"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 of history 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, respectively, Stalinism and the Holocaust. Leading theories of
history - Marx's and Weber's - are then critically compared in the
context of the work of recent 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. Swimming against the tide of contemporary fashion,
"Theories and Narratives "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.
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