Hayden White

Herman Paul

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745637655
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This new book offers a clear and accessible exposition of Hayden White's thought. In an engaging and wide-ranging analysis, Herman Paul discusses White's core ideas and traces the development of these ideas from the mid-1950s to the present. Starting with White's medievalist research and youthful fascination for French existentialism, Paul shows how White became increasingly convinced that historical writing is a moral activity. He goes on to argue that the critical concepts that have secured White's fame – trope, plot, discourse, figural realism – all stem from his desire to explicate the moral claims and perceptions underlying historical writing. White emerges as a passionate thinker, a restless rebel against scientism, and a defender of existentialist humanist values.

This innovative introduction will appeal to students and scholars across the humanities, and help develop a critical understanding of an increasingly important thinker.

1

Humanist Historicism: The Italian White

Hayden White was a 25-year-old graduate student when he embarked on a journey that was to have a lasting impact on all of his work. Armed with a Fulbright fellowship, White left the University of Michigan, where he studied medieval history, to spend two years in Rome (1953–55). Judging by the work he produced there, the young scholar spent long hours in the Vatican library, that goldmine for historians of medieval Europe. However, perhaps more important was that he discovered some of the literature, the bookshops, and the museums that Rome had to offer. He learned the language and began to collect cheap editions of sixteenth-century Italian books.¹ At the university, he became acquainted with Mario Praz, the art critic and professor of English literature, who invited him to contribute to his journal, English Miscellany. White also paid regular visits to Carlo Antoni, the philosopher of history whose book on the decline of historicism and the rise of sociology he began to translate into English. Inspired by a sense of cultural urgency, the young White even started an overseas correspondence with Ezra Pound, the modernist poet who, in White’s later recollection, “was the kind of person we had to come to terms with.”² If anything, for White, the eternal city was a cultural eye-opener and a place to reflect on what it means to “do” history.

In a sense, White had had this experience before, back home, in the classrooms of Wayne University in Detroit. For a student with a working-class background – Hayden was born in 1928 in Martin, Tennessee, as the son of a worker who lost his job during the Great Depression, but found new employment on the assembly lines of Detroit’s automobile industry – a course in European or intellectual history was like an immersion in a hitherto unknown world of literature, philosophy, and art. White quickly fell under the tutelage of William J. Bossenbrook, a charismatic teacher with an amazing capacity to capture his students’ imagination with beautiful stories and erudite philosophical discourse.³ How different was this Republic of Letters from the smelly factories elsewhere in Detroit, or from the American Navy, where White, in the aftermath of World War II, had spent just enough time (in the V5 officer-training program) to secure admission to college through the G.I. Bill.⁴ “For those of us who had grown up in the cultural and social wasteland of Detroit during the depression, he [Bossenbrook] was our introduction to the world of intellect; in fact, he was that world,” White wrote in a Festschrift for his teacher. “More: he permitted us to believe that we could become a part of it on the basis of our intellectual abilities alone.”⁵ Encouraged by this example, the young White began to absorb Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus (“very exciting for an 18/19 year old undergraduate”) as well as other European existentialists, such as Karl Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel. He perused the New Statesman and Nation, Kingsley Martin’s British Socialist magazine, and discovered Marxism, not in its political manifestations, but as a tradition of progressive, critical thought: “Existentialism, along with Marxism, seemed to me in my youth like the only possible way of looking at the human condition.”⁶

One may wonder how these (reading) experiences shaped White’s thoughts about history. So far, most of the secondary literature ignores White’s 1955 Ph.D. dissertation and his contributions to Praz’s English Miscellany. These are, however, indispensable for understanding White’s later philosophy of history. This chapter is therefore devoted to “the early White.” Starting with the dissertation White composed in the Vatican library, I argue that, during the 1950s, the German sociologist Max Weber served as White’s most powerful source of influence. However, White’s stay in Rome and his exposure to Italian historicism as represented by Antoni and his mentor, Benedetto Croce, stimulated a lasting fascination for more historical modes of thought. I argue that in this Italian period, White came to identify himself with a “humanist historicism,” which combined a thoroughly historicized (and secularized) understanding of the human condition with an almost existentialist emphasis on the freedom and moral responsibility of the individual.

