The Emergence of Liberal Humanism: An Intellectual History of Western Europe, Vol. I: From the Italian Renaissance to the French Revolution. Wilson H. Coates , Hayden V. White , J. Salwyn Schapiro

1967 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-158
Author(s):  
William M. Johnston
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Liberal Humanism ◽  
History Of ◽  
The French Revolution

Hayden White

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karyn Ball ◽  
Ewa Domańska
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social History ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Narrative Discourse ◽  
Historical Representation ◽  
Liberal Humanism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hayden White ◽  
The French Revolution

Hayden White (b. 12 July 1928–d. 5 March 2018) was a groundbreaking critic of conventional historiography whose emphasis on the moral, rhetorical, aesthetic, and fictive valences of narrative as a mode of figuration unsettled professional historians’ tendency to disavow the role of the imagination and form in the selective arrangement of evidence. Despite Metahistory’s manifest affinity with structuralist approaches, White’s 1973 monograph is widely viewed as having inaugurated a “postmodernist” critique of narrative historiography that resonated with the growing influence of a postwar, anti-positivist “linguistic turn” stressing the figural dynamics of texts as objects of discourse. In grasping the implications of referential fragility, White articulated a quintessentially Nietzschean antipathy toward naively mimetic notions of “truth” that govern history treated as an objective mirror rather than as an imaginative construction of the past. In consonance with Roland Barthes, White recognized that narrative historiography shared stylistic ground with realist fiction in adhering to poetic conventions that shore up the “referential illusion,” or the reader’s feeling that descriptive writing bears an intimate relationship with a sometimes arbitrary and disordered reality. Insisting upon historical narrative’s status as a verbal structure, White additionally demonstrated that history’s figural operations are irreducible to a rigorously logical methodology and “science” as such insofar as history’s form reflects choices that cannot be evaluated on epistemological grounds. For this reason, while traditional historians continue to disavow the import of White’s interventions, scholarship in the humanities and social sciences attests to his abiding influence beyond the critique of historiography. Before the appearance in 1973 of the textbook The Greco-Roman Tradition and his monograph Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, White translated Carlo Antoni’s From History to Sociology: The Transition in German Historical Thinking from Italian (with a foreword by Benedetto Croce) (1959); co-authored two textbooks respectively entitled The Emergence of Liberal Humanism: An Intellectual History of Western Europe, Vol. 1: From the Italian Renaissance to the French Revolution (1966) with Willson H. Coates and J. Salwyn Schapiro; and, again with Coates, The Ordeal of Liberal Humanism: An Intellectual History of Western Europe, Vol. 2: Since the French Revolution (1970). White also edited The Uses of History: Essays in Intellectual and Social History (1968) and co-edited Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium with Giorgio Tagliacozzo (1969). With his wife, Professor Margaret Brose, White co-edited Representing Kenneth Burke in 1982, but following Metahistory, he primarily published essays, some of which reappeared in four collections: Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (1978); The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (1987); Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (1999); and The Practical Past (2014). The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory 1957–2007, an anthology of White’s essays, co-edited and introduced by Robert Doran, appeared in 2010.

Revitalizing the Intellectual History of the French Revolution

1989 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 652 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack R. Censer ◽  
Daniel Arasse ◽  
Keith Michael Baker ◽  
Carol Blum ◽  
Robert Darnton ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
History Of ◽  
The French Revolution

scholarly journals The Contemporaneity of ‘Counter-Enlightenment’. From the French Revolution to German Post-War Sociology

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 940-970
Author(s):  
Sonja Asal
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Before And After ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
German Sociology ◽  
The French Revolution

While resistance to Enlightenment thought occurring in the eighteenth century is often framed by the concept of ‘Counter-Enlightenment’, the term itself was not introduced before the twentieth century. The article first reconstructs the anti-Enlightenment polemic before and after the French Revolution to highlight that while the notion of Counter- Enlightenment is appropriate for the identification of hitherto unexplored strands of thought, in view of a broader and more differentiated approach to the intellectual history of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it does not allow for a substantial definition. Subsequently, the article examines the history of the concept in French, English and German linguistic contexts, the German sociology of the interwar period and discussions about the legacy of the Enlightenment after World War II, to retrace how the different iterations have to be understood as a key for the self-reflection of modern societies throughout the twentieth century.

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