Burke’s explanation of metonymy and synecdoche helped me better understand Hayden White’s proposal in Metahistory (1973) that Marx is the philosopher of history who apprehended the past in terms of metonymy. White makes use of Burke's master tropes in his work Metahistory. While he shows that Marx’s outlook is metonymic, he also explains that it comes to a full romance. However, White seems to be divided between comedy (which for him is the emplotment that corresponds to synecdoche) and romance (metaphor) because Marx’s imagination, in certain respects, fits the old Greek formulation of comedy: the hero is one of us, the aim is to achieve something, a setback occurs, and then a victorious revolution happens. Burke’s explanation helped me make more sense of White’s analysis of Marx’s view. According to Burke, metonymy is “a substantial reduction” (GM 507). Also, Burke argues, “a reduction is a representation” (GM 507), that is a synecdoche; thus, metonymy “may be treated as a special application of synecdoche” (GM 509). Marx intends to represent society through a worker’s state. His outlook begins metonymically: all history until 1840s has been a history of class conflict. As White observes, Marx’s aim is to overcome this through a sort of integration (Burke would call it representation or synecdoche). Burke may have sought the same type of integration by proposing the term “the people” at the Writer’s Conference in 1935.