Hayden White - Narrative and The Concept of Action 1970

NARRATIVE HISTORY AND THE CONCEPT OF ACTION
FREDERICK A. OLAFSON
Until quite recently, philosophical discussions of the nature of historical

knowledge have devoted very little attention to the narrative structure of
historical writing. Interest has been, for the most part, concentrated upon the
logic of explanation in history and, more specifically, upon the role of general
laws in such explanations. By contrast, interest in historical narrative has
tended to be associated with interpretations of historical understanding which,
in one way or another, challenge the proposed application to history of
models of explanation derived primarily from the natural sciences. Here the
work of William Dray and W. B. Gallie comes to mind.' It is, therefore, an
event of some interest when two philosophers who, unlike Dray and Gallie,
accept the regularity theory of explanation in its application to history turn to
historical narrative and try to provide an account of its distinctive features
that is consistent with the requirements of their general theory of historical
explanation. This is what the recent books by Arthur Danto and Morton
White in fact undertake to do, among other things; and they have placed all
students of these matters in their debt by formulating the issues involved in
the analysis of historical narrative in a much more exact and powerful way
than had previously been done.2
In this paper I propose to discuss only one aspect of the interpretations of
historical narrative which they develop; and I will not try to do justice to
other theses of great interest which they defend in the course of their discus-
sions of explanation, narrative, and other topics. The topic which I have
selected for special attention is the role of human action in historical nar-
rative; and I hope to show that these two writers have in their different ways
failed to recognize its central place in our understanding of historical events
and that their accounts of historical narrative suffer under this deficiency.
1. W. H. Dray, Laws and Explanation in History (London, 1957); and W. B.

Gallie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (London, 1964).
2. A. Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge, 1965); and M. White,
The Foundations of Historical Knowledge (New York, 1965).
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266 FREDERICK A. OLAFSON
With regard to the central question of whether historical explanations imply

the existence of general laws, Danto's answer is affirmative; but his formula-
tion of the regularity thesis is marked by a number of important qualifications.
These reflect the strong emphasis he places on the temporal position of the
historian relative to the events which he records, as well as on the implications
of this relationship for the historian's characteristic way of conceptualizing
these events. Thus, an historian can describe Caesar's conquest of Gaul by
saying that he laid the foundations of Western European civilization, although
this description of Caesar's achievement would necessarily have been un-
available to his contemporaries, since it entails events that took place long
after Caesar's death of which no one in the first century B.C. could know
anything. It is quite in keeping with this thoroughgoing emphasis on tem-
porality and process that Danto should stipulate that historical explanations
be explanations of changes in the course of which some state of affairs at a
given time t1 is modified through the loss or acquisition of some characteristic
by time t2. This emendation of the regularity theory, however, is less impor-
tant than Danto's explicit recognition that historical events and changes are
not explainable under all descriptions. Stated differently, this means that there
may be no laws under which many - perhaps most - historical events can
be directly subsumed in the form in which they are described by the historian
-no laws, for example, that apply directly to such an event as the Duke of
Buckingham's change of attitude with respect to the Spanish marriage. Not
only do such descriptions contain proper names and dates which could have
no counterpart in an unrestrictedly universal law; but even when these are
eliminated, there is no reason to think there will be laws that apply to the way
in which dukes make up and change their minds. At the same time, however,
Danto does hold that there must be some description under which historical
changes are explainable through subsumption under general laws; and he
gives examples of the successive stages of redescription through which an
event like the Duke of Buckingham's change of mind can be brought closer
to being explained.
This same example is also used to make clear Danto's conception of the
connection between explanation as narrative and explanation as involving
subsumption under general laws. The narrative gives us two states of affairs
that both involve some individual - whether a person or an institution or a
country - which in some sense remains the same throughout the acquisition
or loss of some characteristic. The historian has to explain why this change
occurred; and to do so he must find some intervening event which accounts
for the change. But the selection of this intervening event is possible only
NARRATIVE HISTORY AND THE CONCEPT OF ACTION 267
through the application of general laws, according to Danto, who says that
"it seems to me beyond argument that any decision one makes about what is
to constitute the crucial middle in a narrative, the event H (that which hap-
pens to x and causes x to change) must be selected in the light of some general
concept, expressible, perhaps, as a general law."3 In other words, the event
to be explained must be redescribed until a description of the change in terms
of general concepts is reached which is also an instance of a general law. In
the Duke of Buckingham example, we have accordingly to ask what the event
H is that happens to the Duke of Buckingham between time t1 and time t2;
and in order to do this we have to redescribe the Duke variously as a proud
man, a politician, and so forth, so that we can assess the effect upon him of
such events as his treatment at the Spanish court. In this case, Danto un-
fortunately does not tell us what the relevant law is; but it is clear that in
his view every narrative is based upon a deductive explanation and that to
every deductive explanation in history there corresponds a narrative sequence
of some kind. Finally, Danto concedes that no such sequence or change is
exhaustively explainable, since the concepts that are used to bring a particular
event under general laws are always of an order of generality which admits
of other quite different instances, and we are unable to say why just this kind
of change took place instead of the other changes that would equally well
instantiate the general law we are using.4
Now it must be pointed out that Danto's way of analyzing such historical
events as the change of attitude on the part of the Duke of Buckingham is in
certain respects highly tendentious. He tells us that that event forms a tempo-
ral whole with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning is the state
of affairs in which the Duke is favorably disposed toward the marriage and
the end is the state in which he has become opposed. The middle or inter-
mediate term which is the cause of the change is said to be "something hap-
pening to [the Duke] at t2."5 This manner of speaking is plainly akin to
that of a previous example which Danto uses and which does not concern
human beings but rather the way in which a dent in a car's fender is to be
explained. The something that "happened" to the Duke proves to be his
treatment at the Spanish court which, Danto tells us, affected his pride in
such a way as "to cause this disposition to actualize in a change of attitude."6
The significant feature of this way of schematizing the event in question is
that it avoids any reference to the Duke's purpose or intention in taking the
action he did and indeed avoids even describing the change as an action. In
3. Danto, 238.
4. Ibid., 229-231.
5. Ibid., 236.
6. Ibid., 240.
this analysis we thus find references to states of affairs, to causes that impinge
upon human beings, and to dispositions (pride) in those human beings which
are actualized by what happens to them with the result that new attitudes are
formed. But, by contrast with the preliminary and naive account in which it
is after all the Duke who "declares himself unwilling to participate further
in the unholy alliance," no one does anything at all in the corrected version
that Danto supplies.7 The avoidance of any reference to action as such would
seem in fact to be one principal function of Danto's schema of initial and
terminal states with intervening causal influences.
It is very questionable whether this schema of explanation is universally
applicable and whether in fact it has very much to recommend it over the
historian's initial way of describing the event which is typically cast in the
language of action. Suppose, for example, an historian were seeking to explain
why Hitler attacked Russia in 1941 instead of the Near East. According to
Danto we would have to conceptualize this event as a change in the course
of which Hitler (and through him Germany) passed from an initial state of
not being at war with Russia to a terminal state of being at war with Russia.
Then we would have to ask what "happened to" Hitler (or Germany) be-
tween time t, at which he was not at war with Russia and time t2 at which he
was at war. Now this question is likely to prove very puzzling because it is
not clear that anything relevant happened to Hitler or Germany that would
explain (causally) this transition. What happened of course was that Hitler
decided to attack Russia and gave the order to do so in December, 1940; and
that decision was surely not something that "happened to" Hitler. If we cast
our questions in Danto's form and ask what "happened to" Hitler between
the Russo-German non-aggression pact in 1939 and the order for Operation
Barbarossa in December, 1940, then we will find that there just does not ap-
pear to have been any incident comparable to Buckingham's visit to Madrid
to which a decisive influence upon Hitler's "dispositions" could be attributed.
Perhaps a relevant "disposition" can be identified in the form of Hitler's long-
standing hostility toward the Soviet Union and communism generally; and no
doubt the outcome of Hitler's campaigns in Western Europe during 1940
made it appear expedient to him to turn eastward at that time. But why should
any one of the events of 1940 have actualized just this disposition at that
time instead of leading Hitler to actualize another long-standing disposition
and conquer the Near East? The vocabulary of dispositions does not give any
answer to this question; and to answer it we would have to enter into Hitler's
practical calculations as best we can reconstruct them. In this way, we might
be able to understand why, in the light of his situation at that time and his
7. Quoted by Danto (p. 240) from C. V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years' War
(Harmondsworth, Eng., 1957), 167.
long-rtin objectives, he came to assign first priority to the

