 In the 1980s he developed a narrativist philosophy of history in which the order and coherence the historian gives to the facts of the past are said to be presented in, and with a historical ‘narrative’.In the 1990s he elaborated this idea into a philosophy of historical representation.According to this philosophy the historian does not ‘translate’ a meaning allegedly present in the past itself into the text of his representation, but he creates historical meaning in his representation of the past which can be seen as a substitute for the absent past itself.