchy. This moment may be present in some self-sty1ed Conservative thinkers, but, if they are tru1y Consen,ative, it wi11 be there as an ideoogical ploy, to defend the privileged positin of particular groups in the current scial dispensation against the demands for progammatic change cming from Radicals, Liberals, or Reactionaries. The Conservative can no more countenance a genuinely narchist conception of the world than he can stand a truly Radical conception of it. e defends the status quo by showing it to be the integrated, organic unity that narchists and Radicals stil1 dream of achieving. 12 got the notion of "cognitive esponsibi1it-v" from Pepper. He uses it to distinguish betrveen prilsophical systems committed to rational defenses of their wold hypotheses and those not so committed. Examples of t1re latter are Nysticism, nimism, and utter Skepticism, al1 of which, at some point in their arguments, are constained to fall bak on the notions of revelation, authority, or conventin. lthough specific Mystics, Animists, and Skeptics might poid,e rational justifications of the irratinal postures they assume befoe eality, such iustifications ate usually set forth as criticisms of the hyper-ationalism of their opponents. The positive content of their doctrines is ultimatel-v indefensible n ra'W'ord tional grounds, fo they deny the authority of reasn itself in the end. See Pepper, be political in thinking would ypotheses, pp. L75_37. The equivalents of such systens represented by the tradition-bound feudal nobleman; the Reactionary, who denies any worth to eithe the pesent or the future; and the Fascist or Nihilist, who ejects both reason and the ideal of consistency in argument with his opponents.

24

METAHsToRY

conceptions of the diection that changes in the status quo ought to take and the means of effecting such changes; and, finally, different time orientations (an orientation toward past, Present, or future as the respositry of a para_ digm of society's "ideal" form). should a]so stress that a given historian's emptment of the historical process or \ay of explaining it in a formal argument need not be regarded as a function of his consciously held ideological positin. Rather, the form that he gives to his historica] account can be said to have ideological implications consonant with one or another of the four positions differentiated above. |ust as every ideology is attended by a specific idea of history and its processes, So too, maintain, is every idea of history attended by specifically determinable ideological iniplications. The four ideological positions that concern me can be ughl characterized in the folIoving terns. With espect to the problem of social change, all four recognize its inevitabilitv but represent diffeent views as to both its desirability and the ptimum pace of change. Conservatives, of curse, are the most suspicious of programmatic transformations of the social status quo, while Libera1s, Radicals, and narchists are relatively less suspicious f change in general and, correspondingly, are 1ess or more optimistic abut the prospects of rpid tansformations of the social oder. s Mannheim notes. Conservatives tend to view social change through the analogy of plantlike gradualizations, rvhile Liberals (at least nineteenth-centlry Liberals) are inclined to viev it thrugh the analogy of adjustments, or "fine tunings," of a mechanism. n both ideologies the fundamental structure of society is conceived to be sound, and some change is seen as inevitable, but change itself is regarded as being most effective when particular parts, rather than structurl eltionshis, of the totality ae clranged. Radicals and narchists, howeve, believe in the necessity of structural transformatins, the forme in the interest of reconstituting society on new bases, the ]atter in the interest f abolishing "Society" and substitting for it a "communitv" of inclividuals held tgether by a shared sense of their common "humanit." s for the pace of the changes envisioned, Conservatives insist on a "natural" rhytIrm, while Liberals favor vhat might be called the "socia]" rhythm of t1re parliamentary debate, or that of the educational prcess and electoral contests betrveen parties committed to the observance of established laws of governance. By cntrast, Radicals and Anarchists envision the possibility of cataclysmic transformatins, though the former are inclined to be more aware of the power needed to effect such transformations, more sensi-

cal preference rather than as emblems of specific political parties. They represent different attitudes with respect to the possibilit of reducing the study of socie to a science and the desirabili of doing so; different ntions of the lessons that the human sciences can teach; different conceptions of the desirability of maintaining or changing the social status quo; different

"Radical," and "Liberal" are meant to serve as designators of general ideologi-

should

stress

at this point that the terms "narchist," "Cnservative,"

NTRoDUcTIoN

tive to the inertial pul1 of inherited institutions, and therefore more concerned with the provision of the mens f effecting such changes than are This brings us to a consideration of the diffeent time rientatins of the various ideologies. ccoding to Manheim, Cnservatives are inclined to imagine hisiorical evolution as a progressive elaboration of the institutional structure tbat currently prevails, which structure they regard as a "utopia"that is, the best form of society that men can "realistically" hope for, or legitimately aspire to, for the time being. By contrast, Liberals imagine a time in the future when this structure will have been improved, but they project thirutopian condition into the remote future, in such a vay as to discourage an1, effort in the present to realize it precipitately, by "radical" means. Radicals, on the other hand, are inclined to view the utopian condiinclined to idealize a remote pst of natural-human innocence from which men have fallen into the corrupt "social" state in which they currently find themselves. They, in turn, profect this utopia onto lvhat is effectively a nontemporaI plane, vieving it as a possibility of human achievement t ny time, if men wiil only seize control of their wn essential humanity, either bv an act of vill r by an act of consciousness which destoys the sociaIly provided belief in the legitimacy of the current social establishment. The temporal location of the utopian ideal, on behalf of rvhich the different ideologies labor, permits Mannheim t classify them with respect to their tendency toward "social congruence" on the one hand or "social transcendence" on the other. Conservatism is the most "sociallv congruent"; Liberalism is reIatively so. narchism is the nrost "socially transcendent"; Radica]ism is relativeiy so. ctually, each of the ideologies represents a mixture of elements of socia] conguence and scial transcendence. on this pint, their differences from one another are matters more of emplrasis than of content. 1l take the prospect of change seriously. This is what accunts for their shared interest in history and their concern to provide a historical justification for their programs. Simi1ar1y, this is what accounts for their willingness t debate lvith ne another, in cognitivel responsible terms, such secondary matters as the pace of desirable social change and the means to be used to effect it. t is the lue accorded to the current socia] estab]ishment, however, that accounts for their different conceptions of both the form of historical ev]u_ tion and the form that historical knowledge must take. n Mannheim's view, the problem of historical "progress" is construed in different ways by the various ideologies. What is "pogress" to one is "decadence" t another, with the "present age" enjoying a different status, aS an aPex or nadir f development, depending upon the degree f alienation in a given ideology. t the same time, the ideologies honor different paradigms of the form that arguments meant to explain "what happened in histry" must take. These
the latter.

tion as inminent, which inspires their concern lvith the provisin of the evoutionary means to bring this utopia to pass no. Finallv, narchists are

