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Historiography between
Scholarship and Poetry:
Reflections on Hayden
White's Approach to
Historiography
Georg G. Iggers
Published online: 08 Jun 2011.

To cite this article: Georg G. Iggers (2000) Historiography between Scholarship

and Poetry: Reflections on Hayden White's Approach to Historiography,
Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, 4:3, 373-390, DOI:
10.1080/136425200457056

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 Rethinking History 4:3 (2000), pp. 373–390

•CONTROVERSIES•

Historiography between Scholarship and

Poetry: Re ections on Hayden White’s
Approach to Historiography

Georg G. Iggers
State University of New York at Buffalo
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My occupation with Hayden White’s work, not only with Metahistory,1 but
also with the essays which followed, has a very practical side to it. For quite
a number of years now I have been occupied with a work of synthesis on his-
torical thought and writing since the Eighteenth century, a study which
focuses on the West but also takes into consideration historiographical
thought and writing outside the West, particularly in China. I chose the Eight-
eenth century as the start because at that junction, as I shall explain below, a
reorientation took place in the quality and character of historical perception
and conceptualization which distinguished modern from pre-modern his-
torical discourse. I have researched and written considerable portions of the
book, yet as I proceeded I became increasingly aware that traditional forms
of writing a history of historiography, which were essentially informative
rather than analytical, such as the readable works of Eduard Fueter, George
P. Gooch, James Westfall Thompson, Harry Elmer Barnes and more recently
Ernst Breisach, no longer sufŽce. Despite the critical notes which especially
Fueter and Barnes contain, they are essentially discussions of individual
writers and their works. White’s attempt in Metahistory to seek ‘a deep struc-
tural content’ (p. ix) in the historical writing of Nineteenth century Europe
constitutes an important contribution to a more critical and analytical
approach to the history of historiography.

I.

My own work in recent years has been located between two orientations from
which I have received important impulses but with which I also have very
profound differences. On the one hand there is the attempt by Jörn Rüsen
and his students, particularly Horst-Walter Blanke (1991) and Friedrich
Jaeger (1994), who seek to deal with historical writing since the Eighteenth
century within the framework of the history of a scholarly, or in their term
scientiŽc, i.e. wissenschaftlich, discipline, and on the other hand, White’s

Rethinking History ISSN 1364-2529 print/ISSN 1470-1154 online © 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd
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 374 Georg G. Iggers

commitment to deal with historical writing primarily as a form of literature.

There is justiŽcation for both approaches, for historical writing can be viewed
from the perspective of scholarship and of literature. Moreover, there is
common ground between Rüsen and White in their treatment, to use White’s
formulation, of ‘the historical work as a verbal structure in the form of a
narrative prose discourse’ (Metahistory: ix). Both Rüsen and his students as
well as White, moreover, privilege written history at the neglect of other forms
of historical memory and reconstruction which are not written but neverthe-
less important aspects of historical consciousness. But within the written
history of the Nineteenth century, they deal with very different subjects; only
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Ranke, Droysen, and Burckhardt occur in both of them and are approached
very differently.
One fundamental difference between the two approaches lies in the views
of objectivity and truth. For Rüsen, Blanke, and Jaeger, history is foremost a
science in the German sense of the term Wissenschaft, for White it is fore-
most an art. Rüsen and his students seek to apply the Kuhnian concept of the
paradigm or the disciplinary matrix to the study of history. To be sure this
involves a modiŽcation of the traditional concept of historical objectivity by
which historical discourse refers to a real past. Every historical narrative, they
acknowledge, only indirectly recaptures the past. Rüsen and White agree that
ideological factors enter into historical cognition. For Rüsen and his students
this means that historical study always reects the life world of the historian.
For him, as for Kuhn, scientiŽc knowledge, and this for him includes his-
torical knowledge, is always a construct, never a direct reection of reality.
For both science, including historical science, presupposes a scientiŽc com-
munity which shares a common language and common standards of what
constitutes scientiŽc method and criteria of truth. While the history of science
for Kuhn emphatically does not consist in the cumulation of knowledge, and
Kuhn thus denies the reality of progress in the history of science, the idea of
a progressive development in historical studies returns through the back door.
Although the substitution of one paradigm by another for Kuhn involves
extrascientiŽc elements such as changed world views, it nevertheless consti-
tutes an advance in problem solving. The same is true for Rüsen’s view of
changes in what he calls ‘disciplinary matrices’. At this point Rüsen embeds
the history of historical study into a broader historical framework linked to
the Weberian conception of rationalization as a key characteristic of the
Occidental world. Rationalization in the sphere of historical inquiry takes the
form of ‘scientiŽcation’ (Verwissenschaftlichung), the transformation of
history into a scientiŽc enterprise, not only in the sense of rigorous scientiŽc
conceptualization but also professional organization. Although the science of
history, for example in the sense of Droysen who spoke of ‘elevating history
to the rank of a science (Wissenschaft)’ (Droysen 1977: 451–69), is different
 Historiography Between Scholarship and Poetry 375

