Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (8 page)

Applied to history, this could only preclude the idea of progress. It might be ‘grand’ and ‘colourful’, but, for Dostoevsky’s ‘sick’
alter ego
, history was essentially monotonous: ‘They fight and fight and fight; they are fighting now, they fought before, and they’ll fight in the future.... So you see, you can say anything about world history.... Except one thing, that is. It cannot be said that world history is reasonable.’
⁷⁵

Yet even Dostoevsky did not sustain this line of argument throughout his greatest works. Elsewhere (perhaps most evidently in
The Brothers Karamazov
) he turned back towards religious faith, as if only Orthodoxy could inoculate against the plague of anarchy he prophesied in Raskolnikov’s nightmare at the end of
Crime and Punishment
. Carlyle’s thought took a similar turn, of course, though on closer inspection his sense of the divine will was much closer to Hegel’s (and perhaps also to Calvin’s) than to the Orthodoxy of Dostoevsky. Echoing (though amending) Hegel, Carlyle saw ‘Universal History’ as ‘at bottom the History of Great Men’: ‘[A]ll things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result ... of the thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world; the soul of the whole world’s history ... were [sic] the history of these ... living light fountain[s], ... [these] natural luminar[ies] shining by the gift of heaven.’
⁷⁶
This was hardly a recipe for an anti-determinist philosophy of history. On the contrary, Carlyle simply rejected the new brand of scientific determinism in favour of the old divine version:

In fact, it is not until the work of turn-of-the-century English historians like Bury, Fisher and Trevelyan that we encounter a complete - if rather unsophisticated - challenge to deterministic assumptions, including even the atavistic Calvinism of Carlyle. Indeed, the mischievous stress on the role of contingency in turn-of-the-century Oxbridge historiography was perhaps informed more by anti-Calvinism than by anything else.
⁷⁸
What Charles Kingsley called man’s ‘mysterious power of breaking the laws of his own being’ was proposed as a new kind of historical philosophy by both Bury and Fisher. Fisher’s
History of Europe
was prefaced with a bluff admission:

Accordingly, Fisher called on historians to ‘recognise in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen’ (though whether he did so himself in the main body of the work is debatable). Bury went further. In his essay ‘Cleopatra’s Nose’, he developed a fully fledged theory of the role of ‘chance’ - defined as ‘the valuable collision of two or more independent chains of causes’ - with reference to a series of decisive but contingent historical events, including those supposedly caused by the eponymous nose. In fact, this represented an attempt to reconcile determinism with contingency: in Bury’s somewhat puzzling formulation, ‘the element of chance coincidence ... helps to determine events’.
⁸⁰
Yet neither Bury nor Fisher took the next step of exploring alternative historical developments in detail, despite the fact that the former’s chains and the latter’s waves could have collided at different points with different consequences. Indeed, Bury qualified his argument by suggesting that ‘as time goes on contingencies ... become less important in human evolution’ because of man’s growing power over nature and the limits placed by democratic institutions on individual statesmen. This sounded suspiciously like Mill or Tolstoy on the decline of free will.

In his essay ‘Clio, a Muse’, Trevelyan went further than this, wholly dismissing the idea of a ‘science of cause and effect in human affairs’ as ‘a misapplication of the analogy of physical science’. The historian might ‘generalise and guess as to cause and effect’, but his first duty was to ‘tell the story’: Doubtless ... the deeds of [Cromwell’s soldiers] had their effect, as one amid the thousand confused waves that give the impulse to the world’s ebb and flow. But ... their ultimate success or failure ... was largely ruled by incalculable chance’. For Trevelyan, battlefields provided the classic illustration of this point:

In the next generation, this approach informed much of the work of that other great writer of history, A. J. P. Taylor, who never tired of emphasising the role of chance (‘blunders’ and ‘trivialities’) in diplomatic history. Though Taylor was clear that it was ‘no part of the historian’s duty to say what ought to have been done’,
⁸²
he nevertheless took pleasure in hinting at what
might
have been.