26

\ETSToRY

different paradigms of explanatin reflect the rnore or ]ess "scientistic" rien_ tations of the different ideologies. Thus, for example, Radicals share with Libera]s a belief in the possibili of studying history "rationally" and "scientifica1ly," but trey have different conceptions of lvhat a rational and scientific historiography might cnsist of. The former seeks the lavrs of historical structures and processes, the latter the general trends or main dift of development. Like Radicals and Liberals, Conservatives and Anarchists believe, in cnformity with a genera nineteenth-century conviction, that the "meaning" of history ca be discovered and presented in conceptual schemata that are cognitively responsible and knowledge requires a faith in "intuition" as the ground on which a putative "Science" of history might be constructed. The narchist is inc]ined toward the essentially empathetic techniques of Romanticism in his historical accounts, whi]e the Conservative is inc]ined to integrte his several intuitions of the objects in the historical field into a comprehensive organicist account of the whole process. n my view, there are no extra-ideological grounds on rvhich to arbitrate amng the conflicting conceptions of the histrical process and of historical knowledge appealed i bv the different ideologies. F'or, since these conceptions have their origins in ethical consideratins, the assumption f a given epistemological position bv 'hich to judge their cognitive adequacy would itself represent nlr'anther ethical chice. cannot claim thaf oe of the cnceptions of historica] kni{edge favored by a given ideology is more "realistic" than the others, for it is precisely over the matter of what constitutes an adequate criterion of "realism" that they disagree. Nr can claim that one conceptin of histrica kn,ledge is more "scientific" than another r'ithout prejudging the prblem of what a specifically histoicl or socil science ought to be. To be sure, during the nineteenth century the generalry credited conception f science \1,aS reresented by Mechanism. But social theorists differed from ne another ,e the question of the ]egitimacy of a Mechanistic science of societv and of history. The Formist, Organicist, and Cntextualist modes of explanation continued to flourish in the human sciences throughout the nineteenth centurv because of genuine differences of opinion over the ade-

not simply authoritarian. But their conception of a distinctie\y histoicl

proiections f a given ideological position. am interested only in indicating how ideologica considerations enter ito the historian's attempts to explain the hisioical field and to construct a verbaI mode1 f its processes ln a narrative. But 'i11 attempt to show that even tl-re vorks of those his_ torians and philosophers of history rvhose interests were manifestly nonpolit-

ar not concerned, then, rvith ranking the different conceptions of history poduced by the ineteenth century in terms of either theii "realism" or their "scienticitv." By the same token, my purpose is not to analyze them as

quacv of Mechanism as a strategy.

NTRODUCToN

27

implication is that men are indentured to an ineluctabie fate by virtue of their participation in history, whereas in the latter case the implica'tion is that they can act in such a \/ay as to control, or at least to affect, their destinies. The ideologica] thrust of histories fashioned in these alterative ways is gen_ erally "Cnservative" and "Radical" respectively. These implications need not be formally drawn in the historical account itself, but they will be identifiable by the tone or mood i which the resolution of the drama and the epiphany of the law that it manifests are cast. The differences between the two kinds of historiography thus distinguished are those which I conceive to be characteristic of the work f a Spengler on the oe hand and a Marx on the other. The Mechanistic mode of explanation is used by the former to justify the tone or mood of histries emplotted as Tragedies, but in such a way aS to draw ideological impications which are socia11y accommodationist. n Marx, however, a similary Mechanistic strategy of explanation is used to sanction a Tragic account of history which is heroic and militant in tone. The differences are precisey simiIar to those which distinguish Euripidean from Sophoclean Tragedy or, to take the case of a single writer, the tragedv
of ingLer from that of Hmlet. Specific examples from historiography rnay be briefly cited fr puposes of illustration. Ranke's histories are consistently cast in the mode of Comedy,, a plot form that has as its central theme the notion of reconciliaffon. Similarl the dominant mode of explanation used by him was organicist, consisting f the uncovering of the integrtie structures and processes which, he believed,

ical, such as Burckhardt and Nietzsche, have specific ideological implications. These works, maintain, are at least consonnt with on or another of the ideological positions of the times in which they were written. consider the ethical moment of a historical rvork to be reflected in the mode of ideological implicatin by which an esthetic perception (the emplotment) and a cognitie operation (the argument) can be combined so as to derive prescriptive statements from what may aPear to be pure1y descriptive or anaIytical ones. historian mav "explain" what happened in the historical field by identifying the law (or iaws) governing the set of events emplotted in the story as a drama of essentially Tragic import. Or, conversely, he may find the Tragic import of the story he has emplotted in his discovery of the "law" which governs the sequence of articulation of the plot. n either case, the moral implicatins of a given historical argument have to be drawn from the relationship which the historian presumes to have existed within the set of events under cnsideration beteen the pot structure of the narrative conceptualization on the one hand and the form of the argument offered as an explicit "scientific" (or "realistic") explanation of the set of events on the other. set of events emplotted as a Tragedy may be explained "scientificaly" (or "rea1istical1y") by appeal to strict laws of causal determination or to putative laws f human freedom, as the case may be' n the former case the

28

METSTOR

ally, the naative mde in which it lvas cast is that of the Satire, the stur (o "medev" ), which is the fictiona] mode of rony and lvhich achieves some of its principal effects by refusing to provide the kinds of forma] coherencies one is conditioned to expect from reading Rmance, Comedy, and Tragedy. This narrative form, which is the aesthetic counterpart of a specificall skeptica conception of knowledge and its possibilities, presents itself as the tpe of all putatively anti-ideological conceptions of lristory and as an altenative to tlrat "philsphy of history," practiced bv N4arx, ege1,
and Ranke alike, r,hich Burckhardt personall,v despised.