from the hard sciences in the softer kind of explanations and conceptualiz-
ation it employs, it is nevertheless more than merely historical scholarship.
For Rüsen three concepts are closely related, ‘scientiŽcation’, ‘professional-
ization’, and ‘modernization’. For him, Blanke, and Jaeger the foundations
for the transformation of history from historiography (Geschichtsschreibung )
to historical science (Geschichtswissenschaft were laid in the Enlightenment;
in Nineteenth century historicism the new scholarly outlook found its high
point. Historicism went hand in hand with the emergence of a professional
ethos in historical studies. But while it overcame the static view of human
nature of the Enlightenment, and saw all cultural phenomena in their chang-
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ing, historical settings, it in their opinion placed too great a stress on high
politics and with its stress on individuality and uniqueness in history sacri-
Žced rigorous conceptualization. Thus the combination of history and the
analytical social sciences in the mid-Twentieth century constitutes for them
not only a replacement of the historicist matrix but also an advance.
While professionalization plays an important role in historical studies in
the Nineteenth and Twentieth century not only in the West but generally in
the world, it constitutes, as White convincingly showed, only one aspect of
Nineteenth (or for that matter Twentieth) century historical studies. The
concept of a disciplinary matrix assumes that there is agreement on how
history is to be researched and written but as White’s examples of Michelet,
Tocqueville, and Burckhardt demonstrate, none of whom Žt the paradigm,
historical writing has gone in very diverse directions. Although Rüsen in
recent years has turned his attention to comparative studies of historical dis-
course including the historiographies of non-Western cultures, the works of
Blanke and Jaeger still early in the 1990s focused narrowly on Germany. I
myself when asked to contribute a paper, ‘Why Did the Verwis-
senschaftlichung of Historical Studies Occur Earlier in Germany than in
Other Countries?’, to the Historical Discourse conference in 1992 on the
modernization of historical studies in the Nineteenth century, changed the
title to ‘Did the Verwissenschaftlichung of Historical Studies in Fact Occur
Earlier in Germany than in Other Countries?’ (Iggers 1994) My reason for
this was my conviction that professionalization by no means guaranteed the
objectivity and impartiality which it prescribed. White in his reply which
follows consistently identiŽes me with a tradition which I have always
approached critically. In fact, I fully agree with White regarding the ideo-
logical aspects of historical scholarship. It is striking that the new pro-
fessional historical studies were generally highly ideological. In the case of
Ranke the ideological implications were concealed and denied but easily
recognizable, in the case of Sybel, Droysen, or Treitschke they were openly
acknowledged. The new historical profession in Germany preceding and
following uniŽcation, and in France in the Third Republic, served political
 376 Georg G. Iggers

and national aims. Droysen, who by Rüsen and White is praised as one of
the greatest historical minds of the Nineteenth century, was also the creator
of the myth of the German mission of the Hohenzollerns since the Middle
Ages.

II.

Turning now to White’s work and more directly to the question of textual-
ism and historical discourse: while Rüsen stresses the scientiŽc and scholarly
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side of historical inquiry which, without denying the literary and aesthetic
qualities of historical qualities of historical narrative, nevertheless aims at a
realistic reconstruction of the past, White minimizes the distinction beween
historical scholarship, speculative philosophy of history, and imaginative
literature. Every attempt to reconstruct the past by scholarly means is pri-
marily a ‘poetic act’ (Metahistory: x, 31). I shall concentrate on Metahistory,
although White has later viewed it as representing an earlier stage of his think-
ing, because it interests me particularly as a history of historiography, and
because the theory of tropes continues basically unchanged into his later
work. What is added is a radically ‘poststructuralist’ and ‘postmodernist’ –
to use White’s terms – theory of language which contrasts with the ‘formal-
ism’ or ‘structuralism’, again to use his terms, of Metahistory.
The key assumption on which White’s argument in Metahistory, rests is
‘that, in any Želd of study not yet reduced (or elevated) to the status of a
genuine science, thought remains the captive of the linguistic mode in which
it seeks to grasp the outline of objects inhabiting its Želd of perception’
(Metahistory: xi). The consequence is that it is not the purportedly objective
investigations of the historian into a real subject matter which lead to know-
ledge about history but rather that the knowledge at which the historian
arrives is conditioned by the linguistic mode in which he/she operates. In
‘choos(ing) conceptual strategies by which to explain or represent his data
. . . the historian performs an essentially poetic act, in which he preŽgures the
historical Želd and constitutes it as a domain upon which to bring to bear the
speciŽc theories he will use to explain ‘what was really happening; (Metahis-
tory: x). White then sets out to examine the texts of four master historians of
the Nineteenth century, Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, and Burckhardt, and
four speculative philosophers of history, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Croce,
to show that the ‘possible modes of historiography are the same as the poss-
ible modes of speculative philosophy of history’ (Metahistory: xi). In so far
as the historical work is ‘a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose
discourse’ (Metahistory: ix), the same conditions govern historical narratives
and speculative philosophies of history, or for that matter the historical novel.
 Historiography Between Scholarship and Poetry 377