Soviet Union. But in doing so we would have abandoned talk of what "hap-
pened to" Hitler in favor of a rational reconstruction of the action he in fact
took.
But if Danto's schema proves unsatisfactory in the ways I have been de-
scribing, then we are really left once again with the facts that the Duke of
Buckingham changed his mind and that Hitler attacked Russia. These actions
certainly effected changes although not always the ones which their authors
intended; but these changes can not be conceived, as Danto proposes, as the
transition from one state of some continuous subject to another through the
action upon the latter of an external causal agency. In Danto's words, "it is
this implicit reference to a continuous subject which gives a measure of unity
to an historical narrative"; but in his account this subject is simply the logical
container of its initial and terminal states and, of course, of its own disposi-
tions as well.8 It is never active in the sense of doing something for some
purpose. And yet it is obvious that both Hitler and the Duke of Buckingham
acted as they did with certain intentions, however insane or petty these may
seem to us; and the latter undoubtedly had reasons for favoring the marriage
just as he later had reasons for opposing it. Moreover, if he was badly treated
at the Spanish court, then that fact would ordinarily be said to have been his
reason -perhaps unavowed- for opposing the marriage. In other words,
he wanted to revenge himself upon the persons who had, he believed, treated
him improperly. Even if we assume that he was not a very rational man and
that his decisions were greatly influenced by his personal feelings, we could
explain his change of attitude along the lines Danto approves only by pointing
out that to be proud in this context means, among other things, that one
seeks to retaliate for slights one has suffered and that the Duke believed that
the abandonment of the marriage was a good way of getting back at the
Spanish court. Even a passionate and unreasonable action is in this sense
aimed at a goal through the use of certain means; and it can not be explained
without reference to this intentional aspect. Since all these additions would
have to be made to the schema of initial and terminal states and since their
effect is to re-introduce the very notions of purposiveness and action which
that schema excludes, one wonders whether there can be any point in retain-
ing it.
Possibly Danto might reply to these criticisms by arguing that these matters
of the agent's intention are among the explananda that are not explainable as
they stand and that under these intentional descriptions the events in ques-
tion remain unexplained, although under other non-intentional descriptions
they can be explained through subsumption under more general concepts and
8. Danto, 236.
laws. But if he were to do so, he would face another and more general kind
of difficulty. If historians give causal explanations and if causal explanations
imply the existence of general laws, then the historian is under an obligation
to seek that description of the events with which he deals under which they
will be instances of a general law. The question I wish to raise about this is
simply whether there are any limits set to this movement away from the
preliminary descriptions of historical events under which they may not be
instances of general laws, in search of descriptions under which they are? No
such limits are set by Danto, nor does he suggest that there might be a need
for them; although he recognizes, of course, that, as the level of generality at
which historical events are described rises, there will be more and more
features of those events that cannot be accounted for by reference to the
general concepts and laws that the historian uses. In the examples he gives,
there is indeed some loss of specificity of this kind; but in general the new
explananda he proposes as substitutes for the preliminary descriptions are not
very remote from the latter and are rather clearly extractable from them with
the aid of certain auxiliary bits of information of the kind that an historical
text itself is very likely to supply. Thus, in his explanation of why flags were
put out in Monaco on a given day, Danto substitutes for the statement, "The
Monegasques put out American flags side by side with Monegasque flags,"
the statement, "The members of one nation were honoring a sovereign of
different national origin than they." These statements are then both brought
under a law which Danto tentatively formulates as follows: "Whenever a
nation has a sovereign of a different national origin than its citizens, those
citizens will on appropriate occasions honor that sovereign in some acceptable
manner."9 Here all the general concepts used in the substitute explanandum
and in the law are such as to be almost certainly available to anyone who un-
derstood the first description. They are, furthermore, descriptions which the
Monegasques themselves would recognize as accurately describing what they
were doing. The plausibility of the example is thus largely due to the fact that it
does not raise serious doubts as to whether the concepts used in the substitute
explanandum are too remote from those in the original description to be ap-
propriate replacements.
A very different kind of case can be proposed, however, in which such
doubts might well arise because the concepts used in the substitute explanan-
dum are logically unrelated to those in the original, so that no easy transitions
such as the one from "the Monegasques" to "the members of one nation"
would be possible. At the limit, these might be concepts drawn from neuro-
physiology or some other branch of behavioral science which formulates its
laws in terms of concepts that are logically unrelated to the vocabulary of
9. Ibid., 221.
molar description of human action and character that we ordinarily employ.