The papal schism of 1130

How did White, with his existentialist readings, come to specialize in medieval church history? In his own recollection, it was “because the world of a Catholic civilisation was so alien to my experience.”

The reason I was working on medieval history, and the church especially, was that the Roman Catholic Church was something I knew absolutely nothing about when I went to college. I found it amazing that an institution based upon a miracle, which by definition cannot be comprehended except through faith, could sustain itself and dominate even the monarchs and the political powers for over a thousand years.⁷

Obviously, such recollections say as much about an older White, looking back upon his youth, than about the young Hayden who eagerly began to explore a world dominated by popes, cardinals, and religious orders. Also, the passage just quoted illustrates a typical feature of what Allan Megill calls White’s “rhetorical dialectic.” It deliberately contrasts Rome with Detroit, church-life with college-life, faith with reason (“a dialectical opposition that he overstates for epideictic effect”).⁸ Nonetheless, for a working-class student whose cultural horizon was by and large still defined by the Navy and the auto industry – although both of his parents had Protestant affiliations, Hayden had not much religion to give up – the world of Bernard of Clairvaux, the French abbot and founder of the Cistercian order, may indeed have felt like a foreign country. Was it Bossenbrook, with his “fascination for apocalyptic and revolutionary social movements,” who first stimulated White’s interest in how Bernard and his reforming monastic order began to challenge the church administration in Rome?⁹

In graduate school in Ann Arbor, White channeled his interest into what he called a social-scientific study of the long-term causes of the papal schism of 1130. It may be helpful, at this point, to recall that this schism had erupted when Gregorio Papereschi (Innocentius II) and Pietro Pierleone (Anacletus II), each supported by large groups of Roman cardinals, had both presented themselves as the legitimate successor to Pope Honorius II (1124–30). Although the conflict had initially seemed to be won by Anacletus, Innocentius’ claim had gained support at a council in Étampes, attended by Bernard of Clairvaux. In spite of this council’s attempts to settle the conflict, peace had returned only after the death of Anacletus in 1138.

In the introduction to his dissertation, White declared that his study of this schism aimed, first of all, to be “objective,” in the sense of undistorted by the apologetic tendencies that had characterized Roman Catholic and Protestant historiography (3).¹⁰ Second, church quarrels were to be studied “in much the same way that a social scientist would analyze a political revolution” (15). This meant, among other things, that White aimed to study the papal schism in terms of group interests, power struggles and leadership competition, rather than in terms of lawfulness, legitimacy or theological appropriateness. He was especially interested in the “value systems” that had held competing groups together and suggested that these ideologies, in good sociological manner, could best be classified by means of Weberian ideal types.

This fascination for Weberian-inspired sociology antedated both the rapid growth of social history in the American historical profession, which would start in the late 1950s, and the large-scale entrance of Weberian concepts such as “legitimization,” “class,” “charisma,” and “bureaucracy” into American sociology.¹¹ It is likely that at least part of White’s interest in this Weberian sociological theory was stimulated by two of his supervisors, Palmer Throop and Frank Grace.¹² Bossenbrook may have been instrumental as well. As an undergraduate, White read with him Gerd Tellenbach’s Church, State, and Christian Society at the Time of the Investiture Contest (1940), a Weberian-inspired book that served as a model for White’s thesis.¹³ And although I will argue below that his two-year stay in Rome decisively changed White’s theoretical preferences, he may have encountered Weberian sociology in Italy, too. With its emphases on value-freedom and objectivity, it provided post-war Italian intellectuals with means for moving beyond the legacy of “neo-idealist” thought, which by that time was almost universally accused of “relativism” and soft-heartedness towards the Mussolini regime.¹⁴

