This article proposes a rereading of the first book published by philosopher and historian Hayden White, The Emergency of Liberal Humanism (1966). This is intended to achieve three objectives. The first is to put in context what the author said in one of his most provocative articles, ‘The Burden of History’ (1966). The Urgency’s ideological limits should be used to make White’s reader aware of a ‘White’ before Metahistory, much less ‘modernist’ than that offered by the article. In relation to the above, the aim is to report on the aesthetic ideology procedures that shaped it as author, at the time, and as we will see, the so-called liberal humanism, which can be summarised as the aesthetic development of American liberalism following Franklin D. Rootlt. Thirdly, the aim is to offer a formalistic reading that would highlight the importance of what White itself called ‘the content of the form’ in the study of historiography. The ideological meanings of the narrative forms used in this work are a good example of the importance of this approach.