Danto does not discuss explanations cast in these terms; but he has said that
the concepts in the new law-instantiating explananda must be linked with the
more specific descriptions of the old through certain "conventions" which
stipulate, for example, what is to count as a way of honoring a sovereign of
alien birth, e.g., putting out the flags of his country.'0 Now these conventions
appear, in the light of the examples Danto uses, to be rules of interpretation;
but some of them have a strongly normative cast as well, e.g., "Putting out
flags of a person's native country is an acceptable way of honoring that person
as a native of that country."" At any rate, in a society composed largely of
Jehovah's Witnesses this convention would certainly be rejected. But if it
expresses a policy of conduct which may be accepted in one society and
rejected in another, then in the form in which it is used by Danto it must be
shorthand for "The Monegasques believe that putting out flags . . ." In the
kind of case we are considering now, however, the concepts used in the new
explanandum are assumed to be unfamiliar to the persons whose actions are
to be explained. They could not, therefore, very well figure in "conventions,"
like the one cited above, in which a convention functions both as a rule of
interpretation and as a rule of conduct that declares a certain means to be
appropriate for achieving some end that is assumed to be desirable.
Danto does not comment on this double function of the conventions he
postulates, perhaps because in the examples he chooses, the convention that
guides the historian's interpretations is formulated in language that is very
close to that of the agent's own implicit maxims. But when more technical
and esoteric concepts are used in the statement of the underlying law, this
slide from one sense of "convention" to another cannot go unnoticed; and it
raises difficulties for Danto's position. One cannot, after all, act in accordance
with rules that are formulated in terms that are unfamiliar or unintelligible to
oneself. So if an historian were to explain some event by bringing it under a
law in which such concepts occurred, he could not connect that law with the
original description by means of conventions that do double duty as the
historian's rule of interpretation and as the agent's rule of conduct. Instead,
the historian's rule of interpretation would connect the event under its orig-
inal description - the description under which it figures in whatever policies
of conduct the historical agent may be using - with the "same" event as it is
redescribed and explained in the relevant causal law. The status and avail-
ability of such rules of interpretation may well raise many questions, but
these do not concern us here. The relevant point is rather that when the law
the historian applies to a particular historical event becomes fully independent
10. Ibid., 226.

11. Ibid., 222.
of the policies that govern the conduct of the agents in question, Danto's
thesis of the convertibility of the narrative account of that event into a law-
based causal explanation becomes very difficult to maintain. The reason for
this is simply the fact that in the kind of case we are considering the law-
based explanation would contain terms which are not known to the agent or
logically derivable from the descriptions he gives of his own actions. In such
a case, the correspondence of the narrative and the causal explanation could
be restored only if the technical terms that occur in the latter could be intro-
duced into the narrative itself; but this would give incongruous results, since
it would mean that in many cases the original description of an agent's action
would be given in language in which he could not recognize that action as his
own. On the other hand, if Danto were to disallow the use of explanations
that move so far from the agent's original description of what he does, then
the causal character of the explanation would be called into question. This
becomes clear in the examples he gives - especially the Monegasque one -
which, as I have noted, stay very close to the descriptions the agents might
themselves give, with the result that these approximate much more closely to
the model of rational explanation than to that of causal explanation. Once
the convention discussed above and the laws are recast as statements about
the way the Monegasques treat sovereigns (as they clearly must be in light
of the obvious counter-instances to the claims they make about all nations),
the explanation Danto presents emerges as an explanation by reference to
the policies of the Monegasque people and the means they adopt to carry
out these policies.12 There is, in short, a choice to be made here between
maintaining the integrity of the primary vocabulary of narrative description
and insuring the subsumability of one's narrative sentences under universal
causal laws.
It would seem, then, that Danto has not provided a satisfactory example of
an explanation in which a law as distinct from a principle of action figures as
the major premise. It is also apparent that in the Monegasque example he has
not, in moving beyond a preliminary description to a description that in-
stantiates a general premise, moved beyond the sphere of characterizations of
the situation in question that would be recognizable and acceptable to the
agents themselves. As I have already argued, these are at bottom character-
izations of certain policies of actions; and my point has been that there are
limits on the degree to which the description of an action can deviate from
the one that would be provided by or be intelligible to the agent if that action
is to be imputed to him as it typically is in an historical narrative. There are,
12. An obvious counter-example, suggested by Michael Scriven, is the lack of interest

of the British public in honoring Prince Philip as a native of Greece.
to be sure, difficult questions that arise in connection with the use of various
technical vocabularies drawn from disciplines like economics and psychology
for the purpose of describing action. But it is surely clear that a recognition
of some such limits could be avoided only if the action character of the
explananda could be ignored; and if the events to be explained could be
broken up into initial and terminal states and intervening influences in
accordance with Danto's schema. In fact, however, Danto has not attempted
to carry out such an analysis in the Monegasque case and has produced only
a general "law" which is visibly parasitic upon the policies of action of his
protagonists and which, if treated as a statement of a causal law, is easily
falsifiable.13 At one point, Danto himself seems to come close to a recognition
of this independence of the explanations he is giving from any laws of
universal scope. In speaking of the Duke of Buckingham and his change of
attitude, he remarks that it is not at all easy "to enumerate in advance the
sorts of things that might make a man like the Duke of Buckingham change
his mind about the marriage of a Prince." Then he adds that "once we know
what turned the trick, we can bring it under a general principle readily
enough."14 This seems to imply quite clearly that the historian's explanation
is worked out in the first instance without benefit of any law-based insight
into events of the type under study. Since that explanation is initially given in
action terms, how can the "general principle" it suggests be more than a kind
of blow-up into fully universal terms of the particularized maxim that is
extracted from the facts available about the Duke and his action? At the same
time, of course, Danto speaks of the relationship between the two as one of
mutual confirmation - as when he says that "a law . . . both licenses and
is licensed by the redescriptions."'15 But if it is clear that the redescribed
event could be a confirmatory instance of the general premise considered as a
"law," it is quite unclear how the latter can be both easy to derive from the
redescription and license the latter - which presumably means that it pro-
vides supporting evidence for the explanation it offers. Such a law is "easy to
furnish" only if the only operations required to produce it are logical opera-
tions of universalization; but the generalization so produced will be no better
confirmed than the particular statement from which it is derived. If the law
is to license the redescription, then surely it must be independently confirmed
in other instances, and, if so, it must be in some sense "on hand" already
and available for guiding the process of redescription. In fact, however,
13. In his important article "The Popper-Hempel Theory Reconsidered," Histoty and
Theory 4 (1964), 3-26, Alan Donagan has commented on the tendency of defenders of
the regularity theory to put forward as "laws" generalizations that are in fact rather
easily shown to be false.
14. Danto, 244.
15. Ibid., 220-221.
Danto never asks whether his major premises are true when considered as
laws, and this suggests to me that he is employing them mainly as statements
of action-policies and not as laws.
One is tempted to suggest not only that Danto is somewhat inconsistent in
his way of using the law-based schema of historical explanation he proposes,
but also that his allegiance to this schema distorts some of his most important
insights into the whole topic of historical understanding. I have in mind here
the salutary emphasis he places on what he calls "temporal wholes" in
history, i.e., the organization of successive events in such a way that they
form a unified sequence of change in which there is a beginning, a middle,
and an end. As I have already pointed out, he believes that such unities are
organized by means of what he calls "narrative sentences" which describe some
past event in a way that implies that another event took place at a point in
time subsequent to the first event; and he also argues that this is a mode of
description that is peculiar to history as the record of the past and one that
is of necessity inapplicable to events that lie in the historian's future. The
historian is thus typically the man who sees farther than the persons he
writes about and can describe their actions in the light of their consequences
as these persons could not. At the same time, this organization of events
in the form of temporal structures serves an explanatory function since the
causal episodes which are recounted are those which are adequate to explain
the change that occurs in some underlying continuous subject according to
some general law of which this change thus is shown to be an instance.
There is an indefinitely large number of such temporal structures within
which any given event E can be situated by the historian; and while the basic
conditions of underlying continuity and relevance must be observed which-
ever structure is used, the choice of a particular structure will also be dictated
by the historian's special interest in a certain set of terminal states with
which the events he is describing are connected. Temporal structures in
narrative history are thus subject only to the two fundamental conditions that
they deal with some continuous subject - which may, of course, be an
institution like the Roman Catholic Church or an event like the French
Revolution and that they explain a change by reference to causal episodes
that are subsumable under general laws.
What is most conspicuously lacking in this treatment of temporal wholes
in history is any effort to show that such unities are implicit in the historical
events themselves in any sense that is prior to and independent of the his-
torian's being able to hit on a description of the events that will bring them
under a causal law. More specifically, the unity established through the
organization of these temporal wholes does not seem to stand in any definable
relationship to the kind of unity among events that is set up by human action
itself. It is true that Danto makes such remarks as that "one chief task of
narration is to set the stage for the action that leads to the end, the descrip-
fion of which is the explanation of the change of which beginning and end
are the termini."16 But this reference to the role of action in narrative
sentences is not developed; and Danto's only sustained treatment of the topic
of action is an argument intended to show that narrative sentences and what
Danto calls "action sentences" are logically distinct in a way that precludes
the assimilation of the former to the latter. An action sentence is a sentence,
like "John is planting roses," in which what a person is doing in this case
digging a hole or preparing the soil is described by reference to its in-
tended outcome. The "project verb" in an action sentence thus describes an
earlier event in the light of a later one; and in this respect action sentences are
like narrative sentences. The difference between the two, according to Danto,
is that in the case of the action sentence "it is not logically required that the
later event take place for the sentence to be true," while in the case of the
narrative sentence the sentence would be falsified if the later event did not
take place.'7 If one says "Aristarchus anticipated Copernicus," then this
sentence would be false if Copernicus had not worked out the heliocentric
theory. But if it turns out that the roots John planted were, unknown to him,
lilacs rather than roses, that does not falsify the statement that he was planting
roses as long as he was doing the kinds of things that are appropriate when
one is planting roses. Quite evidently, then, action sentences have something
to do with the agent's intention and his understanding of what he was about;
and these are not altered by some subsequent failure due to the agent's
ignorance. Narrative sentences, by contrast, are falsifiable by subsequent
events quite apart from any consideration of the agent's intention or
knowledge, and it is evident that narrative sentences do not, as Danto
interprets them, have any necessary or close connection with action or
intention as such. As a result, the unities which narrative sentences establish
among events are independent of the relationships implicit in intentional
action; and this difference between narrative and action sentences is distinct
from the one based on the different temporal perspectives of the agent and
the historian.
In offering this characterization of narrative sentences and assigning them
a central place in his account of historical understanding, Danto did not, of
course, intend to claim that all sentences in history books are of this logical
type, but rather that among all the different types of sentences that an
historian may have occasion to use, these are the ones which are from a
logical point of view peculiar to and distinctive of his enterprise. What is a
little surprising, however, is the fact that Danto nowhere takes note of the
16. Ibid., 248.