All three are confronted with a ‘choice among contending interpretative strat-
egies’ (Metahistory:,xi). These strategies White deŽnes as ‘tropes’. ‘As a corol-
lary of this (choice), the best grounds for choosing one perspective on history
rather than another are aesthetic or moral rather than epistemological’
(Metahistory: xii).
Going beyond this, White argues that once the historian has made his/her
choice of strategies or tropes, he/she is captive of this stategy. Within the Nine-
teenth century European setting, four tropes or historical styles were poss-
ible, each of which preconditioned one of four ‘modes’ of ‘emplotment’
(romantic, tragic, comic, satircal), ‘argument’ (formist, mechanistic, organi-
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cist, contextualist), and ‘ideological implication’ (anarchist, radical, con-

servative, liberal) (Metahistory: 29). Thus Ranke in his historical optimism
employs what White calls a comic mode of emplotment, in which the plot
leads to a happy end, sees society in organicist terms, and is politically con-
servative. The historical style thus predetermines the way the historian pro-
ceeds, how he explains historical events, and what political stance he takes.
One may dismiss this categorization, which reects the scientistic structural-
ism of literary theory in the 1960s, as peripheral to White’s epistemological
position. The core of his argument is that ‘proper’ history, philosophy of
history, and literary forms of history all have the same explanatory validity.
As he formulated it in an essay published shortly after Metahistory:

But in general there has been a reluctance to consider historical narratives as

what they most manifestly are: verbal Žctions, the contents of which are as much
invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their
counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences.
(Tropics: 82)

Using a purely ‘formalist’ method, White therefore ‘will not try to decide
whether a given historian’s work is a better, or more correct account of a
speciŽc set of events or segment of the historical process than some other his-
torian’s account of them’ (Metahistory: 3–4).
To illustrate his point, White proceeds to what he considers a strictly textual
examination of the four master historians and the four master philosophers of
history who for him represent the four tropes with their implications for
emplotment, argument, and ideology as he deŽnes them. His formalism
assumes that the texts are self-contained, that they can be analysed without
reference to a context, that in fact they contain the context and that ‘they
cannot be “refuted”, or their generalizations “disconŽrmed”, . . . by appeal to
new data. . . . Their status as models of historical narration and conceptualiz-
ation depends, ultimately, on the preconceptual and speciŽcally poetic nature
of their perspectives on history and its processes’ (Metahistory: 5).
The problem with White’s essays on the four historians and the four
 378 Georg G. Iggers

philosophers of history is that he does not do what he sets out to do. These
essays are largely not textual but contextual analyses. I shall show this in the
case of the essays on Ranke, Burckhardt, and Marx which I have examined
closely, but it also holds for the remaining Žve essays. The textual approach
assumes that the text can be read without reference to a referent. White in
Metahistory had not yet completed his ‘movement to postmodernism’ of
which he spoke in 1993 when he wrote: ‘I am inclined to follow people like
Foucault and Barthes. So I say, the text in some sense is detached from the
author’ (Interview: 16). In Metahistory, he was still concerned about the
author’s intentionality and he sought to Žnd it in the text. But he largely failed
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to read the texts in which the historians or philosophers he examined wrote

history, to Žnd the understanding of history implicit in their historical narra-
tives. Instead he restricted himself for the most part to reconstructing their
explicit theoretical statements and examining inuences which other thinkers
exerted on them. Using his scheme of the tropes with its implications for what
he called emplotment, argument, and ideology, he imposed a consistency on
each of them which obscured the contradictions or at least the lack of sys-
tematic coherence in the thought of each of them. Perhaps the problem with
White’s analysis arises because the text only answers the questions which we
ask it and these questions are not inherent in the text. These questions then
lead to authorial intentionality, although, of course, the author may not be
fully conscious of the implications of his writing. But if we exclude the
author’s intentionality from the text and refrain from asking questions
seeking to probe his/her intentionality, we are forced to take an absurdist
notion of free play which permits the texts to be interpreted in an inŽnite
number of ways. White concludes his reply with ‘it is the intention of the texts
that should interest us, not the intentions of the writer’. But in truth only
writers have intentions, no matter how complex and unclear these may be.
Texts have no intention although they and the intentions of the writers
expressed in them are open to interpretation.
Looking now at the Ranke chapter, it struck me that White had examined
none of Ranke’s great narrative works, neither the History of the Popes, nor
the History of the Reformation in Germany, the History of Civil Wars and
Monarchy in France, nor the English History in the Sixteenth and Seven-
teenth Centuries (although all of them except the last are listed in his bibli-
ography). It would have been interesting to examine the ideological
implications, the emplotment and the forms of argument which interest
White in the actual historical narrative. Instead Ranke is embedded into the
intellectual history of the early Nineteenth century by an analysis of his
theoretical statements. White draws on the brief excerpts from Fritz Stern’s
Varieties of History, the famous four-page preface to the Histories of the
Latin and Germanic Nations, the brief fragments of his introductory
 Historiography Between Scholarship and Poetry 379

