I'm reading From Plato to Nato by David Gress, out of pure curiosity, and am having trouble understanding the concept of a grand narrative. If it helps, here's the context in which Gress uses it:
Liberty grew because it served the interests of power. This apparent paradox was the core of Western identity. It was obscured by the conventional account of that identity, the account that I have dubbed the "Grand Narrative." This account rightly saw liberty as a fundamental to the West, but mistakenly defined liberty as an abstract, philosophical principle, which it then traced through a series of great books and great ideas divorced from passions and politics back to classical Greece.
Through Googling, I'm interpreting it as a perspective that historians/scholars see how the Western world (ethics, morals, identity, etc) has formed. Am I right?
Or,
is the Grand Narrative a history of Western civilization accepted by most historians/scholars?
I'm a 90's kid, but I do have an understanding and appreciation for world history so you don't have to explain to me like I'm five, just to save you the trouble.
Thank you in advance for reading my concern.
Edit 1: Provided additional information. Edit 2: Grammar
I've never read David Gress, but I would assume it's synonymous with the term "metanarrative" made popular by Jean-Francois Lyotard in his 1979 book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. In it he got pretty out there with doubting the validity of science and knowledge. But, I'll do my best to ELI5 (even though it's so dense and complicated I often have trouble with it)
A "narrative" is just the narrating of an event. It's a story about how one person thinks the past happened. Every history book has a narrative.
The metanarrative (also called a "master narrative") is a narrative about how we gained and legitimated knowledge in the past that underpinned human progress and history (Or, put another way: a metanarrative is a narrative about narratives we accept as true). The problem with narratives is that they rely on other narratives and other sources we can't necessarily trust to claim their legitimacy. It's almost impossible to write a narrative without referencing other narratives. This includes big narratives that we just assume are true like, "America won WWII" or "Japan existed." Or, in this case, that "liberty was fundamental to the west."
So, "liberty was fundamental to the West" is something to which most people would say, "Duh. Everybody knows that. That underpins our entire knowledge of history about the West." So, Gress here is challenging that narrative with his metanarrative contrary to it.
Edit: and it's not just for history of the West. It's all history.