Hayden White and the «Emergence» of Liberal Humanism: The Content of the Form of Western Civilization courses

This paper proposes a re-reading of the first book published by the philosopher and historian Hayden White, The Emergence of Liberal Humanism (1966). This text is intended to achieve three main goals. The first is to put into con-text what was said by the author in one of his most and well-known provocative articles, «The Burden of History» (1966). The ideological limits which framed The Emergence should serve the reader to make to get in touch with a «White» before Metahistory. Secondly, this paper tries to explain and decodify the procedures of aesthetic ideology that shaped White as an author, and as we shall see, the so-called liberal humanism, which can be summarized as an aesthetic construction of post-FDR American liberalism. And thirdly, it seeks to provide a formalist interpretation claiming the importance in the study of historical writing of what White himself called «the content of the form». The ideological meanings of narrative forms used in this work are a good example of the importance of this approach