HOW NARRATIVES EXPLAIN 281281CHAPTER 15
HOW NARRATIVES EXPLAIN
MARK BEVIR
As a political theorist, I have no narrative of hard-won freedom, no story of the personal and
social disadvantages I overcame in pursuit of my dream of interpretive work. To the contrary,
because my graduate work was on the history of socialist thought in Britain, I almost inevitably
set out to study beliefs or meanings expressed in texts. Soon afterward I started thinking and
writing about the philosophy of intellectual history. In doing so, I carved out a distinctive inter-
pretive theory, a theory that I soon took to apply across the humanities and social sciences. (Sev-
eral of my critics have phrased the same point rather less kindly, suggesting that my theory neglects
what they take to be specific aspects of the study of the past or, more narrowly, of canonical texts.)
By then, I was employed in a department of politics and, being of a sociable nature, I entered
into various discussions with my colleagues, notably Professor Rod Rhodes. Rod found that my
theory helped him resolve dilemmas he confronted in thinking about changes in British politics. I
wanted to experiment with my theory beyond the history of ideas. Together we began to use that
theory to write about British governance. We also worked with others to use it to explore com-
parative governance.
All this collaborative work has brought me into greater contact, much to my surprise, with
subfields of political science in which interpretive approaches do not have the ascendancy they
do in the history of political thought. Ironically, I thus find myself part of a broad interpretivist
category that neglects the dreadfully important, if sublimely subtle, distinctions with which I had
so laboriously carved out my distinctive philosophy of intellectual history.
❖❖❖Gladstone hoped to trump Cabinet doubts and party unease by the
production of a great bill.
—Henry C.G. Matthew (1995, 236)Family relationships were powerfully affected by the concept that the
pursuit of individual happiness is one of the basic laws of nature.
—Lawrence Stone (1979b, 178)Interpretive approaches rest on a philosophical analysis of the human sciences as being con-
cerned to unpack meanings as beliefs. This analysis inspires a distinctive narrative form of expla-
nation in which beliefs are situated in wider webs of beliefs that themselves are situated against
traditions and dilemmas.