Hayden White's Historicist "Party of Hope" Humanism

In October 1959, Hayden White published a review article in the journal Comparative Studies in Society and History on Franz Rosenthal's translation of Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah. White used the occasion to articulate his own historicist humanism. He opens his essay with a key observation:

"It is a distinguishing feature of modern Western historical thought that it has striven self-consciously to free itself as an autonomous, self-explanatory and self-justifying form of thought. Croce believed this movement to be a late phase of humanism and identified it as the main ingredient in the Western intellectual tradition. In his view, the history of historiography in the West has been one long struggle to expel the category of transcendence from historical analysis, that is, a struggle of history against philosophy of history" (White, "Ibn Khaldun", p. 110).

I would respectfully amend White's final sentence to read, "... that is, a struggle of an immanentist philosophy of history against a transcendentalist one."

Secularity, so-called, is really nothing more than a preference for immanence over transcendence. Such a preference, by the way, has roots in ancient Semitic literatures (the Bible, no less), and so any facile distinction made between sacred and secular is just that--facile, all too facile.

One can read White's subsequent analysis (and critique) of Ibn Khaldun's masterpiece as an exercise in Euro-centric triumphalism--a reading, I fear, that someone like Edward Said would have been only too prone to produce. I choose to avoid such a reading while, at the same time, reserving the right to take exception to statements that reflect a youthful enthusiasm on White's part that would probably make him blush today (e.g., "Unlike modern historical thought with its value free orientation..."). Exception taken, noted, let us move on...

White's essay tends to celebrate the accomplishments of the ancient Greek historians (Herodotus, Thucydides) in a manner that credits their efforts with a kind of modernity that owes more to wishful thinking than critical analysis, and his brief precis of "Asharite theology" ironically de-historicizes the Muslim thinker's metaphysics in such a way as to miss the fact (later recognized by White's friend and colleague Norman O. Brown) that al-Ashari's "imperious" and "secluded" Deity may lead one to a version of secularity both radically immanentist and nominalist.

Nevertheless, his overall critique of Ibn Khaldun is sound:

"In Ibn Khaldun's philosophy of history there is no progress that is not temporary, no enlightenment that is not revelation, no human accomplishment which does not have at its base mechanical chance; there is only the enervating Lucretian rise and fall out of the void and back again, only brute habit making for what seems to be historical continuity" (ibid., p. 123).

In my view, what remains most admirable about White's article is the articulation of the wonderfully historicist humanistic morals that he drew from his study of the Muqaddimah:

1. "... when the historian has no genuine respect for men, he will look everywhere but to men for the cause of historical change, and, failing to center upon man as the agent responsible for human triumph and disaster, he will find it impossible to share, through his history, in the achievement of the former and the avoidance of the latter" (pp. 124-125).

2. "... the distinction between 'inner meaning' and external appearance of historical events is not in itself vicious; it only becomes so when it is used to justify escape from the burden of human freedom and its responsibilities" (p. 125).

With these lines, Hayden White announced his membership in the Party of Hope: the party of all who dare to embrace a humanism capable of sustaining the practice of democratic criticism so woefully absent from public discourse in the United States today.