Frank Ankersmit

Franklin Rudolf Ankersmit (born 20 March 1945, Deventer, Netherlands) is professor of intellectual history and historical theory at the University of Groningen.

[3] 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’.

Ankersmit is often perceived as a postmodernist, but his work can also be seen as drawing from the 19th century historian Friedrich Meinecke and as "an almost neo-Kantian desire to counter the hegemony of science in history and politics".

He sees Neoliberalism as a return to Medieval feudalism: both wish to entrust public competences and responsibilities to (semi-)private hands.

Ankersmit was member of the National Convention, a commission installed by minister Alexander Pechtold in order to offer advice about how to strengthen democracy.

More recently he insisted that representative democracy is, in fact, an elective aristocracy, which is, from a logical point of view, a peculiar mixture of Medieval political representation by the three Estates and the concept of sovereignty, as established under absolute monarchy.