Herman Paul's Hayden White and the politics of professional historiography

Abstract

This essay-review of H. Paul's book on the work of Hayden White draws out the interpretations Paul makes of White's seminal work, Metahistory. This essay-review applauds Paul's endeavor to provide a systematic context for White's overall oeuvre. The second section focuses on the politics of professional historiography, or the frequent confusion between politics and profession in matters historical and historiographical.

Keywords:

• Hayden White
• historiography
• the historical profession
• narrative representation
• politics
• misrepresentation

Notes

 1. See Niall Ferguson, ‘America, the Fragile Empire’, http://articles.latimes.com/print/2010/feb/28/opinion/la-oe-ferguson28-2010feb28 and Pankaj Mishra, ‘Watch This Man’, London Review of Books, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n21/pankaj-mishra/watch-this-man.

 2. Perry Anderson, ‘From Progress to Catastrophe’, London Review of Books, Vol. 33 No. 15 (2011), 24–8.

 3. See Cohen, Passive Nihilism, New York: St. Martin's Press, 132–5.

 4. David Carroll, ‘On Tropology:The forms of History’, Diacritics, Vol. 6 No. 3 (1976).

 5. See Gilles Deleuze, Foucault. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 16–20.

 6. Hayden White, ‘Guilty of History? The Long Duree of Paul Ricoeur’, History and Theory, Vol. 46 (2007), 233–51; and Hayden White, ‘Introduction: Historical Fiction, Fictional History, and Historical Reality’, Rethinking History, Vol. 9 (2005), 2–3, 147–57.

 7. Oliver Daddow, ‘Exploding history: Hayden White on disciplinization’, Rethinking History, Vol. 12 No. 1 (2008), 41–58.

 8. Richard J. Evans, ‘From Historicism to Postmodernism: Historiography in the 20^th c.’, History and Theory, Vol. 41 (2002), 81, 86.

 9. Carlo Ginzburg, History, Rhetoric and Proof. Hanover: UNE, 15

10. Ginzburg, History, Rhetoric and Proof, 17. As Marco V. Garcia Quentila has argued, Ginzburg's mentor, Arnaldo Momigliano, wrote scathing comments in History and Theory on the work of Dumezil, while his own writings on Fascist Italy were hidden. See Quentila, ‘Dumezil, Momigliano, Bloch: Between Politics and Historiography’, Studia Indo-Europea,Vol. 2 (2002–2005), 87–105.

11. Martin Jay, ‘Of Plots, Witnesses, and Judgments’, in Probing the Limits of Representation, ed, by Saul Friedlander. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992, 100–1.

12. Martin Jay, Refractions of Violence. New York: Routledge, 41, 196.

13. Martin Jay, ‘The Aesthetic Ideology as Ideology: Or, What Does It Mean to Aestheticize Politics?’ Cultural Critique, No. 21 (1992), 57.

14. Martin Jay, ‘Avital Ronell's Fighting Theory’, BookForum, May 2011. http://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201105&id=28050. ‘But perhaps the ultimate perlocutionary effect, at least for this reader, is to weaken respect for the legacy of deconstruction, especially if it depends so heavily on mobilizing the tired rhetoric of combat that animated the “theory wars” of the 1980s. AR herself seems frozen in that moment, a bit like one of those Japanese soldiers on a remote Pacific island still fighting for the emperor long after he surrendered.’

15. Wulf Kansteiner, ‘Success, Truth and Modernism in Holocaust Historiography: Reading Saul Friedlander Thirty-Five Years after the Publication of Metahistory’, History and Theory, Vol. 47 (2009), 28.

16. Nicolas Asher, ‘Events, Facts, Propositions and Evolutive Anaphora’, in Speaking of Events, ed. by James Higginbotham. New York: Oxford UP, 2000, 129–35.

17. Carolyn J. Dean, ‘Minimalism and Victim Testimony’, History and Theory, Theme Issue 49 (December 2010), 85–99. Carolyn Dean's discussion of Friedlander is appropriate: Years ‘falls well within a discourse of humanity triumphal and an ideology of secular humanism that mobilizes the narrative. Indeed, it is so familiar and ultimately redemptive that it domesticates the disorientation the voices are meant to introduce’.

18. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press, 111.