Reinhart Koselleck and Hayden White as Metahistorians: The Critique of Modern Historical Writing toward the End of the Modern Age

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Published Sep 24, 2021
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Vol. 2 No. 3 (2021): Is criminology the alma mater of business in the 21st century?

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Dr. Patrick Hutton
University of Vermont
https://orcid.org/0009-0006-5768-8725

Abstract

My purpose in this essay is to consider how the classic philosophy of history was reinvented as metahistory toward the end of the twentieth century. The German historian Reinhart Koselleck and the American historian Hayden White were its most prominent practitioners. Both scholars responded to the challenge of rethinking problems in historiography in light of the breakdown of the grand narrative of modern history, born of the European Enlightenment. Both rejected the teleological designs of the philosophy of history, yet are of particular interest for their inquiry into alternative conceptions of transcendence in historical interpretation. Koselleck reached toward a science of anthropology from his training in the idealist tradition of German philosophy. White, by contrast, reaffirmed history’s ancestral ties to the arts of writing. In juxtaposing these scholars, I highlight historiographical issues they raise about the relationship between the experience of the past and writing about it.


DOI:
https://doi.org/10.61439/TPJN6568

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Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Author Biography

Dr. Patrick Hutton, University of Vermont

Patrick Hutton is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Vermont, USA, where he taught European intellectual history and historiography. Academician of the European Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Hutton was the recipient of a number of national fellowships, including awards from the Danforth Foundation, the Fulbright Program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. His teaching experience: European intellectual history, the history of collective mentalities, the history of private life, cultural contexts of memory, historiography, philosophy of history, etc. Patrick Hutton is the author and editor of several books, including History as an Art of Memory (1993).

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