lectures, and then the famous essay on the ‘Great Powers’ (Ranke 1950)
from the Von Laue edition. These statements give us a good insight into
Ranke’s world view as he consciously articulated it. They support White’s
view of it: the combination of an optimistic vision of the historical process,
which White denotes as comic, an organicist conception of society, and con-
servative political values. White draws heavily on Humboldt’s essay ‘On the
Task of the Historian’ to explain Ranke’s doctrine of historical ideas and
individuality.
Yet it would have been important to have gone beyond Ranke’s megahis-
torical perceptions in ‘The Great Powers’ to examine the actual historical nar-
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ratives. This would have permitted us to look into the actual texture of his
texts, to view his heroes (and villains), his psychology, his comprehension of
human behaviour, and the political implications. Although Ranke proclaims
his impartiality, the political implications within his texts become apparent
at every step. His treatment of Luther and Münzer in his chapter on the
German Peasant Wars is a good example of this.
Ranke rejected the historical novel as he saw it exempliŽed in Walter Scott
but he was very much aware that history was also an art and wrote in the
manner of the historical novelists. Here it would have been interesting to
explore the commonalities in the discourse and style of the scholarly historical
work and the work of literature. And then there was, of course, the scholarly
side, the central role of critical archival research, which Ranke took very seri-
ously, but White barely mentions, because he considers it irrelevant to an
understanding of Ranke’s narrative. But it cannot be dismissed, so that it is
important at least to examine its impact on the narrative, even if like White
we were to consider this impact minimal.
White is right that much of Ranke’s world can be reconstructed through a
depth analysis, even a linguistic analysis of historical narratives. He unfortu-
nately does not do this here. Nor is it clear that the historical picture Ranke
constructs results from the choice of a trope. It seems rather that the choice
of trope is part of a broad context which shapes this choice, that ideology,
deŽned here not as political doctrine or false consciousness in Marx’s sense
but in terms of basic views and values, may be a stronger force in determin-
ing the historical styles which White has in mind as tropes than the reverse.
In his essay on Burckhardt, White does in fact occasionally refer to the
Civilization of the Renaissance, but only peripherally. And he deals with it to
isolate articulated ideas, rather than to lay bare the implications contained in
the narrative. But for the most part the sources which White examines are
again not historical narratives – The Age of Constantine is mentioned, but
not examined. Instead, great emphasis is placed on the Letters, The Cicerone,
Force and Freedom, and Judgements on History and Historians –, none of
which are historical narratives. Thus parallel to the discussion of Humboldt
 380 Georg G. Iggers

in the Ranke chapter as a source of Ranke’s idealism, there is an extensive

treatment of Schopenhauer as a source of Burckhardt’s pessimism. But this is
an external, contextual element, not found in the narrative. Yet an examin-
ation of Burckhardt’s historical narrative would have presented a much more
complex picture, not free of contradictions, than the attempt to deŽne Bur-
ckhardt in terms of tropes. There is a contrast between the note of aristocratic
pessimism in the face of the industrial world and mass society reected in Bur-
ckhardt’s diaries and letters, especially after 1870, and the aristocratic, but
nevertheless embulliant note of the Civilization of the Renaissance. Despite
Burckhardt’s rejection of Hegel’s philosophy of history as schematic and his
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written repudiation of the idea of progress in Force and Freedom, there is a

good deal of common ground between him and Hegel, for example in his
view of the emergence and progress of a peculiarly Western conception of
liberty with its roots in classical Greek antiquity (Jaeger 1994). And for him,
as we know, the Renaissance constituted a remarkable progress over the
Middle Ages. To be sure he saw this modern culture threatened by the forces
unleashed by the French Revolution and industrialization. But this does not
become apparent in The Civilization of the Renaissance, which in some ways
is a nostalgic reection on a past world more glorious in its violence and its
repudiation of conventional morality than that of his time. A close reading
of the texts thus shows a much less consistent mind than the theory of the
tropes would suggest.
We can show something similar in Michelet and Tocqueville. But the
philosophers of history too must be read much more closely than occurs here.
Thus Marx’s writing of history and his philosophy of history is characterized
by White as ‘mechanistic’ and assigned to the ‘metonymical mode’. But a
careful reading of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte shows that its
narrative is much too complex to be categorized in this way. Faced with the
failure of his and Engels’ predictions in early 1848 about the outcome of the
Revolution they considered to be imminent, Marx introduced factors in con-
ict with his general statements elsewhere about the course of history. The
macrohistorical framework within which Marx places the course of historical
development remains. But Marx now draws a much more complex picture of
class relations than he and Engels did in the Manifesto. Even the peasantry,
whom Marx disdainfully compares to a ‘sack of potatoes’, enter as a historical
factor. Marx argued that ‘Louis Bonaparte’s victory was a result of bourgeois
fear of the proletariat, combined with peasant resentment of both the bour-
geoisie and the proletariat’ (Metahistory: 320). But confronted with the actual
events which do not Žt into his larger historical scheme, Marx is forced to
introduce factors which are not purely reducible to economic forces. Thus he
recognizes the role, however, negative, which individuals, foremost Louis
Bonaparte, played in shaping political events and the powerful inuence which
political traditions such as the French Revolution and Bonapartism asserted.
 Historiography Between Scholarship and Poetry 381

