Abstract
Contemporary theory of history struggles in finding a new research agenda ‘after narrativism.’ One such theoretical example is Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen’s Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography. This essay argues that Kuukkanen’s position falls within the ambit of his own criteria of narrativism, namely constructivism, representationalism, and holism. Yet, at the same time, Kuukkanen’s reconstruction of narrativism raises serious questions concerning its adequacy. This inadequacy, in connection with Kuukkanen’s view that history books argue for certain theses, leads to some sort of essentialism and ‘isolation’ from the relation between the narrative on the one hand and the historian and the reader on the other. What is more, the main thesis of Kuukkanen’s book is untenable on the basis of the examples to which he refers and lacks concrete instances of informal reasoning in history. As a result, a truly narrativist insight into the specificity of history books paradoxically goes unrecognized and Kuukkanen’s model appears prenarrativist at its core.