ABSTRACT
Among the historians who have spearheaded the rethinking of intellectual history, perhaps the most committed is Hayden White. "The Tasks of Intellectual History" signalled a more politically radical White, dissatisfied with "the pessimistic and accommodationist tone of intellectual historiography." The literary intellectual historian revels in the superiority of a hardnosed formal and structural method. "The utility" of the semiological analysis, White proclaims, "is to be assessed solely in terms of quantitative criterion, namely, its capacity to account for more of the elements of any given text, of whatever length, than any contending 'content'-orientated method could match." The new intellectual historians undercut emphatic arguments with the truism of textual complexity. The world of interpretations turns grey; everything is complicated, indeterminate, feasible. The new intellectual historians resolutely seek to escape a baneful positivism that erases the specificity of history; they reject a search for general, causal, and objective laws.
