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Theories and Narratives: Reflections on the Philosophy of History. By Alex Callinicos. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. 252p. $45.00 cloth, $16.95 paper.
Joshua Foa Dienstag, University of Virginia
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 (e.g., Simon Schama) have taken to defending narrative as the most appropriate form of writing for their studies, other literary and political theorists (e.g., Hayden White and Jean-Francois Lyotard) have taken to criticizing narrative expression itself as implicitly bound up with power and authority. At the same time, philosophers have hotly debated the proposition advanced by, e.g., Alasdair MacIntyre and Martin Heidegger that narrative plays a crucial role in human life in general.
While the title of this book overstates its scope, its author is nonetheless well aware of these debates. Callinicos's main purpose here is a defense of the feasibility and value of Marxist historiography. In this sense, it is a continuation of his previous efforts in Making History (1988), Against Postmodernism (1989), and The Revenge of History (1991). But the opponents he identifies here are not merely other historians and social theorists. Recognizing the wide-ranging character of his project, he attempts to address the broader literature on narrative itself, particularly the critiques of it by postmodernists. At the same time, Callinicos aims to lay out a Marxist approach to the past that is both philosophically rigorous and yet revolutionary.
To this end, he develops a...