The Death of the Historian and Autotelism, Textuality and Impotence of Historical Writing: Hayden White and the Autonomy of History

Hayden White did not directly examine the issue of the independence of history as a discipline of knowledge in his theoretical reflection. He did not ask about the subject of historical studies, the specificity of the methods used in it, the difference between history and other fields, or the economic and social conditions of historical discourse. In this article, I revise White’s writing and reconfigure the extant research using the concept of autonomy. White — primarily in his works from the 1970s and 1980s — devoted much attention to exposing and describing cultural compulsions resulting in historical practices and violating their autonomy. These actions also brought unexpected results. At first, the use of structuralism in these practices, and then poststructuralist concepts of “the death of the author” and textualism, suggested claims that freed historiography from its links with an author’s biography and world-view, and with the social context in which a given work is produced. Using Foucault’s descrip-tion of the order of discourse, in turn, brought the image of a strict rigor of historical discipline, which, however, is not equal to the strong autonomy of history. A stronger delimitation of the field of history appears in his — already in the twenty‑first century — offer to use Michael Oakeshott’s division into the practical past and the historical past. Whilst censuring academic historical writing as sterile and rejected by readers because it fails to answer contemporary existential, social and political questions, White, most likely unintentionally, described the independence of historians’ actions from the demands of the societies to which they belong. According to commentators, his remarks can be a productive inspiration for reflection upon the distinctiveness of the discipline of history.