Customer Reviews

Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe

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Hayden White's Metahistory takes the reader deeply into the winding roads of history writing. From Hegel to Croce, he reviews and analizes the many different ways history was written in the nineteenth century and it's impact and influence in today's historiography. A must for any historian, but a little too deep - and perhaps boring- for those not familiar with history's theory and philosophy.

Depending on your familiarity with the study of history this book may be either over- or under-rated. It is fantastic text and highly informative. That said, a few cautionary notes:

This book has diminishing returns. I read the whole thing, but the book is rather formulaic. Spend more time on the Introduction than anything else. Without it you'll be lost.

Also I have little familiarity with the authors White discusses. With the ones I did know, Nietszche, Hegel, and Tocqueville, I found his commentary very interesting. But some familiarity with each author addressed would be worthwhile to enjoy it fully.

Hope it was useful. Whether or not you buy his argument, the work is definitely a modern classic.

Hayden White's METAHISTORY is a sophisticated analysis of historical methodology in the nineteenth century.

Without a doubt, the book is brilliant. White analyzes the poetic and linguistic structure behind the writings of historians and philosophers of history. He focuses on the works of Michelet, Ranke, Toqueville, Burckhardt, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Croce. The result is a compelling look at how the methodological structure of historical writing changed through the course of the nineteenth century.

However, there is a major drawback to the work. White frequently uses a number of poetic and linguistic terms that are not standard fare for the average reader. For example, unfamiliar terms such as Metonymy, Synecdoche, Metaphor, Organicist, and Contextualist are used to describe the methodology behind various historical works. I frequently found myself lost and flipping back pages to find the definition of a particular term. This was an un-needed difficulty; the terms only served to obscure White's otherwise clear and logical arguments.

In conclusion, this highly sophisticated work is a brilliant piece of historical analysis. However, it would have been much more readable without the difficult language.

This book is great in its own way: highly readable for readers of all ages, immensely rich in details, and gives some new perspectives into history.
But the main idea of the book struck me as an attack on Empiricism raised by Leopold Ranke and popularized by Lord Acton(as the title suggests "in nineteenth-century Europe", both Ranke and Acton were of that period), rather than a totally new approach to the study of history. I could be wrong on this point, since I read this book immediately after finishing reading Lord Acton's lectures and Ranke's works.
In a nutshell, this is a book that sets you think-maybe not easy for beginners on the first try, but it would be a very rewarding experience to read a book from such a thinker.