Narrative History

In historical narrative there are no explicit theories. It is a reaction against the poetic tradition of writing history as well as the Hegelian concept of God moving through events.

There is no basic theory of society underlying the narrative historical view. A researcher is tasked with uncovering "history as it happened," that is the processes that drive events are to be understood within context to other events.

The primary source of data for this vantage point is the records participants leave behind. Critically analysis is possible through uncovering the accuracy of the documents through a specialized knowledge of language and time of the works left behind in archives. One achieves this through comparing sources and correspondence with each other to permit contextualization. To communicate, one must possess empathy and see the world as those in the past saw it.

The medium to this is through the historical narrative: the telling of a story through a coherent form and permitting the history to speak for it. For historians, the issue of causation is a unique phenomena that is the constellation of events for some unforetold reason.

Ranke believed the careful use of sources permitted distance from events so that an informed consensus on the past might emerge where dissimilar observers from all kinds of backgrounds could make uniform judgments. Some question whether this process is anything more than a fancy humanity.

History has its roots in philology where specialists scoured the distant texts of past languages and attempted to find the context of those texts in others. Ranke moved from great books to ordinary documents. He wanted to separate himself from the moralizing and instructive works of past writers and tell a tale of ugly facts.

Ranke trained his disciples in historical seminars at the university level where most of his specialists made careers. Not much of a market exists for the dry and dull texts of the academic historian, though the archive industry thrives as a result of their interest.

Modern schooling is an instruction of civic nationalism, or at least it used to be, and more often than not, teachers follow the narrative style in constructing text books and lesson plans.

Critiques of the historical narrative are almost endless. Its harshest critics call it mindless empiricism and little more than artisitc humanism. Some say its too conservative in the worldview of its practioners as well as its use of "elite" sources. Van Ranke has been criticized for venerating the state and his model on international politics has been rigourously challenged.

The old synchronic versus diochronic approach of the past also emerges as historians who dwell too much on a peculiar document will often lose sight of larger patterns in development. Historians would rebut that logic cannot be imposed on events afterthefact.