And Žnally, not only in the assessment of Louis Bonaparte but also of the
Lumpenproletariat and the Society of December 10, Marx introduces moral
categories which are not compatible with his larger scheme of history.
This is not meant as a repudiation of textual reading but rather as a call
for a much closer textual reading than White has undertaken here. But it also
points to the limits of a narrow textualism. We cannot understand the text
without understanding the context in which it arose. And the intentions of
the author are an important part of this context. At the same time we must
be aware that these intentions are much more complex than the author admits
or realizes. Here we are driven to do what White has admonished us to do at
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the beginning of Metahistory, to dig below the ‘surface’ to the ‘deep struc-
tural content’ (Metahistory: ix, x). We must try to Žnd this structural content
through a close, critical reading of the texts, but it is not generated by the
texts. My criticism of White in Metahistory, is not that he relied too heavily
on the texts, but that in contrast to the textualism he advocates he relied on
them too little.
In fact the texts can tell us a great deal about the age which goes beyond
the author himself because the author is embedded in a context. White recog-
nizes this in his essay, ‘The Context in the Text: Method and Ideology in Intel-
lectual History’, published in 1982, almost a decade after Metahistory
(content: 185–213). We should leave aside White’s espousal of post-Saus-
surean linguistics and look at what he actually does in his masterful treatment
of The Education of Henry Adams. Here White recognizes that ‘considered as
historical evidence, all texts are regarded as being equally shot through with
ideological elements’. ‘To the historian equipped with the proper tools’, he
continues, ‘any text or artifact can Žgure forth the thought-world and poss-
ibly even the world of emotional investment and the praxis of its time and
place of production’ (Content: 187). And in his analysis of The Education of
Henry Adams, he closely considered contextual aspects, such as the conditions
under which the work was published and the world of an American aristoc-
racy out of which Adams came. Far from seeing the work as a unit, White
points at the deep disjuncture in discourse and outlook between the part
dealing with the early years of Henry Adam and the later years. Considering
his analysis to be ‘semiological’ rather than ‘linguistic’, White wants to go
beyond the ‘conventional approach’ of ‘identify(ing) generic elements, themes,
arguments, and so forth, in the interest of establishing what the text is about’
(Content: 194), to take us to the ‘process of meaning production that is the
special subject of intellectual history’ (Ibid.: 209). ‘By unpacking the rich sym-
bolic content of Adams’ work’, White concludes, ‘we return it to its status as
an immanent product of the culture in which it arose’. ‘It is the typicality of
Adams’ discourse that makes it translatable as evidence of his own age that a
reader can comprehend, receive as message, understand’ (p. 213). I agree. The
result is a convincing demonstration of the interplay of text and context.
 382 Georg G. Iggers

III.

Textualism as understood by White, however, raises not only the question of

the relation of text to context but also the related question of the relation of
the text to an extratextual reality and with it the question to what extent the
text conveys fact or Žction.
There are several points on which I can agree with White:
Few persons would question White’s intention to treat the historical work,
certainly in its classical form in Nineteenth century Western culture which he
examines, as ‘a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse’
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(Metahistory: ix). Historical accounts normally take the form of stories.

Few persons would disagree with him that the conception which he
ascribes to Nineteenth century academic history, that the story emerges
unproblematically from the documentary evidence, is untenable. In his reply
White attributes to me ‘use of the very categories that underwrote history’s
establishment as an ideology passing for a science in the nineteenth century’,
categories which in fact I have steadily examined critically. Incidentally none
of the great historians, certainly not Ranke, held this conception. The coher-
ence of the accounts requires the historian to construct a story which goes
beyond the raw data. This account, at least in the classical form which not
only Nineteenth century European historiography, but much of historiogra-
phy before then in the West and in other cultures, assumed, requires emplot-
ment of the data. In this sense every historical account has a literary
dimension, as incidentally also Ranke recognized.
Most persons today would agree with White that the historian does not
proceed without presuppositions in the construction of this story. In White’s
words: ‘Before the historian can bring to bear upon the data of the historical
Želd the conceptual apparatus he will use to represent and to explain it, he
must Žrst preŽgure the Želd’ (Metahistory: 30). I further agree that explicit
or implict ideological considerations enter into every construction of a his-
torical account. Moreover, I agree that there is a philosophy of history implicit
in every historical account.
Further I would agree that the sharp distinction between history and litera-
ture which dominated Nineteenth century historical thought requires to be
modiŽed (See Tropics: 98). White, however, insists wrongly that I draw this
sharp distinction and identify all literature as Žction. In fact I agree that the
view, according to which ‘it was possible to believe that whereas writers of
Žction invented everything in their narratives, . . . historians invented nothing
but certain rhetorical ourishes’ (Content: x), is no longer tenable. Nor is the
rigid ‘older distinction between Žction and history, in which Žction is con-
ceived as the representation of the imaginable and history as the represen-
tation of the actual’ tenable without qualiŽcations. Not only does the
 Historiography Between Scholarship and Poetry 383

