Narrative History as a Way of Life

Abstract

Hayden White writes: 'Historians have systematically built into their notion of their discipline hostility or at least a blindness to theory and the kind of issues that philosophers have raised about the kind of knowledge they have produced.' His explanation for this blindness seems to be in terms of a set of personal failings shared by historians: their simplistic assertion that only empirical research really matters; their mistaken belief that understanding what historians do is a matter of practical knowledge available only to fellow professionals; their inability to theorize their own discourse and the suppression of the philosophical dimensions of their craft and discipline. Such attitudes are indeed widespread among historians. But I want to suggest a much more profound reason for the antitheoretical tradition in history: most historians feel no need for a self-conscious, separate and distinct theoretical analysis of their discipline because the dominant discourse of knowledge in history is coterminous with the common sense discourse of modern everyday life. As John Passmore has argued: 'For the most part . . . there is nothing much to say about historical explanation; nothing that cannot be said about explanation in everyday life .... No wonder historians are often puzzled to know what philosophers are fussing about!'2 'Narrative' historians like myself, and most other historians,3 work mainly within the framework of a human action account of the past.4 History is viewed as a field of human action and action as the result of individual and collective reasoning in particular circumstances under the impact of a variety of social, political, economic, ideological and cultural influences (themselves contexts of action composed of and created by other human agents). The task of historians is to reconstruct the reasons for past actions. They do this by reference to surviving

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