historical process as revealed in Ranke's accounts of it. Burckhardt epresents another vaiation on these same possibilities of com_ bination. Burckhardt was a Contextualist; he suggested that historians "explain" a given event b inserting it into the rich fabric of the similary discriminable individualities that occupy its circumambient historical space. He denied both the possibilitl, of deriving laws from the stud1, of history and the desiabilitv of submitting it to tpological analsis. F'or him, a given area f histocal occurence represented a fie]d of happening which WaS moe or less ich in the billiance of its "fabric" and more or less susceptible t impressionistic representation. is Ciyilization of the Renaissnce, fo example, is cnl,entioallv regarded as having no "Story" r "narrative line" at a11. ctu_

repesent the fundamental modes of e]ationship to be found in history. Ranke dealt not in "laws" but in the discovery of the "deas" of the agents and agencies which he viewed as inl-rabitants of the historica field. nd will argue that the kind of explanation which he believed historical knowledge povides is the epistemological counterpart of an aesthetic perception of the histrical field which takes the form of a Comic emplotment in all of Ranke's narratives. The ideological implications of this combination of a Comic mode of emplotment and an Organicist mode of argument are specifically Cnservative. Those "forms" lvhich Ranke discerned in the historica] field r,ere thouglrt to exist in the kind of hamonious cndition which con_ ventionallv apears at the end of a Comedy' The reader is left t contemplate the coheence of the histoical field, consiclered as a completed structure of "deas" (i.e., institutions and values), and rvitl-r the kind f feeling engendered in the audience f a drama that has achieved a definitive Comic resolu_ tion of all the pprently tragic conflicts l,ithin it. The tone of voice is acconmodationist, the mood is optimistic, and the ideological implications are Consevative, inasmuch as one can legitimateIy conclude from a history thus constued that one inhabits the best of possible historical worlds, or at least the best that one can "realistically" hope for, given the natue of the

But the tone or mod in which a Satirical narrative is cast has specific ideological implications, "Libera1" if cast in an optimistic tone, "Conseryative" if cast in a resigned one. For example, Burckhardt's conception of the historical field as a "texture" of individual entities linked together by little more tha their status aS conPonents of the same domain and the brilIiance

NTRoDUcToN

29

several manifestations, combined with his formal skepticism, is destructive of any effort on the part of his audience to use history as a means of comprehending the Pesent world i anything but Conservative terms. Burckhardt's own pessimism with respect to the future has the effect of promoting in his readers an attitude of "Sulle qui peut" and "the devi] take the hindmost." one might pomote such attitudes in the interests of either Liberal or Conservative causes, depending upon the actual social situations in which they wee advanced; but there is absolutely no possibility of basing Radical arguments on them, and their ultimate ideological implications as Burckhardi used them are strictly Conservative, when they are not simply

f their

"Reactionary."

The Problem of Historiogrhicl Styles

Having distinguished among the three levels on which historians work to gain an explanatory affect in their narratives, wil1 now consider the problem of historiographica1 styles. n my view, a historiographical style represents a
paticular iombiution of mdes of empltment, argument, and idelogical implication. But the various modes of emplotment, argument, and ideologi-

cal implication cannot be indiscriminatelv combined in a given work. For example, a Comic enplotment is not cmpatible rvith a N4echanistic argument, just as a Radical ideologv is not compatible with a Satirical empltment. There ae, as it were, elective affinities among the varius modes that might be used to gain an explanatoy affect on the diffeent leels of comPositin. nd these elective affinities are based on the structural homologies which can be discerned among the possible modes of emplotnent, argument, and ideological implicaiion. The affinities can be represented graphical1y as follorvs:

ode of mplotment Romantic Tragic Comic

Satirical

ode of Argument
Fomist

ode of deologicl mpliction Anarchist Radical

Coservative

Mechanistic
Organicist Contextualist

Liberal

in a given historian. On the contrary, the dialectical tension which charac-

These affinities are not to be taken aS necessdry comb,inatiols of the modes

terizei the work of every master historian usually arises from an effort t wed a mode of emplotment vrith a mode of argument or of ideological implication which is inconsonant with it. For example, as vill show, Michelet tried to combine a Rmantic emplotment and a Formist argument with an ideolgy that is explicitly Liberal. So, too, Burckhardt used a Satirical emplot_

)o

METASToRY

specificaly 1inguistic, in nature.

ment and a Contextualist argument in the service of an ideological position that is explicitly Conservative and ultimate]y Reactinary. egel emplotted history on two levels-Tragic on the microcosmic, comic on the macrocosmic-both f which are justified by appeal to a mode of argument that is organicist, with the result that one can derive either Radical or conservative ideoIogica implications from a reading of his work. But, in every case, dialectical tension evolves within the context of a coherent visio or presiding image of the form f the who]e historical field. This gives to the individual thinker's conception of that field the aspect of a selfconsistet totality. nd this coherence and consistency give to his vork its distinctive slistic attributes. The probem here is to determine the grounds of this coherence and consistency. n my view, these grounds are poetic, and

documentary recrd does not figure forth an unambiguous image of the structure of events attested in them. n order to figure "what relly happened" in the past, therefre, the histrian rnust first prefigre as a possibie object f knowledge the vrhoIe set f evets reported in the documents' This

Before the historian can bring to bear upon the data of the historical field the conceptual apparatus he will use to represent and explain it, he must first prefigre the field-that is to say, constitute it as an object of mentaI PercePtion. This poetic act is indistinguishable from the linguistic act in which the field is made ready for interpretation as a domain of a particular kind. That is to say, before a given domain can be interpreted, it must first be construed as a ground inhabited by discernible figurei, The figures, in turn, must be cnceived to be classifiable as distinctive orders, classes, genera, and species of phenomena. Moreover, they must be conceived to bear certain kinds of reationships to ne another, the transformations of which wilI constitute tre "problems" to be soIved by the "explanations" provided on the ]evels of emplotment and argument in the naative. n other words, the historian confronts the historica] fied in much the same way that the grammarian might confront a new' language. is first poblem is to distinguish among the exical, grammatical, and syntactical eIements of the field. Only then can he undertake to interet what ny given configuration of eIements or transformations of their relationships mean. n sht, the historia's problem is to construct a linguistic protocl, complete with lexical, grammatical, syntactica, and semantic dimensions, by which to characterize the field ad its elemets in his on terms (ather tlan in the terms in which theycome labeled in the documents themselves), and thus to Prare them for the explanation and representation he uril] subsequentIy offer f thern in his narrative' This preconceptual linguistic protocl will in turn be-by virtue f its essentia]y prefigutie nature-characterizabe in terms f the dominant tropological mode in which it is cast. istorical accounts puort to be verba] models, or icons, of specific seg_ ments of the historical process. But such models are needed because the

NTRoDUcToN

)L

prefigurative act is poetic inasmuch as it is precognitive and precritical in the economy of the historian'S own consciousness. t is also poetic insofar as it is constitutive of the structure that will subsequently be imaged in the yerbal mode] offered by the historian as a representatin and explanation of "what relly happened" in the past. But it is constitutive not only of a domain which the historian can treat as a possible object of (mental) perception. t is a1so cnstitutive of the concepts he wilI use fo identify the obiects that inhabit that domain and fo chrcterize the kinds of reltionshis they can sustain with one another. n the poetic act which precedes the formaI analysis of the field, the historian both creates his object of analysis and predetermines the modaIi of the cnceptual strategies he lvil] use to explain it. But the number of possible explanatory strategies is not infinite. There are, in fact, four principal types, which correspond to the four principal tropes of poetic language. Accordingly, we find the categories for analyzing the different modes of thought, representation, and explanation met with in such nnscientific fie]ds as historiography in the modaIities of poetic language itself. n short, the theory of tropes prvides us with a basis for classifying the deep structural forms of the historical imagination in a given period of its evolution.