Nor was this emphasis on the contingent nature of some, if not all, historical events uniquely British. For the later German historicists like Droysen, the task of historical philosophy was ‘to establish not the laws of objective history, but the laws of historical investigation and knowledge’. Much more than Ranke, Droysen was concerned with the role of ‘anomaly, the individual, free will, responsibility, genius ... the movements and effects of human freedom and personal peculiarities’.
⁸³
This line of argument was elaborated on by Wilhelm Dilthey, who has a good claim to be considered the founder not only of history’s theory of relativity, but also of its uncertainty principle.
⁸⁴
In developing the historicist approach still further, Friedrich Meinecke sought to distinguish between several levels of causality, ranging from the determinists’ mechanistic’ factors to the ‘ spontaneous acts of men‘.
⁸⁵
It was a distinction he put into practice most explicitly in his last book,
The German Catastrophe
, which stressed not only the ’general’ causes of National Socialism (a disastrous Hegelian synthesis of two great ideas), but also the accidental factors which brought Hitler to power in 1933.
⁸⁶

Yet there were important intellectual constraints which prevented a complete overthrow of nineteenth-century determinism. Of very great importance in the British context was the work of two English philosophers of history - Collingwood and Oakeshott, latter-day idealists whose work owed much to Bradley’s
Presuppositions of Critical History
. Collingwood is best known for the aspersions he cast on the simple, positivist notion of a historical fact. As he saw it, all historical evidence was merely a reflection of ‘thought’: ‘Historical thought is ... the presentation by thought to itself of a world of half-ascertained fact.’
⁸⁷
The most the historian could therefore do was to ‘reconstruct’ or re-enact” past thoughts, under the inevitable influence of his own unique experience. Not surprisingly, Collingwood was dismissive of determinist models of causation: ‘The plan which is revealed in history is a plan which does not pre-exist in its own revelation; history is a drama, but an extemporised drama, cooperatively extemporised by its own performers.’
⁸⁸
Unlike the plot of a novel, the ‘plot of history’ was merely ‘a selection of incidents regarded as peculiarly significant’.
⁸⁹
Historians were different from novelists because they sought to construct ‘true’ narratives, though every historical narrative was no more than an ‘interim report on the progress of our historical inquiries’.
⁹⁰

Collingwood’s reflections on the nature of time are especially insightful and, indeed, anticipate some of what modern physicists have to say on the subject:

Yet Collingwood’s conclusion was that the historian’s goal could only be ‘a knowledge of the present’ and specifically ‘how it came to be what it is’: ‘The present is the actual; the past is the necessary; the future is the possible‘. ’All history is an attempt to understand the present by reconstructing its determining conditions.’
⁹¹
In this sense, he simply admitted defeat: history could only be teleological, because historians could write only from the vantage point, and with the prejudices, of their own present. The here-and-now was the only possible point of reference. This was a new and much weaker sort of determinism, but it clearly excluded any discussion of counterfactual alternatives.

It was possible, of course, to reject the very notion that the present had ‘determining conditions’ - by rejecting the notion of causation itself. There was a great fashion for this among idealist and linguistic philosophers between the wars. Ludwig Wittgenstein simply dismissed ‘belief in the causal nexus’ as ‘superstition’. Bertrand Russell agreed: ‘The law of causality ... is a relic of a bygone age surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.’
⁹²
So did Croce, who saw ‘the concept of cause’ as fundamentally ‘alien from ’ history.
⁹³

At first sight, this seems like a profoundly anti-deterministic proposition. Nevertheless, as is clear from Oakeshott’s definitive statement of the idealist position, it ruled out counterfactualism just as categorically as any determinist theory:

While this might have a certain philosophical logic to it, its practical implications are far from satisfactory. In Oakeshott’s formulation, ‘change in history carries with it its own explanation’:

Thus the only method whereby the historian can improve on the explanation of an event is by providing ‘more complete detail’.
⁹⁴

As Oakeshott makes clear, this is not a recipe for ‘total history’. Some kind of selection is necessary between ‘significant relationships’ and ‘chance relationships,’ because ‘historical enquiry, as an engagement to compose ... a passage of significantly related events in answer to an historical question, has no place for the recognition of such meaningless relationships’.
⁹⁵
But what makes an event ’‘significant’? Here Oakeshott provides only an oblique answer, to the effect that the historian’s answer to a given question must have some kind of internal logic. The aim is ‘to compose an answer to an historical question by
assembling a passage of the past
constituted of related events which have not survived inferred from a past of artefacts and utterances which have survived.’
⁹⁶
That would seem to imply a narrative structure of the sort envisaged by Collingwood, but in fact any kind of intelligible structure would logically suffice.

The idealist challenge to nineteenth-century determinism had an important influence on the work of a number of practising historians, notably Butterfield and Namier, whose researches into diplomatic history and political ‘structures’ respectively were informed by a deep hostility to determinism (especially its materialist variants). The same idealist tradition may be said to have been carried on by Maurice Cowling, whose preoccupations with high politics and the quasi-religious nature of nineteenth-and twentieth-century ’public doctrine’ have set him apart from virtually all his Cambridge contemporaries.
⁹⁷
In a more diluted form, traces of idealist anti-determinism can also be found in the work of Geoffrey Elton.
⁹⁸