Applied to the papal schism, White’s sociological mode of inquiry resulted in a lengthy, massively documented narrative, which described the efforts of two competing schools of ecclesiastical thought trying to gain access to the Roman curia (the college of cardinals responsible for papal elections). Using a pair of ideal types from Weber’s Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, White characterized these schools as social movements adhering to “charismatic” and “bureaucratic” leadership ideals, respectively. The tenth-century moment of Cluny counted as an example of the former, whereas Pope Gregory VIII, with his “purely legalistic view” of the papal office (49), was a typical representative of the latter. A great part of White’s thesis, then, is an account of how both of these groups emerged, how their mutual tensions increased over time, and how the schism that eventually occurred in 1130 was “the institutional expression” of a long-existing “ideological split” (420). In the terminology of Metahistory, this narrative about competing leadership ideals could be characterized as a tragedy, especially insofar as, under the given circumstances, a bitter conflict in the curia was almost unavoidable.

White’s Ph.D. thesis was never published, but supplied the material for two articles on Roman Gregorianism. Whereas in White’s thesis the distinctions between charismatic and bureaucratic leadership ideals had already been schematic, the types were even more contrasted in these published essays. “Otherworldly” monasticism was put over against “purely material” interpretations of church power; moral reform against administration of temporalia; “the prophet-reformer” against institutionally defined church leadership. The moral ideal of a “return to the primitive Church” and the “administrative means envisaged for its realization” were portrayed as “fundamentally incompatible, if not directly opposed.” With reference to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount – “It is written, but I say to you” – White even suggested that charismatic religious leaders typically legitimized themselves by criticizing bureaucratic practices. If such contrasts happened to coincide with generational differences, as had been the case in the monastery of Cluny, “the conditions for schism” had been created.¹⁵

Before examining what led White to this interpretation of twelfth-century church politics, it is worth noting that his schematic approach provoked the irritation of his colleagues no less than the tropological scheme in Metahistory would do in later decades. Critics pointed out that White’s juxtaposition of Gregorianism and ascetic monasticism failed to acknowledge the extent to which both movements had been closely interwoven and, in some cases, represented by the same people. White was blamed, moreover, for using his Weberian ideal types not as heuristic instruments, but as descriptive labels – thereby suggesting that the conceptual distinctness of his ideal types was not, as Weber would have said, a provisional tool for ordering “irrational” historical realities, but a feature of ideologies and social groups themselves. At a more detailed level, White’s interpretation of Bernard of Clairvaux and the crise clunisienne received ample amounts of criticism. Gerd Tellenbach, of all people, concluded that White asked relevant questions, but failed to give adequate answers.¹⁶

White’s covering law model

What, then, was so controversial about White’s approach? It was one thing that White assumed an “incompatibility” between what others saw as merely different aspects of Bernard’s personality. But it was another that he superimposed a model upon a reality that had arguably been far less well ordered than the model could account for. According to this model, outlined in the introduction to White’s thesis, all leaders face the challenge of convincing the people that their strategies, rather than others, are most effective in realizing the goals that “the masses” expect their leaders to attain. As soon as these “masses” become dissatisfied with the existing strategies or ask for different political goals, the leaders will have to revise their policies. But the longer these leader figures have been in power, the more rationalized and bureaucratic their institutions tend to be. In consequence, discontented voices from the people will not easily manage to realize political change. But if such changes fail to happen, people will inevitably look around for alternatives: “If the goals of the mass change or if the leadership seems to be foresaking the ideal goals of the institution in the eyes of the mass, a schism results” (17). New, charismatic leaders will make their appearance and promise the people that they can fulfill their demands. They will claim access to political positions and threaten violence, while old leaders, in order to strengthen their positions, will take refuge in bureaucratic strategies and blame their competitors for unlawful behavior. Whereas the old leaders will regard the new ones as rebels, the latter will consider the former usurpers of power. “A propaganda war will follow in which each p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: How to Read Hayden White
• 1 Humanist Historicism: The Italian White
• 2 Liberation Historiography: The Politics of History
• 3 The Historical Imagination: Four Modes of Realism
• 4 The Power of Discourse: White’s Structuralist Adventure
• 5 Masks of Meaning: Facing the Sublime
• 6 Figuring History: The Modernist White
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index