,z- TheTheory of Tropes

tropes for the anaIysis of poetic, or figurative, language: [etaphor, Metonymy, Synecodoche, and rony.13 These tropes permit the characterization of
13 The two leading exponents of the tropological conceptin of nonscientific (mythic, artistic, and oneiic) discourse ae the Structuralists Roman Jakobson and Claude L6viStrauss. The latter uses the Metaphorical-Metonymical dyad as the basis fo his analysis of the naming systems in primitive cultures and as a key to the compehension of myths. See Claude LviStrauss, The Sag ind, pp. 2o5-44; and, fo an exposition of the method, see dmund Leach, ClaudeL1i-Strauss (New ork, 197o), pp. 47fi. |akobson uses the same dyad as the basis for a linguistic theory of poetics. See his brilliant essay "Linguistics and Poetics," inStyleinLguge, ed. Thomas . Sebeok (New York and London, 196o), PP' 35o-77; and the famous chapter 5 of Roman Jakobson and Morris alle, Fundmentls of Lnguage ('s-Gravenhage, 56), entitled "The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles," now reprinted in Criticl Theory since Plto, ed. azard dams (New York, r97r), pp. 113-16. For a similar application of this dyad to the problem of characterizing the linguistic structure of deams in psychoanalysis, see |acques Lacan, "The nsistence of the Letter in the Unconscious," in Sfructualism, ed. facques Ehrmann (New York, 966), pp. ror-36. L6vi-Strauss, |akobson, and Lacan conceive Metaphor and Metonymy as the "poles" of linguistic behavior, repesenting respectively the continuous (verbal) and discontinuous (nominal) axes of speech acts. n |akobson's linguistic theory of stye, Synecdoche and rony are teated as species of Metonymy, r,yhich in turn is vie',ved as the fundamenta trope of "ealistic" prose. Thus, for example, |akobson writes: "the study of poetic topes has been diected mainly towad metapho, and the so-ca1ed realistic literatue, intimatey tied

Both traditional poetics and modern language thery identify fur basic

MTASTORY
neto}.nic princip}e, still defies intepretation, although the same linguistic methodoogy, which poetics uses rhen analyzing the metaphorical style of romantic poety,

with the

is entirely applicable to the metonymic texture of realistic prose." See fakobson, "Linguistics and Poetics," p. 375' s a matter of fact, the analysis of the history of realism
novel in terms of its essentially Metonymical content was carried out by Stephen Ullmann, Style in the Fench Novel (Cambridge, 1967). Ullmann demonstrates the progressive "nominalizatin" of the essentially "verbal" style of the Romantic novel for,l

in the

Fruitful as the Metaphoical-Metonymical dyad has proven to be fo the analysis of Iinguistic phenomenon, hwever, its use as a framework fo chaacterizing litery styles is, in my view, limited. am inclined to utilize the fourfold conception of the topes, conven_ tional since the Renaissance, fo distinguishing among different stylistic conventions rvithin a single tradition of discourse. As Emile Benveniste has suggested in his penetrating essay on Freud's theory of language: "it is st1,le rather than anguage that we would take as term of comparison with the propeties that Freud has disclosed as indicative of oneiric 1an_ guage. . . . The unconscious uses a veitable 'rhetoric' 'vhich, like style, has its 'figures,' and the o]d cataogue f the tropes would supply an inventory appropriate to the tvo types of expression [symbo1ic and significative]." Emile Benveniste, "Remaks on the Frnction of Language in Freudian Theory," in Pobems of cenerl Linguistics (Coral Gables, Fla., 1971), p.75. n this essay, Ben,eniste collapses the distinction between poetic and prosaic language, between the language of dreams and that of waking consciousness, between the Metaphorical and Metonymical poles. This is consistent with my contention that the simiiaities between poetic and discursive representations of reality are as important as the differences. Fo it is',vith "realistic" fictions as it is with dreams: "The nature of the content makes a1l the vaieties o{ metaphor appear, for symbols of the unconscious take both thei meaning and their difficu1ty from metaphoric conversion. They a1so employ what traditional rhetoric cal1s meton1ny (the container for the contents) and synecdoche (the part for the whole) [sic], and if the 'syntax' of the snbolic sequences calls foth one device more than any other, ii is ellipsis." bid. Pat of the difficu1ty in moving trom a lingui}tic to a stylistic characteization of the forms of realistic liteature may lie in the fai1ure to exploit the conventional hetoical distinction bet,een tropes and figures on the one hand and that between tropes and schemes n the othe. Sixteenth-cetury hetoricians, following Peter Ramus, classified the figures of speech in terms of the four tropes (or mdes) of Metaphor, Metonymy, Synecdoche, and rony, but without stessing their mutual exclusiveness, theeby providing a more supple conception of poetic discourse and a more subte difierentiation of iiterary styles than that offered by the bipoiar system favored by modern linguisticians. While keeping ihe basic binary distinction between Metaphor and Metonymy, sone hetoricians went on to view Synecdoche as a kind of Metaphorical usage and ony as a kind ot Metonymical one. This permits the distinctin bet',veen integtie 1anguage on the one hand and dispersie language on the othe, while still allowing futher distinctions regarding degrees of integration or reduction aimed at in different stylistic conventions. ln The e Sciance (7z5, 174o), Giambattista Vico utilized the fourfoid distinction among the troes as a basis fr difierentiating the stages of consciousness thogh which mankind has passed from primitivism to civilization. nstead of seeing an oasition between poetic (mythic) consciousness and prosaic (scientific) consciousness, therefore, Vic salv a continuity. See Thomas G. Bergin and Max . Fisch, tans., The Ne Science of Gimbttist Vico (thaca, N.Y., 1968), bk. z, pp. rzgff., on "Poetic Wisdom." on the hetoica| theory of the Renaissance and fo a catalog of the standard figures of speech and of the tropes, see Lee ' Sonnino, AHndbook to Sixteenth Century Rhetoric (London, 1968), pp. 1o-14, 2$-46. The distinction betveen schemes ad figure is made in conventional rhetoric on the

Stendhal t Sartre.

