SOURCE: "Burckhardt: Historical Realism as Satire," in Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973, pp. 230-64.

Below, White analyzes Burckhardt's work within the framework of a structuralist theory of historiography. He emphasizes the influence of Arthur Schopenhauer on Burckhardt's thought.

The German philosopher and historian of ideas Karl Lowith argued that it was only with Burckhardt that the "idea of history" was finally liberated from myth, and

from that nefarious "philosophy of history" spawned by the confusion of myth with historical knowledge which had dominated historical thought from the early Middle Ages to the middle of the nineteenth century.… Lowith did not see that the urbanity, the wit, the "realism," the desire to see "things as they are," and the Reactionary implications of knowledge as pure "seeing" which Burckhardt promoted were themselves elements of a specific...