A Weberian medievalist: Hayden White in the 1950s

Abstract

This article is the first in-depth examination of Hayden White's earliest writings. Ignored by most scholars of White's thought, these medievalist studies, dating from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, offer a fascinating insight into the young White's approach to history. Much unlike his later, better-known writings, White's doctoral dissertation, on the papal schism of 1130, expresses the belief that history should model itself after the social sciences. In particular, the thesis reflects a close affinity with Weberian-style sociology, not only in the use of models and ideal types derived from Max Weber, but also in its conceptions of ideology and ‘means–ends rationality’. Besides, traces of Weber's conviction that modern individuals have ‘to live in a godless and prophetless time’ can be recognized in White's critical treatment of charismatic religious leadership. This does not imply that White, talented in absorbing influences from different directions, unreservedly adhered to Weberian methods. An increasingly critical stance toward what he considered Weber's ‘science of society’ is evident from White's engagement with the work of Carlo Antoni. Still, one might argue that White's agenda in what the author calls his ‘medievalist period’ was to a large extent shaped by Weberian themes and attitudes. Finally, the author suggests that White's focus on ideology as well as his covering-law type of evolutionary model can be seen as anticipations of the metahistorical readings and tropological sequence that White would offer in his chef-d'oeuvre, Metahistory (1973).

Keywords:

• Hayden V. White (1928–)
• philosophy of history
• historiography
• Max Weber (1864–1920)
• medieval studies
• schism of 1130

Acknowledgements

This article is based on the first chapter of my PhD dissertation. I would like to thank Frank Ankersmit and Chris Lorenz for their constructive criticism and support.

Notes

1. Although the dissertation is dated 1955, White only received his PhD degree in 1956.

2. Cf. Jenkins 1998, 70: ‘I got interested in [medieval history] primarily because the world of a Catholic civilisation was so alien to my experience. I mean, I grew up in a family of working-class people, very ill-educated – that is to say sixth or seventh grade education was what they had – and they weren't in any sense intellectuals; they had no background in university life.’

3. During his undergraduate years at Wayne University, White had studied the English translation of Tellenbach's Libertas: Kirche und Weltordnung im Zeitalter des Investiturstreites (1936) with William J. Bossenbrook, a history professor whose ‘fascination for apocalyptic and revolutionary social movements’ (White 1968, 11) may have stimulated White's interest in how Bernard of Clairvaux and other charismatic leaders had challenged the twelfth-century Gregorian administration of ecclesiastical offices. (Personal communication of Hayden White in October 2002.) ‘Tellenbach's study demonstrated, among other things, the heuristic value of Max Weber's typology of leadership when applied with caution by a sensitive and competent historian’ (White 1960, 325).

4. Allan Megill echoes these words when he writes: ‘One can disagree with White's conclusions at various levels, but one cannot deny the importance of the questions he asks’ (Megill 1998, 6). Judged by the book reviews that White produced in the 1950s and early 1960s, Tellenbach's conclusion was not necessarily displeasing to White. One characteristic of a good book, White seemed to believe, is to ask new, penetrating questions about the subject under study. In one book review, White explicitly stated: ‘it is as important for the historian to raise new questions through a fresh look at the data as to resolve old ones’ (White 1959d, 308). In another, he complained that ‘the author does not probe some of the broader questions that should be raised’ (White 1962b, 688). Praising a study written by George Armstrong Kelly, he would still in 1970 use the same vocabulary: ‘Like any good book, it raises more questions than it answers . . .’ (White 1970, 345).

5. White never denied that ‘modes of formal argument’ should be rigorously ‘scientific’ – that is, universally valid and empirically verifiable. For this reason, White would still in the 1970s refuse to consider the covering law model as wrong. ‘The Hempelians,’ he would declare, ‘are right to insist that historian's [sic] arguments must stand or fall by the tests of adequacy that we apply to any scientific argument’ (White 1972, 19). One might wonder, however, to what extent Vico's, Spengler's or Dawson's theories not only claimed universal validity, but also met the standard of empirical verifiability.

6. Richard V. Burks, who taught history at Wayne University when White was an undergraduate there, was also fascinated by the concept of ideology. Like White, he felt most attracted by how sociologists of knowledge (Mannheim) understood the term. But unlike White, Burks reserved ‘ideology’ for patterns of ideas embodying ‘an inclusive interpretation of human history’, incorporating ‘a highly articulated theory of the social order’ and inculcating this ‘by means of an educational system and an appropriate hagiolatry’ (Burks 1949, 184).

7. In ‘The Printing Industry from Renaissance to Reformation and from Guild to Capitalism’, White paid more attention to the ‘socioeconomic and cultural’ factors that had stimulated early modern printing industries in Europe (White 1957a, 74). One might wonder to what extent this shift in focus was caused by the topic of the paper, or, more generally, how White's intellectually oriented mode of analysis related to the choice of ‘intellectual history’ as his field of specialisation. Finally, it is worth noting that also Bossenbrook, particularly in his book The German Mind, often explained human action in terms of an individual's ‘fundamental orientation toward the world as totality’ (Bossenbrook 1961, 385) As I have shown elsewhere (Paul 2006a, 68–73), this explanatory focus on the ‘depth level of world and life view’ (Bossenbrook 1961, 410) would also characterise the history of liberal humanism that White would co-produce during the 1960s (Coates, White, and Schapiro 1966; Coates and White 1970).