NRoDUcTo

tt

following basis: a schem (whether of words |Iexeos] or of thought |dinai]) is an oder of repreientations involving no "iationa]" leaps or substitutions; by contrast, a figua involves precisely such an iirational (or at least unexpected) substitution, as, fr exampie, in the pirase "cold passions" when the adfective "hot" might have been expected. But what is rational and what is irrational in lingristic usage? ny figure of Speech is rational which prduces the effect of cmmunication aimed at by the user. And the same might use f language we11 be said f schemes, whether of wods or of thoughts. The creative eading, thinkof the act in consciousness fom what departue indeed demands, admits, ing, or hearing anticipates on the basis of convention. nd this ould be as tre of ,,rea1istic" prose discouse as of poetry, hlvever "Romantic." \Vhat formal termiirologica those devised fr denoting the data of physics, envisage is the elinination systems, ,r.h ", oi figuaiive usage aitogether, the construction of perfect "schemata" of wods in which nothing "rn.rp..t"d" appears in the designation of the obiecis of study. For example, the physical reaiity agreem"ent to ,se crlcul, as the termino]ogical system fr discussing the postulated by Nei.vton represents the schemtiztion of tha! aea of discourse, thgh not f thethought about its objects of study. Thought ablt the physical rryorld remains essenthcory tia\\y figuiie, progressing by a1l sts of "iational" leaps and bounds fom one the ceative problem for The mode. Metonymical to another-but alvays within the physicist is to cast his insights, derived by figuative means, in the schema of wods specified io, co**uri.ating with ther physicists cmmitted to the mathematical terminlogicai
system provided by Newton.

The }undamental problem f "realistic" representation of those areas f expeience not temino1ogically discip1ined in the way that physics is, is t prvide an adequate schema f wrds for1epesenting the schema of thoughts rvhich it takes to be the truth but eality' But, when it is a matter of characterizing an aea of experience over which there is no funiametal agreement about lvhat it cnsists of o rvhat its true nature might be, or vhen it is a matter of challenging a conventional characterizatin of a phenomenn such as a evo1utin, the distinction between what is ]egitimate1y "epected" ad what is not falls epeaway. The thoght about the object t be repesented and the words to be used in usages of senting either the object or the thought about the obiect are all consignecl to the repefignrative discourse. t is impeative, therefoe, when analyzing putative "reaiistic" cast. is its discourse vhich in poetic mode dminant the to detemine reality of statins f that ievel penetates io one of discourse, modes) By identifving the dominant mode (or And, analyzed. prior being to constitted is experience of rvorld a whictr on consciusness by etaining the fourfold distinction amng the "master tropes," as Kenneth Bllrke cals me r less them, one can speciiy the different "styles of thought" which nright appear, prosaic. See Burke, poetic or manifestly whether eality, of any repesentation in hidden, Gmmar, app.D, pp.5o3-17' Cf. aul enle, ed., Languge, Thought, n"d Cultue (nn Ao, icn., 1961, pp. 17345. The literature on the tropes is varied and beset by congenital disagreement. Some of the problems met with in trying to analyze the tropological dimensions of discourse can be seen in the vaious chaacterizations f the in the Pinceton ncyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex eminger trop.s
et l. (Pinceton,

ir.r,

Retention of the fourfold analysis of figurative language has the added advantage of esisting the fal1 into an essentially dulistic conception of styles which the bipolar conceptin of styie-cum_language pomotes. n fact, the fourfold classification of the tropes peimits the use of the combinatorial possibilities of a dual-binary classificatin of styles. by its use we are not forced, as }akobson is, to divide the history of ineteenth-century liteature between a romantic_poetic-Metaphorica tradition on the one hand and a ealistic_prosaic-Metonymical tradition on the other. Both traditions can be seen aS eements in a single con;ention of discurse in which al of the tropologica strategies of linguistic urrg. rr pr.r.rt, but present in difterent degrees in different',vites and thinkers.

965)'

34

METSToRY

sion "e is all heart." Though ronv, finallv, entities ca be characterized Py 'u1il of negating on the figurative level ,hat is positively affirnred on the liteal leve]. The figures of the manifestlv absurd e*pression (catachresis), such as "blind rnouths," and of exp]icit paradox (oxvlnoron)' sch as "cod passion," can be taken as emblems of this trope. ' rony, Metonvmy, and Synecdoche are kinds f Metapho, but they differ frm one another in the kinds of eductions or intergritiorrs they efiect on the literal level of their meanings and by the kinds of illuminations they aim at on the figurative level. Metaphr is essentially representtionl, Meton_ ymy is reductionist, Synecdoche is integrtie, and rony is negtional. For example, the Metaphorical expression ,,my love, a rose,,, affirms the adequacy of the ose as a representation of the loved one. t asserts that a simiarit,v exists between two objects in the face of manifest differences between them. But the identifiction of the 1oved one with the rose is only Eiterll asserted. The phrase is meant to be taken figurtie, as an indica_ tion of the quaities of beauty, preciousness, delicacy, and so on, possessed by the loved one. The term "love" serves as a sign of a particula. i.rdiuiduri, but the tem "rose" is understod to be a "figre" or "symboI" of the qualities ascribed to the loved one. The loved one is identified vith the rose, but in such a way as to sustain the particularity of the loved one while suggesting the qualities that she (or he) shares with the rose. The loved one is not educed to a rse, as woud be the case if the phrase were read Metnymyi cally, nor is the essence of the loved one taken to be identical with tire essence of the rose, as rvould be the case if the expression were understood as a Synecdoche. Nor, viously, is the expression tb be taken as an implicit negation of what is explicitly affirmed, as in the case of rny. similar kind of representatin is contained in the Metonymical expres_ sion "fifty sail" when it is used to mean "fifty ships.,, But here the ierm "sail" is substituted for the term "ship" in such a ,ry ,s to reduce the whole to ore of its parts. Two different objects are being implicitly compared (as in the phrase "my love, a rose" ), but the objects are expricitly conceived to bear a part-whole relationship to each other. The modality oi this relation-

objects in different kinds of indirect, or figurative, discorse. They are especially useful for understanding the operations by which the contets of expe_ rience rvhich resist description in unambiguous prose representations can be pefiguratively grasped and prepared for conscius appiehension. Meta_ phor (literally, "transfer"), for example, phenomena can be characterized in terms of their similarity to, and difference from, one another, in the manner of analogy or simile, as in the phrase "my love, a rose." Through Metonymy (iteraly, "name change"), the name f a part of a thing *ry b. substituted for the name of the whoe, as in the phrase "fifty sai1" whin what is indicated is "fifty ships." with Synecdoche, rvhich is regarded by some theorists as a form of Metonmv, a phenmenon can be characterizecl by rsing the part to symblize some qulity presumed t inhere in the tta]ity, rs in th..*pr"r-