17. Ibid., 159 if.
fact that there are some legitimate grounds for objections to the use of
sentences of this type in history- objections, that is, to the description
of the action of historical personages in a temporal perspective that was
unavailable to them. Thus, one of the strongest objections to "the Whig
interpretation of history" is that it permitted such statements as "Martin
Luther was a pioneer of religious liberty in the modern world." Critics like
Herbert Butterfield point out that while Luther's break with the church was
certainly one of the events that were eventually to lead to an acceptance of
religious liberty as the only alternative to perennial religious strife, that out-
come was wholly alien to Luther's own intention.'8 Assuming this to be a
legitimate criticism of a certain way of writing history from the standpoint
of the events that were subsequent in the time order to the actions being
described but causally connected with them, one must ask whether Danto's
schema of explanatory narrative would permit him to censure such forms of
temporal organization as this and to say in what the error consists. After all,
the conditions of continuity and law-instantiation could presumably be met.
Wherein, then, might the error consist? No doubt, Luther would have hotly
repudiated this description of what he did; but it is not clear that from
Danto's standpoint that fact would constitute a defect in a narrative sentence
about Luther or anyone else. At least, there is no stipulation among the
"logico-aesthetic points" that Danto makes with respect to narrative sentences
to the effect that the description of actions they give must stand in any
particular relationship to the description of those actions that might have been
given or accepted by the agents themselves.'9
It seems to me that if Danto wants to find grounds for objecting to nar-
rative sentences such as I have described, he could do so only by introducing
a further requirement into his canon for narrative sentences. This would be
a requirement to the effect that an historian must not describe an action
by means of narrative sentences alone, but that these must be supplemented,
as necessary, by a description in terms of "action sentences" which reflect the
agent's understanding of what he is about as narrative sentences do not
necessarily do. The rhetorical devices by which this pairing might be
effected are various; but in all cases they would serve the purpose of makin
it clear that the temporal and causal perspective implicit in the narrative
sentence is that of the historian and not necessarily that of the agent. In this
way, misunderstandings of narrative statements as action statements that
attribute a certain intention to the agent would be prevented. But this require-
ment that action sentences be included in an historical narrative has more
extensive implications, since such sentences introduce a new form of temporal
18. H. Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London, 1931), Chapter 3.

