Theories and Narratives

This text explores the relationship between social theory and historical writing. Its aim is to establish the contribution that theory can make to understanding the past. Pursuing this objective, it critically confronts a number of attempts to reconceptualize the meaning of history.

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"Theories and Narratives" explores the relationship between social theory and historical writing. Its aim is to establish the contribution that theory can make to understanding the past. Pursuing this objective, Alex Callinicos critically confronts a number of leading attempts to reconceptualize the meaning of history, including Francis Fukuyama's rehabilitation of Hegel's philosophy, and the postmodernist efforts of Hayden White and others to deny the existence of a past independent of our representations of it. In these cases, philosophical arguments are pursued in tandem with discussions of historical interpretations of Stalinism and the Holocaust. Marx's and Weber's theories of history are then critically compared in the context of the work of writers such as Michael Mann, W.G. Runciman and Robert Brenner. Finally, the politics of historical theory is explored in a discussion of Marxism's claims to be a universal theory of human progress. The book seeks to rebut the claim made by many postmodernists that Marxism is inherently Eurocentric in both its conceptual structures and political practice.
Marx's project of human emancipation, it concludes, still defines our political horizons.