SOURCE: A review of Metahistory, in American Historical Review, Vol. 80, No. 4, October, 1975, pp. 961–63.

In the following review, Ermarth offers a positive assessment of Metahistory.

Metahistory is a daring, ingenious, and sometimes bewildering tour de force. White has produced a profoundly original “critique of historical reason,” based not upon the usual fare of idealist metaphysics or the logic of predictive science but upon linguistics—a discipline that may become the novum organon of the twentieth century. The author presents a unified field theory of history, which takes its departure from the linguistic structures and figurative language implicit in the historical writing of the great practitioners—Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, Burckhardt—and theorists—Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Croce—of the “classical age” of history.

The novelty of the work lies not with its components but in their systematic combination and deft application to concrete issues. In fairness it must be said that...