Abstract
The influential theorist of history Hayden White began as a partisan of the earlier Italian thinker Benedetto Croce. After 1963, however, White gradually turned against Croce, finally, in Metahistory, casting Croce's position as the limiting ironic outcome of nineteenth-century historiographical realism. Croce putatively left the historian as a passive observer, cut off from using historical understanding to help shape events. Whereas most students of White say little about White's encounter with Croce, this article argues that both thinkers were seeking to establish a post-realist cultural framework. Although White had plausible reasons to dissent from Croce, he sidestepped the challenge of the Crocean alternative by forcing Croce into a limiting mold as a time-bound, bourgeois ideological spokesman. This was to restrict unnecessarily and unfortunately the terms of post-realist debate.