19. Danto, 249-251.
organization of events distinct from that introduced by the historian's interest

in certain outcomes of the actions he is studying. This temporal whole, too,
is a unity of an initial state with a terminal state; but the intermediate term
is an action rather than a causal episode, and the terminal state is not the
actual result of the action, but the intended or projected outcome. The latter
is often identified by the name of the action itself - the "project verb" as
Danto puts it - but the full nature of the intention is given only when we
know both the agent's reasons for acting in this way and his beliefs about his
situation which make this the proper way of achieving his objective. The
action thus involves a reference to the state of affairs which it is intended
to change and more specifically to the features of that situation which are
to be altered or removed. It also makes a forward reference to a state of
affairs that is to be achieved by this action and to those features of that
situation which the action seeks to realize. Both this apprehension of the
current (or immediately past) situation and this reference to a future state
to be realized are effected by the agent; and they reflect the extent and the
limitations of his knowledge of his environment and of the relationship upon
which the effectuation of this change depends. In short, there would corre-
spond to every action sentence in an historical narrative, not a deductive
explanatory argument, but a schema of practical deliberation in which the
action is subsumed under the relevant intentions of the agent.
This conception of the role of action sentences casts a very different light
on the way narrative sentences, in Danto's sense, function in history. Very
often people do not succeed in the efforts they make, and often when they
succeed the results of what they do prove to be quite different from those
they had projected. Quite obviously, too, it is the business of the historian to
set forth not just what people were trying to do but what in fact happened
and why; and it is here that one major function of "narrative sentences" is
performed. Some narrative sentences, of course, simply describe a person in
terms unavailable to him without even seeming to impute some action to
him, e.g., "X was the great uncle of the last man to speak Cornish." But those
narrative sentences that do impute an action to their subjects typically de-
scribe the latter's actions in the light of their unintended and unexpected
consequences. Thus the narrative sentence about Luther which I discussed
above assigns a consequence to his actions that was unintended by him and
that presumably would have been quite unwelcome to him. A narrative
sentence that has this function must, however, be in some degree parasitic
upon a corresponding action sentence, since we would not be in a position
to point out the unintended consequences of an action unless we had some
prior knowledge of the intention of the action itself. In general, while the
temporal perspective implicit in narrative sentences is the historian's, if only
because he is in a position to know more about the consequences of the
agent's action than the agent often is, the above examples suggest strongly
that it is not wholly independent of the temporal organization effected by the
agent but instead reflects the historian's way of following that action and
determining what effects - intended and unintended - it really has. It is by
no means necessary that the historian should always make use of "narrative
sentences" for the purpose of conveying the fact that the real results of an
action were different from what they were intended to be and perhaps from
what the agent could have reasonably expected them to be. That device
can be very effective if the historian's intention is ironic; but he can perfectly
well state what actually came of a given undertaking without redescribing it
in terms that imply that it had these later and unexpected consequences, as is
often the case when narrative sentences are used.
It is one of the unsatisfactory features of Danto's account of narrative
sentences that he does not give many examples in context of the way in
which they might be used in an historical account. The examples that are
given tend to be fragmentary phrases or sentences which make the point
about the historian's special temporal perspective and superior knowledge,
but do not really show why or how this special mode of description for
historical events would be appropriate or required. That the latter constitutes
an optional rhetorical device at the disposal of the historian is clear; but it is
much less clear that it provides a key to the continuity of historical narrative.
The point is an important one, for Danto lays down a general requirement
of relevance for historical narratives according to which "it is a flaw in a
narrative if it contains episodes that fail to contribute to the action."20 Now
this seems to me to imply a further limitation on the freedom of the historian
to pick out any consequence of an action that happens to interest him,
as distinct from the consequences that either realized or betrayed the
intention of the agent. The consequences of that action must after all be
described in terms that will permit them to serve as the premises of the next
episode in the story that is being told; and this will typically be another
action, performed either by the same agent or by someone else. Clearly the
original agent will react to those consequences primarily as they constitute
a failure or a success of his original action. So may another agent; but he
may also identify those consequences in terms of his own purposes and in a
way that is quite irrelevant to the intentions of the first agent and therefore
employs a quite different description from that used by the agent himself.
It will, moreover, be important for the historian to know what this new
description of the consequences of the first action is so that he may set about
trying to explain what these various agents then proceed to do. Once again,
then, the historian is compelled to draw his description of this terminal
20. Ibid., 250.
state that has become the initial state for a new sequence of action, not from
his own independent interest in some causal consequence of the original
action, but from the way in which it is described in the context of another
and perhaps quite different set of purposes and intentions. It is here, surely,
in the way successive agents identify and react to the consequences of their
own and others' actions, that we find the effective enchalnement and con-
tinuity of historical events. No doubt it is the historian's privilege to leap
over some of the episodes which he will later recount, and startle his readers
by a description of some personality or event in terms that imply the occur-
rence of subsequent events that have not yet been related. I think, however,
that this rhetorical trick will be accepted by most readers only if they believe
that this sudden anachronism anticipates some later episode in the story that
is being told and that it could be reached step by step by a sequence such as I
have described above. If that understanding were violated and the reader
were continually treated to descriptions of human actions in terms of conse-
quences that proved irrelevant to the characterization of subsequent actions,
they would be likely to feel that such a narrative "contained episodes which
fail to contribute to the action" and thus violated Danto's own rule of
narrative relevance. Since that action consists of successive linked episodes,
as Danto's own diagram indicates, the descriptions of its initial and terminal
states must be such that other actions can "latch on" to the latter and so
maintain a continuity of multi-agent intentionality that could not be guaran-
teed if the historian's interest in one set of consequences rather than another
were the decisive criterion for inclusion in an historical narrative.
II
While Morton White devotes less attention than does Danto to the analysis
of historical narrative and more to a reformulation of the regularity theory of
explanation as applied to history, his book includes a substantial chapter
devoted to historical narration.2' Unlike Danto, White is not concerned with
the kind of temporal perspective that typically underlies "narrative sentences";
but in other respects his treatment of narrative has many points of similarity
with Danto's. Thus, a narrative is concerned with the states in which some
continuing entity like "a nation, a society, or a person" finds itself at different
points in a time sequence; and the task of the narrative historian, as distinct
from the chronicler, is to "colligate" these facts in such a way that we under-
stand why they followed upon one another in the way they did.22 These
colligations, in White's view, depend upon the existence of appropriate causal
21. See Chapter 6.

22. White, 221.
laws as a condition of their truth; and the sequence of causal explanatory

arguments they involve make up what White calls the logical skeleton of
historical narrative as contrasted with its literary qualities. While he is not
especially concerned with the temporal perspective of the historian, White
does have a great deal to say about his point of view, insofar as the interests
and evaluative attitudes it reflects play a role in singling out some event or
feature of an event as abnormal or unusual and thus as in need of explana-
tion. The cause of such an event which is abnormal relative to a certain point
of view is what White calls its decisive cause; and he is prepared to admit
that there may be as many decisive causes for an event as there are points
of view from which it appears abnormal in different ways. There is, then,
such a thing as objective historical truth, but "there is no Archimedean point
from which points of view may be assessed, no essence of history which
dictates what point of view must always be adopted in order to pick out the
correct answer either to the question 'What was the cause of what happened?'
or . . . to the question 'What happened?' "23 In support of this relativistic
analysis of the notion of a decisive cause, White has occasion to argue against
several versions of what he calls "metaphysical monism," the doctrine that
such causes fall into some single ontological category. Among such categories
he cites as examples "underlying conditions," "thoughts," and "actions."24
While an event falling into any one of these categories might turn out to be the
decisive cause of a given event, this would depend entirely upon the initial
characterization of that event and the form of interest in the event that is
reflected in this characterization. I believe, however, against White, that the
standpoint of the historian does not vary in the unrestricted way permitted by
this analysis; and I think it can be shown that the decisive cause of an event
will typically turn out to be an action, at least from any distinctively historical
standpoint.
While I am primarily concerned with White's arguments against the view
that the decisive cause is always an action, there are certain features of his
treatment of the view that the decisive cause is always a "thought" that also
call for comment and are in fact closely linked with a consideration of the
parallel thesis about actions. It seems clear that he has construed the view
that assigns a privileged position in historical explanation to thoughts in a
very narrow way - so narrow, indeed, that the fact that a variety of objects
not ordinarily described as "thoughts" are referred to as causes or reasons
in historical explanations becomes a counter-instance to the thesis under
attack. Thus, in one of White's examples, the "causes of the delay" in the
founding of Harvard College, after funds had been appropriated by the
23. Ibid., 128.

