Metahistory Critical Essay | Critical Review by Stanley Pierson

Critical Review by Stanley Pierson

SOURCE: A review of Metahistory, in Comparative Literature, Vol. XXX, No. 2, Spring, 1978, pp. 178–81.

In the following review, Pierson praises Metahistory as “a bold and imaginative book” and outlines the book’s key points of contention that will likely be debated by scholars.

The discipline of history has remained relatively free from the close critical scrutiny which, in recent years, has been laying bare the metaphysical and methodological foundations of such neighboring disciplines as literary criticism, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, and sociology. Significant inquiry into the nature of historical thinking has been confined largely to the pages of History and Theory and to works by philosophers—White, Dray, Mink, Gallie, Fain, and Danto. Serious self-scrutiny by historians has been limited to the important study by David Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies, the works of George Iggers, and lighter efforts by Stuart Hughes and Peter Gay. Historians in general have shown little interest in...
(read more)