INTRoDUToN

35

ship, however, is nt that f a microcosm-macocosm, as wuld be true if the term "Sail" were intended to symbolize the qulify shared by both "ships" and "sails," in which case it would be a Synecdoche. Rather, it is suggested that "ships" are in some sense identifiable with that part of themn Metonymy, phenomena are implicitly applehended as bearing relation_ ships to one another in the modalitv of part-part relationships, on the basis of which one can effect a reduction of one of the parts to the status of an aspect or function of the ther. To apprehend any given set of phenomena as existing in the modality of part-part relationships (not, as in Metaphor, object-object relationships) is to set thought the task of distinguishing between those parts which are representative of the whole and those which are simpy aspects of it. Thus, for example, the expression "the roar of thun_ der" is Metnymical. n this expression the whIe process by which the sound of thunder is produced is first divided into tw kinds of phenmena: that f a cause on the oe hand (the thunder); and that of an effect on the
related to the rar in the modality of a cause_effect reduction' The sound signified bv the ternr "thunder" iS endoved vith the aspect of a "roar" (a particular kind of sound), which permits one to speak (Metonymically) of the "thunder causing the roar." phenomena and reduce one to the status of a manifestation of the other. This reduction may take the form of an agent-act relationship ("the thunder rors'') or a cause_effect relationship ("the oat of thunder"). nd, by such reductions, as Vic, ege1, and Nietzsche a1l pointed out, the phenomenal world can be populated with a host of agents and agencies that ae presumed to exist behind it. once the word of phenomena is separated into two orders ofbeing (agents and causes on the one hand, acts and effects on the other), the pimitive consciousness is endowed, by puel1l linguirtic mens Cone' vith the conceptua categories (agents, causes, spirits, essences) necessary for the theology, science, and philosophy of civilized reflection. But the essentially extrirsic relationship that is presumed to characterize the two orders of phenomena in all Metonymical reductions can by Synecdoche be construed in the manner of an intrinsic relationship of shared qulifies. Metonymy asserts a difference between phenomena construed in the manner of part-part relationships. The "part" of experience which is apprehended aS an "effect" is related to that "pt" which is apprehended as "cause" in the manner of a reductin. By the trope of Synecdoche, however, it is possib1e to construe the two parts in the manner of an integrtlon within a who]e that is qulittiely different from the sum of the parts and of which the parts are but microcosmic replications. By way of ilustrating what is invoIved in Synecdochic usage, will analyze the expression "He is a]] heart." n this exPression, there is what appears to
selves without which they cannot operate.

other (the roar). Then, this division having been made, the thunder

is

By Metonymy, then, one can simultaneously distinguish between

two

36

METIiSToRY

be a Metonmy-that is to say, the name of a part of the body is used to characterize the whle body of the individual' But the term "heart" is to be understod figuatively as designating, not a part of the body, bt that qulity of character conventionally symbolized by the term "heart" in West_ ern culture. The term "heart" is not eant t be construed as designating a part of the anatomv whose function can be used to characterize the function of the lvhle body, as in "fifty sail" for "fifty ships." Rather, it is to be construed as a synbol f a quality that is characteristic of the whole individual, considered as a combination of physical and spiritual elements, all of which participate in this quality i the modality of a microcsmic-nacrocosmic

Thus, in the expressin "He is a1l heart," a Synecdoche is superimpsed on a Metonymy. f the expression \ere taken literally, it vuld be senseless. Read Metonynicall1,, it ri,ou]d be reductive, inasmuch as it wuId onIy imply recognition f the centralitv of the heart to the functioning of the oganism in order t be even figurativeiy suggestive. But read Synecdochically_that is, as a statement suggesting a qualitative relationship among the elements of a totality-it is integative rather than reductive. Uniike the Metonymi_ ca1 expression "fifty sai}," used as a figure for "fifty ships," it is meant to signal not simply a "name change" but a name change designating a totality (""") lvhich possesses Some quait (genersity, compassion, etc.) tlrat suffuses and cnstitutes the essential nature of all the parts that make it up. s a N4etonymy, it suggests a relationship among the various parts of the body wlrich is t be understood in terms of the centra] functin of the heart among those parts. s a Svnecdche, holveve, the expression suggests a relationship among the parts of the individual, considered as a combination of physical and spiritual attributes, l'-rich is qualitative irr natue and in
which al1of the parts participate. We consider the three tropes thus far discussed as paradigms, provided by language itself, of the operations by which consciousness can prefigue aeas of experience that are cognitivelv problematic in order subsequently to submit them to analvsis and explanation. That is t say, in ]inguistic rsage

rclationship.

itself, thought is provided with pssible alternative paradigms of explanatin. Netaphor is representational i the way that Formisrrr can be seen to be. Meton,vmy is reductive in a Mechanistic manner, while S1,necdche is integrative in the way that organicisrr is. Metaphor sanctions the prefigura_ tion of the world of experience in object-object terms, Metonymy in partpart terns, and Synecdche in bject-vhole terms. Each trope also promotes cu]tivation of a unique linguistic protocol. These lingristic protco]s can be called the languages of identil (Metaplror), extrinsicality (Metonymv), and intrinsicality ( Synecdoche ) . be deployed ony in the belief in language's capacity to grasp the nature ol
Against these three tPes, vrhich characterize aS "naive" (since they can

NTRoDUcToN

37

things in figurative terms), the trope of rony stands as a "sentimental" (in Schiller's sense of "se1f_conscious") counterpart. t has been suggested that rony is essentially dialectical, inasmuch as it represents a se]f-conscious use of Metaphor in the interests of verbal self-negation. The basic figurative

