The Grand Narratives: The Rise and Fall of Universal Philosophical Systems

This thesis reviews the development of narrative and systematic methods of argumentative legitimation in the Western tradition of philosophy from its conception until the present day. Utilizing both primary sources from central figures in key movements within this development process and supplementary secondary sources, this analysis notes which systems were used as appeals to higher authority and the trends in the adoption and transformation of new models. It is demonstrated that the Enlightenment era punctuated a progression begun in the premodern era from simple, cultural narratives to individualized, subjective, and self-perpetuating Grand Narrative systems, and that it generated the preconditions for the postmodern era's generalized skepticism towards systematic legitimation as a model for approaching truth. The findings suggest that the Enlightenment movement, consisting of the spontaneous generation of universal philosophical systems of legitimation (the Grand Narratives), was the final and most intense iteration of a crucial trend in the history of philosophy, in which attempts to arrive at more abstract and fundamental groundings for truth ultimately led to greater subjectivity rather than less.