historical narrative unavoidably introduce Žctional elements in its construc-

tion of a story, but the novel, particularly in its Nineteenth century form,
‘wish(es) to provide a verbal image of “reality”’ (Tropics: 122), particularly
in its commitment to realism. I would accept White’s insistence that there is
a continuum between fact and Žction, and would further accept his obser-
vation that ‘novelists might be dealing only with imaginary events whereas
historians are dealing with real ones, but the process of fusing events, whether
imaginary or real, into a comprehensible totality capable of serving as the
object of a representation is a poetic process’ (ibid.: 125).
I would further agree with White that ‘“history”, as a plenum of docu-
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ments that attest to the occurrence of events, can be put together in a number
of different and equally plausible narrative accounts of “what happened in
the past”’ (Metahistory: 283) Thus we should acknowledge ‘that there is no
such thing as a single correct view of any object under study but that there
are many correct views, each requiring its own style of representation’
(Tropics: 47). Comparing this to art, he rightly suggests that ‘we do not expect
that Constable and Cézanne will have looked for the same thing in a given
landscape’ (ibid.: 46).
Up to this point I agree with White and believe that he has made a valu-
able contribution in heightening our awareness of the literary and Žctional
aspects of historical narration. In my opinion White’s error is that he argues
that because all historical accounts contain Žctional elements they are basi-
cally Žctions and not subject to truth controls. For him there are not only
many different possible accounts of any set of events and interpretations of
any set of documents, but all of them have the same truth value. As we have
already quoted, ‘grounds for choosing one perspective of history rather than
another are ultimately aesthetic or moral’ (Metahistory: xii).
White does not deny that there are historical facts. Pressed on the ques-
tion of the Holocaust, he admits that it took place. He distinguishes between
events which are real and facts which are constructs but then uses the two
terms interchangeably. Thus an ‘occurrence’ like the storming of the Bastille
on 14 July 1789, is ‘simply a matter of fact’ (Content: 77). So is the Holo-
caust. To claim that it did not take place is ‘as morally offensive as it is intel-
lectually bewildering’ (Content: 76). Here White has a much simpler and
more traditional conception of a fact than he employs elsewhere, e.g. in his
agreement with Claude Lévi-Strauss that historical facts are constituted rather
then given (Tropics: 55), or in his quotation of Roland Barthes’ sentence: ‘Le
fait n’a jamais qu’une existence linguistique’ which is the motto of The
Content of the Form. Similarly he questions the existence of ‘raw facts’ and
suggests that the historian has to constitute the facts by the ‘choice of the
metaphor by which he orders the world’ (ibid.: 47). With speciŽc reference
to the Holocaust and contrasting it to the assertions of the Revisionists who
 384 Georg G. Iggers

deny that it took place, White argues: ‘Obviously, considered as accounts of

events already established as facts, “competing narratives” can be assessed,
criticized, and ranked on the basis of their Ždelity to the factual record, their
comprehensiveness, and the coherence of whatever arguments they may
contain’ (Probing: 141). But he then immediately qualiŽes this by continuing:
‘But narrative arguments do not consist of factual statements (singular exis-
tential propositions) and arguments: they consist as well of poetical and
rhetorical elements. . . . Here the conict between “competing narratives” has
less to do with the facts of the matter in question than with the different story-
meanings with which the facts can be endowed by emplotment’ (ibid. 141).
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Thus White’s turn to factualism in reference to the reality of the Holocaust

appears in conict with his stance throughout his writings from Metahistory
to the interview with Ewa Domanska in 1993 that all historical writing is
Žction. Thus as we have already noted, he considers all historical narratives
‘verbal Žctions, the contents of which are as much invented as found’ (Tropics:
82). ‘Viewed simply as verbal artifacts, histories and novels are indistinguish-
able from one another’ (ibid.: 122). Similarly ‘the opposition between myth
and history . . . is as problematical as it is untenable’ (ibid.: 83).
While rightly pointing at the elements in the construction of any historical
narrative which go beyond the raw data, White moves on to a position which
I Žnd untenable: that every historical account, provided it does not violate its
Ždelity to the facts, possesses equal truth value. Historical narratives, he
argues, can be judged in terms of their ‘consistency, coherence, and illumi-
nary power’ but they can no more be ‘refuted’ or ‘disconŽrmed’ than can
expositions of speculative history (Metahistory: 4). How one puts a ‘plenum
of documents’ together into a ‘plausible narrative account’ is a matter of ‘vol-
untarist’ decision (Metahistory: 283).
White’s position is then further radicalized when in his later work he moves
to what he calls a ‘post-Saussurian’ or ‘semiological’ approach to language.
Such an approach rejects the ‘illusion that there is a past out there that is
directly reected in the texts’ (Content: 209), and thus ‘permits us to moot the
question of the text’s reliability as witness to events, its honesty and objectiv-
ity’ (ibid.: 192). As a consequence, White now sees the operations of academic
scholarship as ‘a ritual function’. ‘The kinds of “honesty” and “objectivity”
to which historians lay claim really relate to the conventions of erudite scholar-
ship that obtain in a given time and place and within speciŽc domains of differ-
ent scholarly communities. In other words the “objectivity” and “honesty” of
historians are, like the “facts” they purvey, “relative” to the cultural ideas pre-
vailing in the time and place of their production’ (Chartier 1993: 65).
 Historiography Between Scholarship and Poetry 385

IV.

