am I rambling about an imaginary distinction?

While I certainly don't think you are rambling (you make some great observations), I do think you have assumed a distinction between social history and narrative history that doesn't inherently exist.

If I'm reading your post correctly, you're perhaps muddling the definition of social history. Social history is, at the most basic level, the study of "ordinary people"--groups like ethnic and racial minorities, the lower economic classes, women, and many others that were for a long time marginalized and discounted by historians. There is nothing inherently contradictory between a social history and a narrative history, which you and many others define as the history of events. I am woefully unfamiliar with historical works on the pre-modern era like the ones you brought up, but one book that I can think of that combines social history and narrative history is Steven Ozment's The Burgermeister's Daughter.

From what I gathered from your post, I don't think your problem is necessarily with social history. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it may be that your grievance is more with history books structured thematically (like the Ruggiero book you cite) rather than chronologically (a la, narrative histories that focus on "events"). There are benefits to both the chronological and thematic ways of writing history, and those benefits boil down to what historical forces the historian is wanting to emphasize.

At the most basic level, there are only two historical forces: structures and human agency. Ideally, historians should recognize that these two forces are interrelated, but I get the impression that most historians today emphasize one at the expense of the other.

First, what are structures? They are impersonal forces--whether ideological, social, or economic--that simultaneously compel and constrain human action. Moreover, structures constitute social systems and make the world in which historical actors operate intelligible. In other words, structures provide the boundaries in which human action occurs; it is very difficult for individuals to take actions outside the boundaries of contemporary historical structures. Economic class relations is one example of a structure (think Marxist historiography). For another example, I'll pull one from the Ruggiero book you mentioned: "the self". Conceptions of the self have throughout history been tied to large-scale symbolic structures. Arguably the most dominant of these in recent history is nationalism. Throughout the modern era, an individual's identity has always been inextricably tied to the nation that he claims (and the nation that claims him). Getting back to your comment and question, history books that are structured by themes, like Ruggiero's, are excellent at clarifying the dominant structures that existed within a particular historical era and provide the context for why and how the major events within the era took place. (A good, if dense, discussion on the role of structures in history is William Sewell Jr., The Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation).

The other historical force is human agency. Agency is in many ways the opposite of structures. If structures constrain human action, agency is the ability of historical actors to sometimes break free of those dominant structures. In my opinion, narrative histories are much better at tracing agency, particularly during periods in which structures become unstable. (A good example of this type of history is Mary Sarotte's The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall). By honing in on specific events and individuals instead of broad themes, narrative histories are able to effectively show how old structures fall and new ones arise.

So, in response to your question as to whether a proper historian can justify a preference for narrative history, I think he certainly can. But I also think that he needs to be aware of the limitations of narrative history, particularly its propensity to focus exclusively on agency at the expense of structures.

It appears that you are asking a question about the status of these methodologies in historiography, i.e. the study of how the writing of history has changed over the years. Hopefully this attempts to answer your question.

Traditional history, i.e. history written before the 1920s, was focused on politics, economics, military, and a "Great White Man's history," all of which contained more or less a chronological depictions of events. These works did not deeply delve into too much analysis of sources the way that modern historians do. That is to say, "reading against the grain" of a source or attempting to find divergent sources (sources from the poor and etc) was not their goal. The goal of such works was to merely lay out how things happened and at times postulated theories about causation and conduct. Now while traditional history is focused on the narrative, I would not necessarily call it narrative history. I'll explain more below.

From traditional history we get the Beards, basically economic causation. From there we get Progressives (Schlesinger Jr.), i.e. class conflict. Then Consensus historians (Hofstadter), i.e. change vs. continuity. After that, depending on the country, you see a move towards social history (Marwick), i.e. the little people, women's history, i.e what women did (This can also be broken into four trends within women's history called Compensatory or Women Worthies, Golden Age, Feminist History, Gender History) (Joan Scott), and cultural history that looks at material culture and its influence on history.

So in terms of historiography, those are the big hitters. I am of course leaving out the earlier historiography, like Hellenic history and Christian centered history, as it isn't in the modern trends. So why does this matter? Because within these broad methods, exist diverging writing styles, which is what you appear to be mostly interested in. Books have various writing styles, monographs (a focused analysis), surveys (textbooks), academic synthesis (blended), and popular history. I'm kind of making these categories up, but this is the way I see things anyway. Narrative history as you describe I typically find in synthesis and popular history.

Popular histories (which is my synonym for narrative) are most common in works by journalists or historians near the end of their career. Part of the reason for this is academia, publishing, and public taste. In academia, you are encouraged to write on very specific topics (monographs) that go into a great deal of analysis on the source material itself. The idea behind this torture test is that your dissertation is you proving you can do history on a truly academic (read obtuse) level. Simplistic language is replaced with ostentatious erudition. Topics are narrowly focused and really designed for specialized readers. etc. These books rarely make it into Barnes and Nobles. Thus, journalists and older academics with the leeway from publishers can take on more popular historical topics. This is where publishing comes into play.

Academic presses love the academic books I described above, it makes them look professional. But they also have to pay the bills. Thus, all publishers also produce popular histories designed for the lay public, which by and large, are narrative styles of history. These books leverage the leg work done by all the aforementioned research and academic writing and turn it into something the public can engage. Great examples of these works are David McCullum's 1776, Shelby Foote's The Civil War, etc.

As I said above, you can actually engage social, cultural, political, military, economic histories in synthesis, which also has a narrative style. The difference is that they spend a good deal of space on footnotes for sources, lengthy historiographic essays, and are meant for student and professional alike. While these too can be approached by the broader public, they are lengthier and beefier. Good examples of these are the Oxford Series on American History, like Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848.

Can I justify your preference? Not really as a professional, but yes as a reader. Is your distinction rather imaginary, yes and no. As to your question about is there a struggle between social historians and "narrative" ones, yes and no. We call this the academic hedge, heh. People like what they like, don't worry about whether its what professionals say you should like. As I described above, while your terms may be off, you get to the heart of the matter for the fight between professional and popular histories.

In terms of academia, professional histories that use, social, cultural, gender, etc. reign supreme. You want to do a thesis or dissertation, you will be doing that. In terms of publishing, the money makers are popular histories, synthesis, and textbooks.

Professional historians lament that history gets dumbed down, yet they do not do much to make their topics or works more approachable. Most people enjoy a good story, a narrative, something linear that they can understand and see progression. But by and large professionals don't write these until much later. Popular histories are useful and well written, but lack nuance and proof. I don't see either type of history changing much in the next few years. But with technology, professional histories are getting more digital time, like The Valley of the Shadow Project online that brings very complex historiographic arguments about the Civil War into a more approachable and visual method.

So that is my spiel. Hope it helped.