tactic of rony is catachresis (literally "misuse"), the manifestly absurd Metaphor designed to inspire ronic second thughts about the nature of the thing characterized or the inadequac of the characterization itse]f. The rhetorical figure of pori (literally "doubt"), in which the author signals in advance a eal o feigned disbelief in the tuth of his own statements, could be cnsidered tl-re favored stylistic device of ronic language, in both fiction of the more "realistic" sort and histries that ae cast in a self-cnsciously skeptica1 tone r ae "reIativizing" in their intention. The aim of the onic statement is to affirm tacit1y the negative of what is on the ]itera] ]eve1 affimed psitivelv, or the reverse. t pesupposes that the reade or auditor already knows, or is capable of recognizing, the absurdity of the characterization of the thing designated in the Metaphr, Metonymy, or Synecdoche used to give frm to it. Thus, the expression "He is all heart" becomes ronic when uttered in a partic,u1ar tone of voice or in a context in which the person designated manifestly does not Possess the qualities attributed to him bv the use of tliis Synecdoche. t can be seen immediately that ronv is in one sense metatropologicaI, for it is deployed in the self-conscious a\/areness of the possible misuse of figurative anguage. rony PeSuPPoSeS the ccupation of a "realistic" perspective on reality, from which a nonfigurative representation of the world of experience might be provided. rony thus represents a stage of consciusness in wlrich the problematical nature of language itself has become recognized. t points to the ptential foolishness f a]1 linguistic characterizations of reality as much as to the absurdity of the beliefs it parodies' t is therefore "dialectical," as Kenneth Burke has noted, though not so much in its apprehension of the process of the wor]d as in its apprehension f the capacity of language to obscue more than it claifies in any act of verbal figuation. n rony,
distorting perception unde question. This is why characterizations of the wor]d cast in the ronic mode are often regarded as intrinsiclly sophsticated and reaIistic. Th"y aear to signal the ascent of thought in a given area of inquiry t a level of self-consciousess on which a genuinely "en1ightened"_ that is to say, self-critical-conceptualization of the world and its Processes
has become possible.

figurative language fods back upon itself and brings its own potentialities for

thought tvhich is radicaly self-critical with respect not only to a given characterization of the wo]d of experience but also to the very efirt to capture adequately the truth f things in language. t is, in short, a model of the linguistic protocol in which skepticism in thought and relativism in ethics are

The trope of rony, then, provides a inguistic paradigm of a mde of

38

METAHSToRY

a Mandarin-]ike disdain for those seeking to grasp the nature f social reality in either science o at.

Liberal or Conservative ideological psitions, depending on whether the ronist is speaking against established socia] forms or against "utopian" reformers seeking to change the status quo. And it ca be used offensively bv the narchist and the Radical, to pillorv the ideals of their Liberal ad Conservative opponents. But, as the basis of a world view, rny tends t dissolve all be]ief in the possibilit,v of positive political actions. n its apprehension of the essential foll, or absurditv of the human condition, it tends t engender be]ief in the "madness" of civi]ization itself and to inspire

conventionally expressed. s a paradigm of the form a representation of the world prcess might take, it is inherently hostile to the "naive" formulations of the Formist, Mechanistic, and organicist strategies of exp1anation. nd its fictional form, Satire, is intrinsically antagonistic to the archetlpes of Romance, Comedv, and Tragedy as modes of representing the forms of signifi cant human development. xistentially projected into a ful]_blown wold view, rony would aPpear to be tansideological. rony can be used tcticaly for defense of eithe

--

The Phses of Nineteenth-Century Histoicl Consciousness

The theory of topes prvides a lvay f chaacterizing the dominant modes of histoicai thinking l,hich took shape in Europe in the nineteenth century. nd, as a basis for a general theory of poetic language, it permits me to characterize the deep Structure of the historical imagination of that peiod considered as a c]osed-cycle development. For each of the mdes can be regarded as a phase, or moment, within a traditin of discourse which evolves fom ,etaphorical, thrugh Metonymical and Synecdochic compre_ hensions of the historical world, into an rnic apprehension of the ireducible relativism of all knorvledge. The firsi phase of nineteenth-century historical consciousness took shape rvithin the context of a crisis in late nlightenment historical thinking. Thinkers such as Vltaire, Gibbon, Hume, Kant, and Robertson had finally come to view history -in essentially ronic terrns. The pre_Romantics_ Rousseau, }ustus Mser, dmund Burke, the Swiss nature poets, the Stijrmer und Driinger, and especialy erder-opposed to this ronic conception of histry a self-consciously "naive" counterpart. The principles of this conceP_ tion of history were not consistently worked out, nor wee they unifomly adhered to by the different critics of the Eng1ightenment, but all f them shared a commo antipathy for its rationalism. They believed in "empathy" as a method of historical inquiry, and they cultivated a sympathy for those aspects of both history and humanity which the Enlighteners had viewed rvith scorn or condescension. s a resu]t of their opposition, there deveoped

NTRoDUcTIoN

39

a genuine crisis in historical thinking, a deep disagreement over the proper ttitude with which to approach the study of history. This schism inevitably inspired interest in historical theory, and, by the first decade of the nineteenth century, the "problem of historical knowledge" had moved to the egel was the philosopher who gave this prblem its mst profound formulatin. During the period between his Phenomenology of ind (8o6) and his Philosohy of History (r83o_3r), he correctIy identified the principal cause of the schism: the irreducible differences between an ronic and a Metaphorical mode of apprehending the historical field. Morever, in his own philosphy of history, egel offered a reasoned justification for conceiving it in the Synecdochic mode. During this same perid, of course, Enlightenment rationalism was being revised in an organicist direction by the French Positivists. In the wrk f uguste Comte, vhose Cours de l philasophie positie began to appear in r83o, the Mechanistic theories of explanation of the Enlightenment were wedded rrith an organicist conception f the historical Pocess. This permitted Comte to emplot history as a Comedy, thereby dissolving the Satiric m7thos that had reflected the pessimism of ]ate Enlightenment histoiogcenter of concerns of the philosophers of the period.

Thus, during the first third of the nineteenth century, three distinct "schools" of historical thought took shape: "Romantic," "dealist," and "Positivist." nd, although they disagreed with one another over the proPer method of studying and explaining history, they were one in their repudiation of the ronic attitude with which late nightenment rationalists had approached the study of the past. This shared antipathy t rony in al its forms accounts in large part for the enthusiasm for historical studies which was characteristic of the time and for the self-cnfident tone of ear1y nineteenth-century historiography, which prevailed in spite of crucial differences
over questions of "methodology." secnd, "mature" or "classic," phase, which ]asted from around r83o to 87o r thereabout. This period was characterized by sustained debate ver historical theory and by the consistent production of massive narrative accounts of past cultures and societies. t was during this phase that the four great

raphy.

t also accounts for the particular tone of historical thinking during its

"masters"

viIle, and Burckhardt-prduced their principal rvorks. What is rnost striking about the historigraphy of this phase is the degree of theoretical self-consciousness in urhich its representatives carried out their

of

nineteenth-century historiography-Michelet, Ranke, Tocque-

investigations of the past and cmpsed their narrative accounts of it. Almst a]l of them were inspired by the hope of creating a perspective on the historical rcess that wuld be as "objective" aS that from which scientists viewed the prcess f ;ieture aid as "rea1istic" a that from which the statesmen of the period <iirected the fortunes of nations. During this phase,

