ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to set aside needless metaphysics about the inherently narrative character of history, a penchant that leads to confusion about the methodological basics of historical research. The most frequent mistake made about cyclical history concerns its presumed determinism regarding individuals’ experience of time. The uncritical advocacy of globalization as the explanatory framework for meaningful historiography recalls Francis Fukuyama’s provocative intervention, The Last Man and the End of History. Letting go of the metanarrative does not entail losing the concept of historical context. For the classic, Rankean school historical contextualization would be a comparatively simple matter of situating a given phenomenon within the circumstances of its own time. The main limits of historical research are practical ones, relating to the scope or complexity of the most useful questions to ask about the past in order to turn past phenomena into history: that is, to provide historical knowledge.
