SOURCE: “Narrative History as a Way of Life,” in Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 31, No. 1, January, 1996, pp. 221–28.

In the following essay, Roberts examines the opposing theoretical positions of White and Arthur Marwick and defends Marwick's perspective of narrative history.

Hayden White writes [in the essay ‘Response to Arthur Marwick,’]: ‘Historians have systematically built into their notion of their discipline hostility or at least a blindness to theory and the kind of issues that philosophers have raised about the kind of knowledge they have produced.’¹ His explanation for this blindness seems to be in terms of a set of personal failings shared by historians: their simplistic assertion that only empirical research really matters; their mistaken belief that understanding what historians do is a matter of practical knowledge available only to fellow professionals; their inability to theorize their own discourse and the suppression of the philosophical dimensions of their craft...