4o

METASTORY

theefore, debate tended to turn on the question of the criteria by lvlrich a genuinely "realistic" conception of history might be judged. Like their contempraries in the novel, the histoians of the time were concered t prodrce images f historv which wee as free from the abstactness of their nlightenment predecessors as they were devoid of the il]usions f their Rmatic PecLlSorS. Brt, also like their contempraies in the novc1 (Scott, alzac, Stendha, F'arbert, and the Gncourts ), the succeeded only in producing aS anv difierent species of "realism" as thee were moda]ities for construing the lvor]d in figurative discourse. over against the ronic "rea]ist" of the En1ightenment, the,v contived a number of competing "realisms," each a projection of one or another of the modes of Metaphor, Metonymy, and Synecdoche. n fact, as will show, the "historical reaiisms" of N'ichelet, Tocqueville, and Ranke cnsisted f little mre than critica] elabrations of perspectives provided b these tropological strategies for processing expeience in specificallv "poetic" ways. nd, in tlre "realism" f Burckhardt, one witnesses the fail once oe into that ronic cndition from lvlrich "realism" itself l,as supposed to ]iberate tlre historical consciousness f the age. The exfoliation f tl-rese vaios modes of historical corceptualization rvas attended bv, and t a large extent caused, further reflection on philsophy of historv. During this second phase, philosopllv of l-ristorv tended to take the form f an attack upon F1egel'S Svstem, but, in geneal, it did not Succeed in taking thought about historical cnsciousness be,vond the point ,here he had ieft it. The exception t this generalization is, of course, Max, r,ho attempted to combine the Sl'necdchic strategies of Hegel lvith the N{etonymical stategies f the political economy f his time in order to ceate a historica vision that''as at once "dialectical" and "materialistic"-that is to say, "historica1" and "echanistic" simultaneolsly. N'a himself represents the most consistent effort of the nineteenth century to tansfol histoical study into a Science. Moreover, his lvas the most consistent effort t analyze the relationship between historical consciousness on the one hand and the actual forms of historical existence on the otlrer. n his work, tlre theorv and practice of historical reflection ae intimateIy linked to the theory and practice of the society in which they arose. More than any trer thinker, Marx was sensitive to the ideological implication of any conception of history which claimed the status of a "realistic" visin f tlre lvorld. Max's own conception of historv was anything but ronic, but he did succeed in revealing the ideologica implications of every concePtion f history' nd he provided therebv mre than ampe grounds for the descent into rony which rvas t chaacterize the historical consciousness of the last phase of the historical reflection of the age, the so-called crisis f histicism which developed during the last third of the century. But histrical thought had no need of a Marx to project it into its third, or crisis, phase. The very success of the historians of the second phase was

INTRoDUC

oN

4L

sufficient t plunge historical consciusness into that condition of rony which is the true cntent of the "crisis of historicism." The consistent e]aboration of a nuber of equally comprehensive and plausible, vet apparent] mutu_ a11y exclusive, conceptins of the Same SetS of events v/as enough to undermine confidence in histr's claim to "objecti'ity," "scientificity," and "realism." This lss of confidence rvas already perceivable in Burckhardt's lvork, which is nranifestl aestheticist in spirit, skeptical in pint of vierv, cvnical in tone, and pessimistic of any effort to know the "real" truth of things. The phisophical cunterpart of the mood represented by Burckhardt in historiograph is, f course, Friedrich Nietzsche. But the aestheticisnr, skepticisnr, cynicisl, and pessimism ,hich lvere simply Ssumed by Burck1rardt as the bases f his peculiar band of "ea]ism" were self-consciousl taken as problems by Nietzsche' Moreoer, thev were considered manifestations of i condition of spiritual decadence which was to be overcome in part by the freeing of histoicai Consciousness frm the impssib]e idea] of a transcendentally "realist" perspective on the vrorld. n his earl prilosophical lvorks, Nietzscl-re took as his prob]em the onic cnsciousness of his age and, as a corollary of this, the specific forms of historica1 conceptlalization r'vhich sustain it. nd, like Hege1 before hini (though in a different spirit and with a different aim in viel,), he sought to dissolve

this ron1, lvithort falIing into the illusions f a naive Rornanticism. Brt Nietzsche does represent a retun to the Ron-rantic conceptiol of the lristorical process inasmuch as he attempted to assimilate histrical thought to a notion of art that takes the Metaphorica1 mde as its paradigmatic figurative strategv. ].Jietzsche Spoke f a historiogaphy that is couciusly metahistrical in its theory and "superhistorica1'' in its aim. is rvas, therefore, a defense of a sef-consciously Metphoricl apperception of the historical field, which is to say that it rvas onlv et'phoriclly ronic in its intention. n },ietzsc1re's thought about histor},, the psvchology of historical conscious_ ness is laid open to analysis; moeover, its origins in a specifically poetic appehension of reali are revealed. As a result, Nietzsche, as much as Marx, provided the grounds for that fa1I into the "crisis of historicism" t

which the historical ihought of his age succumbed. t was in response t the crisis of historicism that Benedetto Croce undertook his monumental investigations into the deep structure of historical consciousness. Like Nietzsche, Croce recognized that the crisis reflected the triumph of an essential]y ronic attitude f mind. nd, ]ike him, he hoped to purge historica] thinking of this rony by assimilating it to art. But in the p.o.ess Croce was driven to contrive a particularly ronic conception of art

itself. n his effrts to assimilate historical thought to art, he succeeded finally only in driving historical consciousness into a deeper awareness of its own rnic condition. e subsequently attempted to save it from tlre skepti_ cism whiclr this heightened self-cnsciousness promoted by assirnilating his_

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METHSToRY

attended its elaboration in the historiography of the time.

of the nineteenth century. This ronic condition differed from its ]ate Enlightenment counterpart on]y in the sophistication vith which it was expounded in phiosophy of history ad the breadth of learning which

tory to philosophy. But, in this effort, he succeeded ony in historicizing philosophy, thereby rendering it as ronically self-conscious of its ]imitations as historiography itself had become. s thus eflvisaged, the evo]ution of philosophy of history_from egel, through Marx and Nietzsche, t Croce_represets the same development as that which can be seen in the evolution of historiography from Michelet, through Ranke and rocqueville, to Burckhardt. The same basic modalities of conceptualizatin aPpea in both philosophy of history and historiography, though they appear in a diffeent sequence i their fuIly articulated forms. The important point is that, taken as a whole, philsophy of history ends in the same ronic condition that historiography had come to by the last third