PRINCIPLES OF NARRATIVE REASON

Abstract

ABSTRACTJouni‐Matti Kuukkanen has theorized that narrative does not involve rational content. Rather, he suggested, narrative is only a descriptive practice consisting of singular statements. Kuukkanen thus divorced the rational and narrative frameworks, arguing that historiography belongs to the former and not the latter. This article establishes a new conceptual framework that provides a revised understanding of narrative as a rational practice. I argue that the principles of organization brought to light by the Gestalt school of experimental psychology illuminate the underlying organizational logic that historians engage with when constructing narratives. To illustrate how these principles operate in historical narratives and how they are rational, I examine classic historical works such as Karl Marx's introduction of the concept of surplus value; Giambattista Vico's Autobiography and Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance; Reinhart Koselleck's Futures Past; and E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class and Johan Huizinga's Waning of the Middle Ages. My analysis shows that narrative entails its own kind of explanatory structure. It is a way of thinking that provides meaning and structure to that which is otherwise unstructured and undetermined. Finally, my new framework offers a foundation for the rational evaluation of narratives by showing how the context of discovery and the context of justification cannot be separated in the case of narrative histories.