At a time when philosophy of history is decidedly out of fashion, Theories and Narratives
explores the relationship between historical writing and theoretical understanding and seeks
to establish the legitimate scope of large-scale theories to grasp historical processes as a
whole. 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 of history and the postmodernist efforts of Hayden White …

The last fifteen years have seen a revival of interest in the topic of narrative across many
disciplines in both the social sciences and the humanities. While in many ways this interest
has the appearance of a unified movement, in fact the different fields have had rather varied
attitudes toward narrative. While some historians (eg, Simon Schama) have taken to
defending narrative as the most appropriate form of writing for their studies, other literary and
political theorists (eg, Hayden White and Jean-Franc, ois Lyotard) have taken to criticizing …