Journal of the Philosophy of History 5 (2011) 131–145 brill.

nl/jph

Review Article

Hayden White: The Making of a Philosopher of History

Hayden White, The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory,
1957–2007, ed. Robert Doran (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2010), 382 pp., ISBN 978-0-8018-9479-4.

What does it take to become an influential, widely-cited and much-discussed

thinker? In a fascinating analysis of how Jacques Derrida acquired his academic
star reputation (“How to Become a Dominant French Philosopher”), sociologist
Michèle Lamont has shown that this reputation was only in part a result of Der-
rida’s own ideas, his provocative interventions, his distinctive writing-style, or his
keen nose for what was new and exciting in the world of letters. What was more
important, argues Lamont, was that Derrida’s philosophy “fitted in with the intel-
lectual culture of specific fractions of the French upper-middle-class,” that “its
politics appealed to French intellectuals at the end of the 1960s,” and that “it
appealed to the professional interests of philosophers by promoting a new image
of their field during an institutional legitimacy crisis.”1 In other words, it was not
primarily Derrida’s work as such, but rather its fit with the needs and expectations
of its audiences that gained the author the reputation of an important, avant-
garde philosopher.
In the case of Hayden White, the American historian and literary theorist whose
Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973) has
become known as a flagship of “narrativist” philosophy of history, such processes
of interaction with audiences in various fields of the humanities have arguably
been as crucial in securing the author’s reputation as in the case of Derrida. This is
evidenced, first of all, by the fact that White has basically two reputations. As
Richard T. Vann and Peter Novick have demonstrated, professional historians
often associate White’s name with postmodern attempts to undermine the foun-
dations of their discipline. Some American historians even seem to regard White
as a “symbolic embodiment” of “nihilistic relativism.”2 By contrast, literary scholars

1)
Michèle Lamont, “How to Become a Dominant French Philosopher: The Case of Jacques
Derrida”, The American Journal of Sociology, 93 (1987), 584–622, here 589.
2)
Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/187226311X555491

132 Review Article / Journal of the Philosophy of History 5 (2011) 131–145

by and large welcome White’s study of the discursive and rhetorical dimensions of
historical texts. They treat him, not as a “relativist” or “postmodernist,” but as an
ally in their quest to rethink human culture from a textual point of view. Different
disciplines, indeed, have different Whites.3
More importantly, audience responses have significantly contributed to White’s
reputation in so far as his work after the mid-1970s was to a considerable extent
shaped by how especially literary scholars responded to Metahistory and some of
its follow-up essays. Under their influence, White increasingly began to publish in
literary theory, submitting his essays to Critical Inquiry rather than to the Journal
of the History of Ideas. Also, encouraged by their criticism, White started to develop
the discursive and rhetorical readings of historical texts that are now routinely
associated with his name.4 Moreover, not a small number of the articles and book
chapters that contributed to his fame as a narrativist philosopher of history were
solicited by journal editors and conference organizers in the field of literary theory.
This raises the question: Had White always been interested in matters of narrative,
discourse, and rhetoric? Or did this interest only emerge in the 1970s, at least in
part in response to the reception that Metahistory received?

I
The latter is strongly suggested by the volume under review in this essay. The Fic-
tion of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1957–2007 is a lengthy
collection of essays written by White over the course of half a century and care-
fully brought together by Robert Doran, a scholar of French and comparative lit-
erature teaching at the University of Rochester. Although White himself has
published three collections of essays – with another one currently in the making
– Tropics of Discourse (1978), The Content of the Form (1987), and Figural Realism
(1999) capture only a small portion of his prolific scholarly output. Currently,
White’s bibliography counts about two hundred articles, book chapters, commen-
taries, forewords, afterwords, and often lengthy book reviews (interviews and let-
ters to the editor not included).5 Many of these, especially the older ones, appeared
in relatively unknown periodicals and are only familiar to specialists. Robert

Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 599; Richard T. Vann, “The
Reception of Hayden White”, History and Theory, 37 (1998), 143–161.
3)
See the introduction to my forthcoming book, Hayden White: The Historical Imagination
(Cambridge; Oxford: Polity Press, 2011).
4)
White first conducted this type of analysis in “Historicism, History, and the Figurative
Imagination”, History and Theory, Beiheft 14 (1975), 48–67.
5)
See the bibliography included in my Hayden White (see above, n. 3).