One can, of course, deal with history from a literary, aesthetic perspective or
a scholarly one. Both have their justiŽcation. But White in fact rejects the
second option as an illusion.
He is undoubtedly right that an ideological element enters into every his-
torical account. On the other hand, he, in my opinion goes too far when he
asserts that ‘there are no extra-ideological grounds on which to arbitrate
among the conicting conceptions of the historical process and of historical
knowledge appealed to by the different ideologies’ (Metahistory: 26). We
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shall test this, turning to the history of the French Revolution. As we saw
White agrees that there is a factual basis which cannot be disputed, such as
the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, or in the case of the Shoah the
existence of the gas chambers. But every attempt to construct a larger his-
torical account whether of the French Revolution or the Shoah is forced to
emplot the events in such a way that the story which emerges is at its core
Žctional. Thus there can be many stories of the French Revolution – as there
can be of the Shoah – among which one cannot arbitrate on any extra-ideo-
logical ground.
Turning briey to the history of the French Revolution: the dominant
interpretations of the French Revolution from the 1920s to the 1970s were
Marxist following Georges Lefebvre’s analysis of the outbreak of the Revol-
ution in terms of class conict. The key role in the Revolution was assigned
to the bourgeoisie although other classes – aristocracy, peasantry, menus
peuples – all played their roles. For White a Marxist explanation cannot be
conŽrmed or disconŽrmed. Precisely because every attempt at historical
explanation contains an ideological element as well as a ‘mode of emplot-
ment’ to ‘structure’ the narrative, there is ‘no way of arbitrating among the
different modes of explanation’ (Metahistory: 276). Nevertheless if we look
at an attempt to ‘explain’ the outbreak of the French Revolution, there are
aspects which can be tested against the documentary evidence. Admittedly
this evidence too consists of verbal artifacts which involve interpretation.
Lefebvre’s analysis triggered off a debate among scholars of the French Revol-
ution regarding the economic and social composition of the classes involved
in it and raised the question whether the concept of class was even applic-
able. Although certainly inspired by ideological commitments, the arguments
raised in the debate, for example between Lefebvre and Cobban or Soboul
and Furet, rested on the interpretation of actual data. The Lefebvre thesis
could thus be tested and in part disconŽrmed or modiŽed. Out of the dis-
cussion came an increasing consensus that the Revolution could not be
explained solely or largely in terms of economic factors but involved attitudes
and cultural values as well. Lynn Hunt and others stressed the role of symbols
 386 Georg G. Iggers

and language. To an extent the economic and cultural interpretations not only
confront each other but cast different perspectives on a complicated historical
complex. There is no one interpretation of the French Revolution nor can
there be, nevertheless there are rational standards which historians follow in
their communication with each other. I fully agree with White that ‘different
historians could provide radically different, not to say antithetical but equally
plausible accounts of the same phenomena without distorting “the facts” or
violating any of the prevailing rules for handling evidence’. But his reference
to ‘prevailing rules for handling evidence’ suggests that White too has to
concede a degree of agreement among historians on scholarly procedure.
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I am totally puzzled why White misquotes me in his reply as having said

that the documents can be invoked to show that the ‘concept of class’ is
‘hardly applicable’ and calling my supposed statement absurd. I did not say
this. Instead I said that the critique of Lefebvre’s class analysis had raised the
question of the applicability of the concept of class among scholars. I never
doubted that the concept was useful in the analysis of the French Revolution.
White at this point becomes involved in a serious contradiction. On the one
hand he denies that there are any extra-ideological considerations possible in
the analysis of a set of events like the French Revolution. The Marxist concept
of class can therefore neither be proved nor disproved. On the other hand he
writes that ‘the reality (my emphasis) of the role of the middle class in revol-
utionary events beginning and following upon that of 1789 is hardly ques-
tionable’. But this involves a naive form of realism hardly in accord with
White’s questioning of such realism elsewhere. You cannot have it both ways.
White here suddenly does not want to realize that class is a very complex con-
struct, laden with ideological elements, not a given reality. My position has
been that nothwithstanding the ideological elements which surround the
Marxist concept of class, it can be and has been subjected to scholarly
examination relying on documentary evidence. The results of these inquiries,
although controversial, have not been exclusively determined by the moral
and aesthetic grounds White wants to invoke but also by serious scholarship.
White brushes Habermas aside ‘as having a very naive theory of com-
munication and therefore of discourse’ (Interview: 21). But in my opinion the
core of Habermas’ theory of communication is not naive. It recognizes the
ideological elements which enter into communication as well as the very
complex and in many ways opaque nature of the reality which surrounds us,
yet nevertheless maintains the commitment to communication among mature
individuals, mündig in Kant’s sense, who agree on standards of rational dis-
course. White questions the concept of rational discourse. For him every
culture and within each culture individual groups have their own form of
rational discourse and logical thinking. To a great extent this is obviously the
case. But it is not true that reason and logic are totally culturally determined.
Perhaps we cannot go as far as Max Weber who wrote that it is and will remain
 Historiography Between Scholarship and Poetry 387