24. Ibid., 133 ff.
General Court of Massachusetts, are said to have included the war with the
Pequot Indians that was going on at the time.25 In another example, the
fact that Harvard came to be situated at Cambridge rather than at Salem in
spite of some clear advantages possessed by the latter site is shown to have
been explained by S. E. Morison, not by reference to what someone thought,
but by reference to reasons that include "a desire, a personality and possibly
a river."26 But this form of counter-argument really modifies the original
thesis by interpreting it as a restriction on the linguistic usage of historians,
i.e., as requiring that nothing shall be cited as a decisive cause in an historical
explanation that is not referred to there as a thought. In fact, however,
"thought," as this term is used by philosophers like Collingwood who defend
this thesis, is not a lexical classification or a restriction on the kinds of words
that can be used to name decisive causes in an historical explanation. It is,
moreover, quite obvious from White's own account that the "causes" of both
the delay in founding the College and the siting of it at Cambridge were
reasons; and these were, to judge from the context, the reasons of some
person or persons for acting or not acting in a certain way at a certain time.
Thus, it would make no sense to say that the Charles River caused the
College to be situated at Cambridge unless what were meant was that it had
swept the buildings away from some other site and deposited them on its
Cambridge banks. What was actually intended by the historian was the quite
different claim that the fact that Cambridge was situated on a river not
unlike the Cam of its English counterpart may have been the reason why
the responsible persons situated Harvard College in Cambridge. But this is to
say that we are dealing with a certain fact which was known to the persons
in question and may have been a premise of a kind of practical deliberation
they performed; and it is in this sense that these reasons or causes were
someone's "thoughts." Similarly, a war is not a thought; but the fact that a
war with the Pequot Indians was going on in 1636 explains the delay in
founding Harvard College only if this fact was known to the governing group
in the colony and was a decisive consideration in favor of delaying the
projected undertaking. Perhaps Collingwood could have expressed the restric-
tion on historical explanation that he was really proposing in some better
way; but even the formulation he gave is not so strange if we remember that
thought is thought about something - some state of affairs - and that, as
known by human beings and as an element in their practical deliberations,
external states of affairs may without excessive impropriety be referred to as
thoughts.
White's treatment of the claim that decisive causes are always human
25. Ibid., 149.

26. Ibid., 150.
actions proceeds along somewhat different lines. There is less attempt to

produce clear counter-examples from works of history and more reliance on
a general claim that historians are not satisfied when they have reached a
voluntary human act in the ascending order of causes, but press on in search
of explanations by reference to other kinds of conditions. Unlike the jurist,
the historian does not, according to White, "treat the action of one man
whether he be an aviator or a President - as something through which [he]
cannot pass in search of explanation."27 Thus, while one historian may
describe the Tennis Court Oath as "the essential and revolutionary act of the
French Revolution" from which "proceeded the destruction of the ancient
regime,"28 others, White argues, will "wish to go beyond the oath of the
tennis court, explain it as the effect of a larger social force playing on those
who swore the oath and then say that this force was the cause of the
revolution."29 Or again, "a future historian [may] speak . . . about the
psychological atmosphere in Dallas when President Kennedy was assassinated
and hence 'pass through' the deliberate action and even the motive of the
assassin in an effort to get an explanation."30 In passing, it may be remarked
that it is not altogether clear from White's brief discussion of these examples
whether his objection is to explanations by reference to the actions of one
man as distinct from those of many; but since there are very few historical
explanations that refer to the actions of only one man, I will assume that
White's objection is to explanations given exclusively in terms of actions,
whether these be the actions of one man or many.
The question that arises about such explanations is not so much whether
historians in fact "pass through" voluntary human actions in search of causes
as it is to determine just what constitutes such "passing through." If I "pass
through" a voluntary human action whenever I talk about something other
than that action - something that has a putative connection with the event
to be explained - then it would seem that there can be very few occasions
on which one does not "pass through" human actions in the course of an
explanation. After all, one cannot explain an event by reference to an action
without saying or at least assuming something about the situation - the
"underlying conditions" - in which the action is performed. Whether or not
an action can produce a certain effect is clearly dependent upon the environ-
ment in which it takes place; and when no explanatory reference is made to
that environment, that is normally because all the relevant facts about it are
assumed to be known to the reader and there are no unusual or abnormal
27. Ibid., 147.

28. Quoted by White (p. 145) from E. L. Woodward, French Revolutions (Oxford,
1934), 28.
29. White, 145.
30. Ibid., 145-146.
facts that need relating. The point I am making is simply that it is doubtful
whether any historian has ever believed that a voluntary action might some-
how by itself and in abstraction from its background be the cause of an event.
But what is puzzling in White's account is precisely his way of speaking as
though explanations that pass through voluntary actions were somehow an
alternative to those that pay primary attention to them. For example, the
suggestion that the historians of the future will pass through Oswald's action
and his motives to the psychological atmosphere is hard to understand if it
means more than that some of those historians may think that these back-
ground conditions have been inadequately explored and devote most or all
of their attention to them. That may well happen; but it does not follow that
it is just as reasonable to regard the psychological atmosphere in Dallas as the
cause of the President's death as it would be, from another point of view
and with a different interest, to regard Oswald's act as the cause. If the Pres-
ident was killed as the result of a deliberate human act and not by natural
causes, then any exploration of the background conditions is an exploration
of the background of that action; and while the historian certainly leaves the
action aside temporarily in order to talk about a variety of things that are
distinct from it and may very well not be actions at all, he must also return
to that action and show what the relationship of the background factors that
have been isolated was to the act itself. It seems almost unnecessary to say
that a psychological atmosphere is quite as incapable of killing a President as
the Charles River is of causing Harvard College to be situated in Cambridge.
But if the background conditions must be placed in relation to the action,
will they not have to be presented as states of affairs of which the assassin
had some degree of awareness and to which he responded in the way he
did, i.e., by killing the President? In this case, it is unlikely that the response,
if there was one, would have been in the nature of a cool practical inference.
It is much more likely that the response would have been strongly affective
in nature; and it is at least possible that an assassin might not have committed
his act if he had not been in a certain emotional state just as a parent might
not strike his child if he had not come home from the office in an angry state
of mind. But other quite different responses to the psychological atmosphere
in Dallas are imaginable. An assassin might think that it would lead the
public, if not the police, to look for a right-wing conspiracy and thus make
it possible for the real assassins to escape detection. Certainly this might give
some potential assassin a motive to commit the crime under these circum-
stances rather than wait for another opportunity. There are many other
possible ways in which background conditions can be related to an action
and thus help to explain a certain event; but the point of interest here is
simply that no historian can neglect entirely this question of the meaning
that is given to background conditions by the agent. Moreover, to talk about
what the agent makes of the circumstances in which he acts is inevitably to

