| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Donald R. Kelley. Faces of History: Historical Inquiry from Herodotus to Herder. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1998. Pp. xii, 340. Cloth $37.50, paper $17.00.

Carl Becker might have been speaking for thoughtful historians anywhere and anytime when he wrote in these same review pages over sixty years ago: "Now that I am old the most intriguing aspect of history turns out to be neither the study of history nor history itself but rather the study of the history of historical study" (AHR 44 [Oct. 1938]: 20). If Becker's extra-reflective turn of mind does not constitute the most urgent or visceral impulse for "everyman his (or her) own historian," his sage, ulterior perspective nevertheless remains salient and determinative of whatever we historians could possibly mean by invoking "true historical significance" and "longterm value." Judgments of this sort would be impossible or vacuous without just such an ulterior (but not ultimate) perspective provided by the history of history. It is a difficult, recursive vantage point that remains as rare and arduous as it is fundamental and indispensable. 1

It is a nearly stupendous feat to explore twenty-five centuries of Western historical practice in a vivid and coherent exposition. Donald R. Kelley's lucid study has accomplished this task quite convincingly and elegantly: it is amazingly synoptic, masterful, and thought-provoking, without lapsing into encyclopedic blandness or collapsing into its own fold-up Procrustean bed of overwrought theory. This truly impressive work might best be characterized as a kind of carefully crafted "metahistoriography"—a lucid yet impassioned rejoinder to Hayden White's "metahistory," along with all sorts of modern and postmodern relativisms of the first and second order. . . .

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