true that methodologically correct proof in the social sciences, if it is to achieve

its purpose, must be acknowledged as correct even by a Chinese, who, on the
other hand, may be deaf to our conception of the ethical imperative’ (Weber
1949: 150). But the very fact that humans in all cultures are confronted by a
real world, which they cannot simply brush aside, sets the basis for at least
minimum standards of logical reasoning which transcend individual cultures.
The result is never deŽnitive agreement, but rather a continuous dialogue
which challenges ideological distortions. Historical scholarship is part of this
discourse. This scholarship, which White considers primarily as a ritual,
despite all ideological variations, contains agreement on certain minimum
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standards of evidence and argument. Notwithstanding the role of imagination

in the construction of scholarly accounts, such accounts are not purely or pri-
marily imaginative but presuppose hard research, the methods and con-
clusions of which are subject to scrutiny among a community of scholars.
While its ability of such scholarship to achieve consensus on substantive
issues is limited, it can contribute to the dismantling of historical myths. And
that is an important part of rational discourse.

V.

Now to the way in which I wish to mould the various fragments I have com-
posed during the past several years into a coherent story of the history of his-
torical thought and writing since the Eighteenth century. I am fully aware that
this will be only one perspective alongside with those which Rüsen, Blanke,
and Jaeger, on the one hand, and White on the other have provided. Because
the historical writing of this period can be viewed from the perspective of its
scholarship or that of ‘historical imagination’, mine will be a middle road
which integrates elements of both perspectives. There are good reasons Rüsen
and his students, White, and I begin our account in the Eighteenth century.
We all recognize a shift in historical consciousness which took place at that
time and which we might label ‘modern’. One aspect of this new conscious-
ness is a secularization of thought, the Žnal break with the Bible-oriented
chronology. Benjamin Elman in From Philosophy to Philology (1984) has
pointed at not entirely dissimilar developments in Seventeenth and Eighteenth
century China. For all three approaches it marks the emergence of a certain
kind of realism which for White consists in the exclusion of ‘legend, myth,
fable’ from ‘potential evidence for determining the truth about the past’
(Metahistory: 52). For Rüsen and Blanke it consists in the emergence of criti-
cal historical scholarship. I wish to deal with historical thought in a broader
setting than that of either Rüsen and Blanke or White. While especially for
Blanke, the focus is on professional historians, including many minor Žgures,
for White it is on the ‘master historians’, because the ‘classic text . . . gives us
 388 Georg G. Iggers

insight into a process which is universal and deŽnitive of human species-being

in general, the process of meaning production’ (Content: 211).
Yet there is something narrow to both foci. The academic historians form
only a small segment of historical consciousness. White’s occupation with eight
thinkers is not only highly selective, but also concentrates on fundamental
differences in historical consciousness. Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, and Bur-
ckhardt represent in many ways irreconcilable standpoints. What I am inter-
ested in are both the commonalities and the differences in historical thought
on a much broader level. There is a point at which Herder, Voltaire, and
Gibbon speak a common language and share assumptions which are part of
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the mental climate of the Eighteenth century. And the same is true of as diverse
thinkers as Burckhardt, Droysen, Taine, and Marx in the mid-Nineteenth
century. If we look carefully at the language of Burckhardt and Droysen, we
shall Žnd that they share much more of the world view of their time than
White’s or Rüsen’s attempts to differentiate them from the main currents of
the age suggest. For practical reasons I shall restrict myself to written works,
although I am well aware that these are only one part of a broader culture in
which historical consciousness expresses itself in symbolic forms in art, monu-
ments, festivals, etc. The book proceeds from the assumption that in the Eight-
eenth century there emerged a new way of looking at history which involved
new ways of writing history. Although never universally accepted, and increas-
ingly questioned already in the late Nineteenth century, this outlook domi-
nated historical writing well into the second half of the Twentieth century
when it was effectively challenged and widely modiŽed. Despite fundamental
differences, historians shared with their fellow citizens assumptions regarding
the possibility of a realistic representation of the past with implications for the
power relations between races, nations, classes and the sexes. It are these impli-
cations which will occupy a central place in my study. I shall use the sequence
of generations, loosely deŽned, to give my study a chronological framework.
Within each generation I intend to look carefully at the uses of language. But
I shall not only be interested in what these historians have in common but also
in the deep divergences in their thought and their styles.

Note

1 Works by Hayden White are referred to by name throughout this article.

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 Historiography Between Scholarship and Poetry 389

Burckhardt, Jacob (1956) The Age of Constantine the Great, New York: Doubleday
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Burckhardt, Jacob (1958) Judgements on History and Historians, Boston: Beacon
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Burckhardt, Jacob (1960) The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, London:
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Chartier, Roger (1993) ‘Quatre Questions à Hayden White’, Storia della StoriograŽa
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 390 Georg G. Iggers

Stern, Fritz (1972) The Varieties of History from Voltaire to the Present, New York:
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—— (1993) ‘Human Face of ScientiŽc Mind. (An Interview with Hayden White)’,
conducted by Ewa Domanska, Storia della StoriograŽa 24: 5–21.
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