thumb|260px|Hayden V. White

Hayden V. White (July 12, 1928 – March 5, 2018) was an American historian in the tradition of literary criticism. He wrote Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe in 1973.

Career

White was born in Martin, Tennessee in 1928. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Wayne State University (1951) and his Master of Arts (1952) and Doctor of Philosophy (1955) degrees from the University of Michigan. While an undergraduate at Wayne State, White studied history under William J. Bossenbrook alongside then-classmate Arthur Danto.

In 1978, White was hired to helm an avant-garde, interdisciplinary PhD program called History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Although the program had been founded as a "board of study" in 1966, White was the first faculty member to receive a full-time appointment in the program. He built the program up through additional hires, including the hires of James Clifford, Donna Haraway, and others.

He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1991. In 2000, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

In 1998, White directed a seminar ("The Theory of the Text") at the School of Criticism and Theory.

Among White's influences, there were two major figures who taught him "how the historian interprets something." The first was William J. Bossenbrook, who taught White as an undergraduate at Wayne State University. Bossenbrook saw history as fundamentally a story of the conflict between ideas, values, and dreams. Therefore, Bossenbrook regarded history as a mystery to be constantly pondered and studied rather than a puzzle to be solved. In his last book, The Practical Past (2014), White paid tribute to the significant effect of Bossenbrook. He argued that historical writing was influenced by literary writing in many ways, sharing the strong reliance on narrative for meaning. Therefore, White contradicts the view that historical writing can be objective or scientific as purely empiric.

White mentions two figures who have enabled people to ask questions about history's objectivity: Marx and Nietzsche. According to White, these thinkers both use their philosophy to consider history which “not only makes us know something about the historical process but know how it knows it." They focus on the problem of history. Marx regards the problem of history as the problem of the mode of explanation, while, for Nietzsche, the problem is the problem of the mode of emplotment. Thus, history is recorded differently depending on which mode the historian chooses. As a result, ‘a value-free history’ cannot exist. Historiography consists of well-constructed narratives.

He insists, in particular in chapter 7, that philosophies of history are indispensable elements in historiography, which cannot be separated from historiography. For him, history is not simply a list of chronological events. White also argued, however, that history is most successful when it uses this "narrativity", since it is what allows history to be meaningful. Emphasizing history as a narrative using language, he argues that true history should contain both characteristics of synchronic and diachronic. This view is contrary to historians such as George Peabody Gooch, and Benedetto Croce, who tried to distinguish between historiography and philosophies of history. He ended his career as University Professor Emeritus at the history of consciousness department of the University of California, Santa Cruz, having previously retired from the comparative literature department of Stanford University.

Lawsuit against the LAPD

White figured in a California Supreme Court case regarding covert intelligence gathering on college campuses by police officers in the Los Angeles Police Department. White v. Davis, 13 Cal.3d 757, 533 P.2d 222, 120 Cal. Rptr. 94 (1975). During 1972, while a professor of history at UCLA and acting as sole plaintiff, White sued Chief of Police Edward M. Davis, alleging the illegal expenditure of public funds in connection with covert intelligence gathering by police at UCLA. The covert activities included police officers registering as students, taking notes of discussions occurring in classes, and making police reports on these discussions. White v. Davis, at 762. The California Supreme Court found for White in a unanimous decision. This case set the standard that determines the limits of legal police surveillance of political activity in California; police cannot engage in such surveillance in the absence of reasonable suspicion of a crime ("Lockyer Manual").

Bibliography

  • Ed. Robert Doran, Fwd. Mieke Bal
  • Ed. Robert Doran, Fwd. Judith Butler
  • Ed. Robert Doran
  • "Historiography and Historiophoty", The American Historical Review, Vol. 93, No. 5 (Dec., 1988), pp. 1193–1199 (online).
  • "Historical Pluralism", Critical Inquiry, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Spring, 1986), pp. 480–493.
  • "The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory", History and Theory, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Feb., 1984), pp. 1–33.
  • "The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-Sublimation", Critical Inquiry, Vol. 9, No. 1, The Politics of Interpretation (Sep., 1982), pp. 113–137.
  • as editor (1982) with Margaret Brose
  • "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality", Critical Inquiry, Vol. 7, No. 1, On Narrative (Autumn, 1980), pp. 5–27.
  • "Interpretation in History", New Literary History, Vol. 4, No. 2, On Interpretation: II (Winter, 1973), pp. 281–314.
  • "Foucault Decoded: Notes from Underground", History and Theory, Vol. 12, No. 1 (1973), pp. 23–54.
  • as co-author (1970) with Willson Coates, The Ordeal of Liberal Humanism: An Intellectual History of Western Europe, vol. II: Since the French Revolution. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970.
  • as co-editor (1969) with Giorgio Tagliacozzo, Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
  • as editor
  • "The burden of history", History and Theory, Vol. 5, No. 2 (1966), pp. 111–134.
  • as co-author (1966) with Willson Coates and J. Salwin Schapiro, The Emergence of Liberal Humanism. An Intellectual History of Western Europe, vol. I: From the Italian Renaissance to the French Revolution. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966.

References

Further reading

  • Doran, Robert (ed.). Philosophy of History After Hayden White, London: Bloomsbury, 2013.
  • Re-Figuring Hayden White, Edited by Frank Ankersmit, Ewa Domanska, and Hans Kellner.
  • Doran, Robert. "Metahistory and the Ethics of Historiography," Storia della Storiografia, 65.1 (2014): 153-162.
  • Doran, Robert. "The Work of Hayden White I: Mimesis, Figuration, and the Writing of History", The SAGE Handbook of Historical Theory, ed. Nancy Partner and Sarah Foot (London: Sage Publications, 2013): 106-118.
  • Ghasemi, Mehdi. “Revisiting History in Hayden White’s Philosophy.” SAGE Open, 2014, 4(3), July–September: 1-7.
  • Paul, Herman. Hayden White: The Historical Imagination (Key Contemporary Thinkers), Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011.
  • Pihlainen, Kalle. The Work of History: Constructivism and a Politics of the Past (with a Foreword by Hayden White), New York: Routledge, 2017.
  • Pihlainen, Kalle. "The Work of Hayden White II: Defamiliarizing Narrative." The SAGE Handbook of Historical Theory, ed. Nancy Partner and Sarah Foot (London: Sage Publications, 2013): 119–135.
  • Pihlainen, Kalle. "History in the world: Hayden White and the consumer of history”, Rethinking History 12:1 (2008), 23–39.
  • Daddow, Oliver. "Exploding history: Hayden White on disciplinization", Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, 1470-1154, Volume 12, Issue 1, 2008, pp. 41–58.
  • Bibliography of Hayden White.
  • Another Bibliography of Hayden White
  • Hayden V. White Papers at University of California, Santa Cruz Special Collections