I haven't read it, but I will say:

• Historians are well aware of the limitations of narrative as a form. We have been talking about this for ages amongst ourselves (nobody outside of our profession seems to care, except apparently this neuroscientist). Hayden White's Metahistory, which is all about narrative forms, is a typical history grad school history reading. There are many works which apply the study of narrative to history (even an entire sub-field of "narratology"). It's mostly dry, methodological stuff (alas), but it's not like we haven't been talking about this for decades.

• While I am actually totally fine with someone (a philosopher?) bringing neuroscience into discussions about narrative, I find the framing of "historians are getting this wrong!" very strange. Perhaps it is just the publisher blurb, but it seems core to the presentation of the book. I would challenge said scientist to come up with a non-narrative way of giving compelling, complex evidence. As historians and sociologists of science would be quick to point out, every science paper that is more than a dump of numbers is embedded within a narrative as well (one that typically downplays the appearance of human agency in an attempt to look more "objective"). If he thinks philosophy papers lack narratives... I've got disappointing news.

• The idea of "understanding history without making it a story" is totally incoherent. I would submit a challenge to anyone: show me a historical understanding that is not reliant on narrative. Even something that appears "narrative-less" (a Wikipedia-style list of facts, for example) always contains an implicit narrative from the editorial selection, and even if it didn't, would be useless (there would be no sense of importance, no sense of argument, and would contain everything from "Julius Caesar got a hangnail" to "Trotsky blew his nose"). What "understanding" would come from that? Again, I don't know what this guy has in mind. If it's something like quantitative methods... yes, those can have their role (and issues) in historical discussion. But even quantitative data requires a "spokesman" to create a narrative for why a given chart tells us something. There's always a narrative.

• I find myself wondering if this guy is self-aware enough to realize his own book necessarily has a narrative structure to it? I'd like to believe so but the ridiculousness of this blurb makes me suspect he actually thinks there is something outside of narrative.

The way historians deal with narrative is to be self-aware of it and to try and be in control of it. We try to recognize what kind of story we find ourselves telling, and make that explicitly part of the argument and interpretation. The idea that we should deny narrative is essential is naive at best, deceptive at worst.

So anyway. I haven't read the book, just the publisher page. But assuming the latter reflects the argument of the former... it seems to be based on some serious misunderstandings of history, historians, and, frankly, narrative. It is not surprising to me that this is a book written by a philosopher — I would love for him to try and write some non-narrative history and see how that works out.

(I am going to file this in the same place I put the comments from political scientists who think they're being very wise when they tell historians that not everything in history ends up in archives. Wow you have blown my mind no historian has ever realized that before because we're all dumbasses k thx bye.)

I'm half way into this and I've added plenty of comments in the margins I'll summarize when I finish.

I bought this book knowing nothing about it save for it was written by a philosopher using what I thought was a scientific approach. I was thinking about Asimov's "Foundation" and the fictional field of psychohistory, and I thought this may actually be heading in that direction, boy was I wrong.

Instead it's a dangerously titled thesis that will only provide ammo to folks who don't want to learn about history. People who would like to remain blind to what happened as if it has no influence on where we are today and where we're heading. This is pseudo history.

I'm still hoping to see payoff and some answers, none so far.

Narrative history is his target, but the title of the book suggests all history is wrong, that is the danger, and even if that were so, there is a bait and switch.

He instead focuses on the fact that history cannot tell us the future or predict what someone will do. He quotes Churchill "Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it" as his gotcha moment. Whoa, how bold! Except no legitimate historian would ever make that claim. There is also no historiography provided, no preponderance of evidence to support his claim. Just a single narrative history of WWII is used so far.

So he shifts gears and creates a straw man of "history gets the future wrong" with a focus on contemporary to WWII war historians as his target. His only evidence supporting this being "Germany attacked through the Ardennes four times" and practically concluded that historians are dumb for not stopping Hitler in the Ardennes! What?!

What is really odd, however, is the amount of text that focuses on street signs and umbrellas in chap 3, and a lack of applying his crucial "theory of the mind" to debunk history as the title of his thesis suggests. By page 47 he cites an academic historian who is talking about Hitlers motives and Rosenberg outright says "I leave it to my readers to apply theory of the mind to this passage..." End Chapter, drops mic.

What the??? He literally spent 3+ pages talking about theory of mind and a dude holding an umbrella, but when it comes to the actual thesis and title of his book he just storms out of the room. As if to say "You figure it out! I'm very busy trying to figure out why this guy is holding an umbrella! "

He then goes on and on about theory of the mind. The chapter "natural history of historians" is more "natural history of blabbering" and yes he actually used the word blabbering in this chapter.

In the margins I have noted numerous instances where he uses narrative in discussions of behavioral science or philosophy, this is ironic. He even provides a narrative history of PREHISTORIC man, jumping to conclusions, with no evidence, that support his thesis.

So yes, this is frustrating to read, but I am finding a lot of humor in it as well. I'm in chapter 6 and he is once again going to discuss street signs from chapter 3, I'm sure without much payoff, but it made me lol.

While I have much to read, and things can still get better, I have already come up with a few suggestions for a more accurate title: "How history gets the future wrong" "How people can be wrong" "The theory of the mind proves history isn't a person" "Narrative propaganda as history is wrong" "Taking history out of context is wrong"

Sad but none of the reviews here seem to have read to the end of the book. It is very heavy going but he seems to suggest that history can be explained by natural selection using elements of game theory. This is an intriguing idea and it would be really great to hear a critique of this approach.

I am not a historian, but I am a history grad student, and I will say I think he's right--it's actually why I took five years off before going back to school because I was so disillusioned by the end of my undergrad degree from feeling like my senior thesis was merely a narrative using the facts available to me to construct something that was basically meaningless to reality. That being said, I second "restricteddata's" point that historians have been aware of this forever--although I would like to add that narratology is not a subfield of history but of literary theory and very few historians actually take it seriously; Hayden White is about the only one who has written on it and even he concludes that there isn't much value in studying history and that we should study art and literature instead.

All that being said, if history is just another narrative, then it's about as valuable as studying any narrative, literature included, for its technique--the fact that most historians forgot and what Rosenberg is bringing to their attention about fifty years too late. In response again to "restricteddata"--it's true that sciences have narratives but the narrative is not where they get their explanations from like in history; scientific experiments lack agency in the sense that Rosenberg is using the folk theory of mind to describe.

The value of understanding narrative is that you learn how to write better, and that we all need narratives to make sense of life--unless you are Alexander Rosenberg and are content with game theory to explain the past (yawn!). Ironically, Rosenberg has actually penned his own historical narratives, representatives of the literary sub-genre "historical fiction", which is the most deplorable of all literary genres, even below academic history itself! Nothing Rosenberg is saying in this study is particularly new, all that is new about it is that recent developments in neuroscience have proven, even more unequivocally than before, that we have no agency and that god is dead. Just go back to the late nineteenth century and you'll find the same exact thing, but you wouldn't know that unless you were a student of history. Maybe this is what Rosenberg is missing--the relativist attribute of history. (As a side note, there's actually a very rich history of this very debate taking place between scientists and humanists across the centuries. I recommend Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons for a relatively recent treatment of it in literature.)

Final point is simply that this guy is right but for the wrong reasons; read Nietzsche for some perspective on the partiality of any historical narrative.