Narrative explanation and its malcontents

History and Theory

Volumn 47, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 19-30

  Carr, David ^a  

^a EMORY UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149434537     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2008.00433.x     Document Type: Review

References (6)

1. On this account the explanation of individual actions retains a crucial role in historical narratives, as Karsten Stueber argues in "Reasons, Generalizations, Empathy, and Naratives: The Epistemic Structure of Action Explanation," his contribution to this Forum (History and Theory 47 [February 2008], 31-43).
2. These passages are from Fernand Braudel, Ecrits sur l'histoire (Paris: Flammarion, 1969), 11f.
3. Quoted in Lawrence Stone, "Reflections on a New and Old History," in The Narrative and History Reader, ed. G. Roberts (London: Routledge, 2001), 283.
4. François Furet, "From Narrative History to Problem-Oriented History," in Roberts, ed. , The Narrative and History Reader, 279.
5. Stone, in Roberts, ed. , The Narrative and History Reader, 283.
6. Thus I agree with Tor Egil Førland's resistance to what he calls the "explanatory imperialism" of methodological individualism in "Mentality as a Social Emergent: Can the Zeitgeist have Explanatory Power?", his contribution to this Forum (History and Theory 47 [February 2008], xx-xx). Though I am not arguing here for plural subjects and social entities such as the Zeitgeist as elements in narrative explanations, I have done so elsewhere. I thus agree with his pragmatic defense of what he calls an "explanatory ecumenism," which would allow the careful and circumscribed use of such notions.