8. For Weber, the archetype of this personality type was, of course, the ascetic Puritan, who repressed his passions in order to serve the ultimate values dictated by his understanding of Scripture. Clearly, a secularised version of this Puritan attitude embodied Weber's own moral ideal (Goldman 1988, 142–4). Yet, Weber always located this ideal at the normative side of Hume's is/ought distinction. He knew that self-possession was a rare quality, that a Puritan-type of self-control was unlikely to become popular and that it would therefore be unrealistic to judge people according to this high moral standard (Dassen 1999, 69–72, 277–84, 287–92). In his doctoral dissertation, White showed less awareness of such tensions between moral ideals and everyday reality. Just as he tended to downplay the heuristic nature of Weber's ideal types, he often disregarded the prescriptive character of ‘ideologies' or ‘value orientations’.

9. Compare White's judgment on Pontius: ‘Pontius’ actions were thoroughly consistent throughout his entire career. It was Cluny and Rome that had changed. Pontius was judged by a world he never made, a world in which he and his type of churchman were anachronisms’ (White 1958a, 197).

10. Although still in the mid-1960s White reckoned himself, ironically or not, among ‘we medievalists’ (White 1964b, 110), he hardly conducted any further researches in medieval history after having completed his thesis. Apart from the two dissertation-based essays mentioned above, most notable were White's handful of book reviews in the field of medieval studies (White 1959d,e, 1961, 1962a,b, 1964a,b, 1966). In spite of his own reconstructions (e.g. in Otterspeer and Zeeman 1989, 4), White's leave from the field of medieval history was not necessarily an act of protest or frustration. Even though in the late 1950s, job prospects for history graduates in the United States were unprecedented, many young PhDs became involved in teaching western civilization courses (see Allardyce 1982; Novick 1988, 312–14). As an instructor at Wayne (State) University (1955–1958) and assistant professor at the University of Rochester (1958–1961), White was mainly entrusted with these courses, too – which, among other things, resulted in the textbooks on western humanism mentioned above in note 7 (personal communication of Hayden White in October 2002). It seems reasonable to assume that these new institutional contexts facilitated the shift in White's research interests during the late 1950s.

11. White's interpretation of Dawson is severely criticized in Quinn 1997, 85–7.

12. ‘[I]f Christianity is to survive, it must abandon the older ritual order or at least modify it radically; this does not mean that the kernel of the Christian ethic, as contained in the Sermon on the Mount, will have to be abandoned, only its historical accretions. If it is argued that Christianity without its historical accretions is not Christianity, I can only say that such a view confirms the anti-Christian attitude which identifies that religion with a given culture. If in fact Christianity is so limited, then it deserves to pass with the culture which gave it birth’ (White 1958b, 283–4).

13. A similar ambiguity is found in White's praise for Collingwood, Toynbee and Dawson. On the one hand, the moral commitment that fascinated White in these three ‘rebel historicists’ can be read in terms of adaptation, revision and response to a modern challenge. This challenge was formulated respectively as ‘the impact of two World Wars and a depression’, ‘the European and the English Untergang’, ‘new questions of history, questions prompted by the destruction of all ideologies and all utopias at the hands of science’, ‘the fall of the British Empire’, ‘the questions asked of history by modern Western Man’ and, finally, ‘questions demanded by a troubled time’ (White 1957b, 147, 150, 170, 171, 177, 178). Whatever the common factor in these definitions, it is clear that White understood the demand for moral commitment to be spurred by specific, twentieth-century circumstances. On the other hand, discussing a ‘century of painstaking scientific historiography’, White frankly declared this to have failed to serve what sounds like a universal need for addressing moral questions: ‘While it has clarified problems of philology and chronology and while such progress may satisfy the archivist, no historian should be content with the solution of merely these kinds of problems’ (White 1957b, 170).

14. Cf. Iggers 1962. White appeared to be influenced by this distorted interpretation when he wrote that ‘Ranke, pour soul, spent a lifetime in his study and ruined his sight attempting to “tell how it really happened”’ (White 1959b, xxiv). In a book review in History and Theory, White was reprimanded for this utterance, as well as for his generally ‘insufficient’ translation of Antoni's Italian original (Mazlish 1961). This, as Richard Vann subtly notes, was White's first appearance in the pages of History and Theory (Vann 1995, 44).

15. White defined historicism as ‘the tendency to interpret the whole of reality, including what up to the romantic period had been conceived as absolute and unchanging human values, in historical, that is to say relative, terms’ (White 1959b, xvii). Objections against this identification of ‘historical’ and ‘relative’ can be found in Gruner 1978, 26.