Linking historical methodology to linguistic constructs, Brown argues that the four basic approaches to historical understanding‑‑functional evolutionism, experimental empiricism, French structuralism, and existential phenomenology‑‑correspond to, and indeed are intimately related to the four master rhetorical tropes of synecdoche, metonymy, metaphore, and irony. To this end, Brown outlines and critically examines each of the aforementioned methodological perspectives, emphasizing their dialectical interrelationship, then tries to demonstrate the connections between each perspective and a corresponding rhetorical trope. From this perspective, Brown finds four pairs of relations, identified as the "root metaphors" of "organicism," "mechanism," "contextualism," and "formism." Brown concludes that this methodological‑linguistic paradigm creates a position of methodological relativism from which the historian can never escape, but he hopes that recognition of this situation will offer the historian the opportunity for more conscious and responsible choices. (am)