SOURCE: “Hayden White's Critique of the Writing of History,” in History and Theory, Vol. 32, No. 3, October, 1993, pp. 273–95.

In the following essay, Kansteiner examines the development of White's theoretical perspective, methodology, and postulations in Metahistory, Tropics of Discourse, and The Content of the Form, while discussing the critical reception of White's work among historians and literary theorists.

I

Recently, in the pages of this journal, F. R. Ankersmit has developed a postmodernist perspective on the writing of history.¹ He argues that history always displays some postmodern characteristics because it is based on unsolvable paradoxes. Despite the claim to one single truth, historical writing only arises from the competition between different versions of the past which are simultaneously supported and called into question by “the other” within the same discipline. Ankersmit also holds that the traditional dichotomy of language versus reality has become untenable. Language has acquired the same opacity...