Grand narrative

Grand narrative or “master narrative” is a term introduced by Jean-François Lyotard in his classic 1979 work The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, in which Lyotard summed up a range of views which were being developed at the time, as a critique of the institutional and ideological forms of knowledge.

Narrative knowledge is knowledge in the form of story-telling. In the tribal times, myths and legends formed knowledge of this type; that such-and-such a mountain was just where it was because some mythic animal put it there, and so on. The narrative not only explained, but legitimated knowledge, and when applied to the social relations of their own society, the myths functioned as a legitimation of the existing power relations, customs and so on.

The great religions of the feudal world – Christianity, Islam and Buddhism – institutionalised this narrative knowledge, and monotheism invested the narrative with a unitary extramundane subject as the central agent. It was Feuerbach who exposed how the Christian narrative was not an explanation but a legitimation of the norms of Christian society.