talk about his motives and intentions even if we do not explicitly adopt an
explicitly psychological idiom for this purpose, so there can scarcely be any
question of an historian's permanently bypassing the question of motives,
however long the detour he takes may be. Here the amount of space devoted
to one aspect or another of an historical episode is not really a reliable index
of what the writer believes the decisive cause to have been; nor would even
an almost complete omission of reference to the actions whose background
is being explored be satisfactory evidence that an alternative theory of the
decisive cause was being proposed in place of a theory of the action as the
decisive cause. Indeed, in the absence of specific disclaimers, I think it would
usually be justified to assume that most historians believe that underlying
conditions, action, and consequences form an indissoluble unity from the
standpoint of historical understanding, and that the abstraction of one or
another element in that complex for purposes of separate analysis does not
imply any special theory of historical causation but rather a judgment as to
research priorities in the light of the state of our understanding of the matter
in hand.
The real question, as I see it, is not whether any one of these three dimen-
sions of an historical episode can be isolated from the others in any final way
but rather what justification there is for treating the action rather than the
underlying conditions as the decisive cause within this unity. (The category of
"thought" which White treats separately from "action" and "underlying con-
ditions" forms a part of what I mean by "action" and need not be treated
as another possible "decisive cause.") I have been suggesting that the
action is the apex of a triangle of which the other corners are the underlying
conditions and the actual consequences of the action; and the question must
therefore be whether there is any reason on which to base the selection of one
corner rather than another to be the apex of this triangle - the point from
which the other two are, so to speak, envisaged. Such a reason would clearly
have to be something more than the interest that one historian may feel in a
certain aspect of an event and that another historian with his own distinct
interests may equally well not feel.
In attempting to provide adequate grounds for the privileged position I assign

to action within historical narrative, I am not seeking to refute White's view
that history is written from a point of view that reflects the interests and
value-attitudes of the historian. In a sense, I am simply trying to show that
the fact that this point of view is the point of view of an historian has restric-
tive implications to which White has not done justice. In one of his rare
characterizations of history as a whole, however, White notes that "historians
write histories of nations, civilizations, scientific societies, philosophical move-
ments, revolutions, economies, religions . . . they do not usually write his-

tories of planets, animals, stars, rocks, or galaxies . . . so we know that they
are primarily concerned with the social behavior of human beings."3' This
tentative restriction on the historian's field of interest turns out not to imply
any criterion for including or excluding anything from an historical account
of "what happened," as White quickly makes clear when he goes on to say
that no "definition of the features that should be recorded by a professional
historian" can be provided.32 If this means that no absolute priority of
political history over, say, the history of cooking can be justified, I would be
inclined to agree; but it may still be the case that the historian by virtue of his
professional interest in "the social behavior of human beings" will be com-
mitted to certain priorities of interest in both political and culinary history. To
put the matter in another way, I am suggesting that all the points of view
that historians bring to a given domain of history may share a thematic interest
in human action in spite of other perhaps unresolvable differences about what
should be included in an historical narrative. There may, in this sense, be an
historical point of view which cannot determine what is to be included in a
history, but does commit the historian to an organization of whatever
material is presented that assigns a permanent priority of interest to what
human beings have done. In support of this conception of the historical point
of view, I am going to assume that the historian's commitment to the study
of the "social behavior of human beings" is equivalent to an interest in the
actions of human beings that significantly affect other human beings; and
I want to show that this interest has very close affinities with two conceptions
of "the decisive cause" which White considers and rejects. These are the
interpretation of the decisive cause as the contingently necessary condition,
and the technological interpretation of the decisive cause. If it can be shown
that these interpretations are sound, then I think the case for holding that
the decisive cause in history is always an action will be much stronger.
A "contingently necessary condition," as this expression is used by Ernest
Nagel, is one that is isolated from a list of conditions that are jointly sufficient
to produce a certain effect, and is then declared to be a necessary condition
for producing that effect when the other conditions are realized.33 The
qualifier, "contingently," is intended to convey the fact that the necessary
condition in question is necessary only when one set of sufficient conditions
is assumed to be the one that produced a given effect and when all but one
of the conditions that make up that set are assumed to be fulfilled. When
these conditions are met, the one remaining condition becomes the necessary
31. Ibid., 259.

32. Ibid., 259.
33. E. Nagel, The Structure of Science (New York, 1961), 584 ff.
condition for the outcome in question. White's comment on this is that one
is rarely in a position to assert that there is only one set of sufficient condi-
tions for a particular effect and that this is what we are in fact assuming
when we pick out a contingently necessary condition. At any rate, in White's
view, we are certainly not in a position to make this assumption on many
occasions when historians designate a contributory cause as the decisive
cause, so it cannot be correct to analyze the historian's use of the latter
concept in terms of the former.
There is, however, a point of view from which the making of these
assumptions is not so arbitrary as it may appear when considered in abstrac-
tion from concrete contexts of historical explanation. If we consider the
situation of a person who seeks to achieve a certain result by the application
of certain means, then it is quite likely that in the situation in which he finds
himself there will be only one way of acting which in his view promises to
realize his goal. In other words, the agent sees certain conditions as given and
at the same time wishes to achieve a certain result; but can do so under these
circumstances only if he acts in manner a. In schematized form, this yields
"If c (circumstances), then r (result) if and only if a (action)." The desig-
nation as a necessary condition of one member of a set of jointly sufficient
conditions thus models the contrast that the agent makes between the
elements in his situation which will affect one way or another the achieve-
ment he projects, and the action itself that is to be taken by him in that
situation - the action which will complete the set of conditions that is
sufficient to produce the desired result. While it would be quite arbitrary, as
White says, to assert that a particular set of sufficient conditions is the only
such set and therefore necessary, it is not so arbitrary if we use as our model
the case of an agent who knows that all but one of the members of one
set of jointly sufficient conditions are present and has no reason to think that
any members of any other set are present or even that there is any other set.
He will typically and justifiably assume that his goal will be achieved only if
some action is taken by him; and he will quite naturally describe the action
which, taken together with the conditions that are already in existence, he
believes to be sufficient for that purpose, as necessary, i.e., as the action that
he must take. If there is more than one action which in these circumstances
might realize the end result, then it is a disjunction of actions that will be the
contingently necessary condition, and his choice between them will have to be
based on some effects that one or the other might have on concurrent goals.
But the point of the qualifier "contingently" consists just in this distinction
between all possible sets of sufficient conditions and the set to which belong
the features which the agent knows to be present in the situation in which he
finds himself and which point to a given action as the missing member of this
set of sufficient conditions for the end in view.
This interpretation of the decisive cause as the contingently necessary con-

dition has a good deal in common with what White calls the technological
interpretation of the decisive cause, although his way of stating that view
seems to me to be defective in one important respect.34 He characterizes
the technological interpretation as the view that historians should regard as
the decisive cause of an event, and therefore as its contingently necessary
condition, only those contributory causes that are manipulable, i.e., that can
be prevented or produced by a human being. This formulation of the tech-
nological thesis is unobjectionable, but White then goes on to stipulate that
this condition must be the kind of event that is producible or preventable
by the person who says it is the cause, i.e., by the historian. This seems to
me to produce a very much less persuasive view than if one said that the
cause must be one that was manipulable by the agents in the historical
episode in question, since there would certainly be actions that the historian,
living as he does in a technologically more advanced age, might perform, but
which the historical personages under discussion could not have even con-
sidered and which it would therefore scarcely make sense to speak of as the
cause of what happened. Between these statements of the technological thesis
there is all the difference between a theory of history based on an under-
standing of past events within the range of possibilities of the persons con-
temporary with them and one that holds that our knowledge of the past is
organized by our present concerns and that past events may be described as
having occurred or not occurred because things were done or not done that
have not become conceivable until our own time.
Presumably, however, White would regard the counter-examples he cites
against his version of the technological interpretation as being equally decisive
against the one which I have contrasted with it. Once again these counter-
examples, in which the cause is supposed to be something that clearly is not
in any normal sense preventable or producible by human beings, are nearly
all cases in which natural events produce their natural effects, as when a man
is killed by a bolt of lightning. Now I would certainly agree that such natural
events form an indispensable and continuing substratum of all historical
accounts as of human life itself; but I would also argue that the operation
of such natural causes, when not mediated by human interpretation and
decision, is not the distinctive object of historical study, but is drawn by the
historian from common sense or from the natural sciences. Being struck by
lightning is, of course, an event to which the victim can scarcely respond
by choice or interpretation, and his being killed is therefore a natural conse-
quence of being struck. On the other hand, if the victim was struck because
he was recklessly walking abroad during a thunderstorm, then this fact might
34. White, 163-167.
be cited as the reason why he was killed, and we would then be citing as the
cause an action that the person in question might have avoided. To be sure,
there need not be this context of an avoidable action for every such intrusion
of natural causes into human affairs. There are after all events - deaths are
probably the best example - that simply occur without its having been in
anyone's power even to try to prevent them. Nevertheless, it can be argued,
I think, that it is in a special sense the historian's job to provide that context
of manipulability if it exists at all, and that these cases cited by White in
which it seems to be lacking are in some sense marginal to his central interest.
Thus one may agree with White when he says that "an earthquake, a storm, a
hurricane, a crop failure or a flood is often cited as the cause of a historical
event" and yet wonder under what description of their effects these events are
said to be causes.35 Certainly, they produce what I have elsewhere called
"natural consequences" of which they may be said to be the causes, as, for
example, when a storm wrecks a fleet of ships or an earthquake blocks
a canal. But surely the earthquake would not be the cause of the reorientation
of trade, or the storm of a policy of military retrenchment, in the same way
in which they are causes of the wreck and the blockage, respectively. There
could be no story of trade or of military policy that did not involve human
undertakings that are exposed to the operation of natural causes along the
lines of these examples; but the point is that these natural causes and their
natural effects come into a story in which human purposes and actions
provide the element of continuity, however often it may be broken by the
deaths and accidents that are inseparable from our natural condition. The
technological thesis properly interpreted does not require that the operation
of natural causes never be mentioned in a history book, but rather that the
larger story in which they find their place be told in terms of what human
beings did and might have done, and that pride of place among explanations
of human events belongs to those that are given in these terms.
III
In this paper I have tried to show some of the difficulties encountered in

attempts to analyze the structure of historical narrative along lines that are
compatible with the regularity theory of explanation. So described, the
analyses of historical knowledge by Danto and White may seem a good deal
more closely akin to one another than in fact they are. One substantial
difference between them is that Danto sets out from and remains throughout
primarily interested in historical narrative, while White first develops a general
theory of historical explanation and then proceeds to analyze narrative
35. Ibid., 166.
history in terms of the general theory of historical knowle

out. If, as I have suggested, both philosophers fail to integrate their account
of narrative satisfactorily with the regularity theory, a good deal more of
Danto's treatment of narrative could be expected to survive this failure, since
it was developed in relative independence from the regularity theory itself.
Indeed, as I have noted, there are features of Danto's statement of that theory
-specifically, the requirement that what is to be explained in history is
change - which suggest a disposition to accommodate the theory to the
special nature of narrative rather than the other way around. Nevertheless,
on the central point of the explanatory character of narrative, Danto's view
finally comes down to essential ageement with the theses defended by White;
and it is here that I have registered my dissatisfaction with their joint position.
Now, even if all the critical points I have made against the treatment of
historical narrative by Danto and White were well taken, it would not, of
course, follow that every similar attempt to square an adequate account of
historical narrative with the regularity theory of explanation is doomed to
failure. What does, I think, emerge clearly from this critical review is the need
to assign a much more central place in discussions of these matters to the
role of action-concepts in historical narrative. At bottom, the problem of
explanation in history seems to me to be a problem of the way we explain
actions. At least superficially, the pattern of such explanations is of the type,
variously described as "rational" or "teleological," in which the major premise
expresses not a universally valid law but the desire of some person or persons
to realize a particular goal. Both Danto and White assume on general philoso-
phical grounds that such teleological forms of explanation must be reducible
to the standard form of explanation which is of the deductive law-based type.
I have not attempted to challenge this assumption, but rather have sought
to show that in the examples they give, the laws cited are parasitic upon the
rational explanations that have been given and thus really add nothing to our
understanding of the events in question. As such, they are perhaps innocuous,
especially since in most cases the historian is required merely to acknowledge
that his explanation holds only if some such laws exist. But sooner or later
the issues raised by this assumption must be faced; and when they are, it is,
I believe, the action-character of the focal events in historical narrative which
will most strongly resist assimilation to the regularity theory. In any case, it
is to the deepened analysis of such concepts and their role in historical nar-
rative that we should look for an amplification and correction of these
accounts of the logic of historical narrative.
Harvard University

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Hayden White - Narrative and The Concept of Action 1970

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NARRATIVE HISTORY AND THE CONCEPT OF ACTION

Until quite recently, philosophical discussions of the nature of historical

1. W. H. Dray, Laws and Explanation in History (London, 1957); and W. B.

With regard to the central question of whether historical explanations imply

long-rtin objectives, he came to assign first priority to the

molar description of human action and character that we ordinarily employ.

10. Ibid., 226.

12. An obvious counter-example, suggested by Michael Scriven, is the lack of interest

16. Ibid., 248.

18. H. Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London, 1931), Chapter 3.

organization of events distinct from that introduced by the historian's interest

20. Ibid., 250.

21. See Chapter 6.

laws as a condition of their truth; and the sequence of causal explanatory

23. Ibid., 128.

25. Ibid., 149.

actions proceeds along somewhat different lines. There is less attempt to

27. Ibid., 147.

what the agent makes of the circumstances in which he acts is inevitably to

In attempting to provide adequate grounds for the privileged position I assign

ments, revolutions, economies, religions . . . they do not usually write his-

31. Ibid., 259.

This interpretation of the decisive cause as the contingently necessary con-

34. White, 163-167.

In this paper I have tried to show some of the difficulties encountered in

35. Ibid., 166.

history in terms of the general theory of historical knowle

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