Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (9 page)

The theoretical position as set out by Oakeshott was nevertheless incomplete. Having demolished the determinist model of causation derived from the natural sciences, Oakeshott effectively replaced it with another, equally rigid straitjacket. In his definition, the historian had to confine himself to the relation of significant past events
as they actually seem to have been
on the basis of the surviving sources. Yet the process whereby the historian distinguishes between the significant and the insignificant or ‘chance’ events was never clearly articulated. Clearly, it must be a subjective process. The historian attaches his own meaning to the surviving remnants of the past which he finds in his pursuit of an answer to a given question. Equally clearly, his answer, when it is published, must make some kind of sense to others. But who chooses the original question? And who is to say whether the reader’s interpretation of the finished text will correspond to that intended by the author? Above all, why should counterfactual questions be ruled out? To these questions, Oakeshott had no satisfactory answers.

Conspicuously, many of the English historians associated with idealism were noted for their political conservatism. Indeed, as the conflicts within English history faculties in the 1950s and 1960s made clear, there was a fairly close connection between anti-determinism in historical philosophy and anti-socialism in politics. Unfortunately - from the point of view of idealism - these were conflicts which the other side effectively won.

For the determinism of the nineteenth century was not, as might have been expected, discredited by the horrors perpetrated in its name after 1917. That Marxism was able to retain its credibility was due mainly to the widespread belief that National Socialism was its polar opposite, rather than merely a near relative which had substituted
Volk
for class. The postwar renaissance of Marxism also owed much to the willingness of Italian, French and English Marxists to dissociate themselves not only from Stalin but also from Lenin - and increasingly from Marx himself. It is not necessary here to pay close attention to the various theoretical modifications introduced by the likes of Sartre and Althusser, the main aim of which was to extricate Marx from the inconvenient complexities of history and return him to the safety of the Hegelian heights. Nor need we dwell on the related but historically more applicable theories of Gramsci, who sought to explain the proletariat’s consistent failure to behave as Marx had predicted in terms of hegemonic blocs, false consciousness and synthesised consent.
⁹⁹
Suffice to say that such ideas helped give the Marxian version of determinism a new lease of life. True, continental influences were slow to make themselves felt in England. But here too, inspired more by a distinctively English sense of
noblesse oblige
- an elite sentimentality about lower-class radicalism - a Marxist revival took place.

Of all the English socialist historians, probably the least original thinker was E. H. Carr, the chronicler of the Bolshevik regime. Yet Carr’s defence of determinism has been extraordinarily influential - and will doubtless continue to be so until someone else writes a better book with as seductive a title as
What Is History?
It is true that Carr seeks to distance himself from the strict monocausal determinism of Hegel or Marx. He himself is only a determinist, he says, in the sense that he believes that ‘everything that happened has a cause or causes, and could not have happened differently unless something in the cause or causes had also been different’. This, of course, is a definition so elastic that it implies acceptance of the indeterminacy of events:

This is fine, as far as it goes. However, Carr quickly adds that the historian’s task is simply ‘to explain why one course was eventually chosen rather than another’; to ‘explain what did happen and why’. ‘The trouble about contemporary history’, he notes with impatience, ‘is that people remember the time when all the options were still open, and find it difficult to adopt the atttitude of the historian for whom they have been closed by the
fait accompli.’
Nor is this the only respect in which Carr turns out to be an old-fashioned determinist. ‘How’, he asks, ‘can we discover in a history a coherent sequence of cause and effect, how can we find any meaning in history’ if (as he has to concede) ‘the role of accident in history ... exists?’ With a grudging nod in the direction of the idealists (‘certain philosophical ambiguities into which I need not enter’), Carr decides, like Oakeshott, that we must select causes in order of their ‘historical significance:

In Carr’s version, however, this simply becomes another version of Hegel’s view of history as a rational - and teleological - process. ‘Dragging into prominence the forces which have triumphed and thrusting into the background those which they have swallowed up’ is, he concludes, ‘the essence of the historian’s job’. For ‘History in its essence is ... progress.’ That this was an emotional position can easily be illustrated. In his notes for a second edition of
What Is History
?, Carr rejected
a priori
‘the theory that the universe began in some random way with a big bang and is destined to dissolve into black holes’ as ‘a reflexion of the cultural pessimism of the age’. A determinist to the last, he dismissed the implicit ‘randomness’ of this theory as an ‘enthronement of ignorance’.
¹⁰⁰

By a not dissimilar route, E. P. Thompson also arrived back at the determinist position. Like Carr‘s, Thompson’s attempt to find a middle way between the strictly anti-theoretical empiricism of Popper and the strictly unempirical theory of Althusser was motivated by a craving for meaning - a desire to ‘comprehend ... the interconnectedness of social phenomena [and] causation’
¹⁰¹
Like Carr (and indeed Christopher Hill), Thompson instinctively revolted against the whole notion of contingency. He yearned for an ‘understanding of the rationality (of causation, etc.) of the historical process: ... an objective knowledge, disclosed in a dialogue with determinate evidence’. But the ‘historical logic’ Thompson proposed - ‘a dialogue between concept and evidence, a dialogue conducted by successive hypotheses, on the one hand, and empirical research on the other’ - was no more satisfactory than Carr’s selection of ‘rational’ causes. At root, it was just reheated Hegel.

In the light of this, it is hardly surprising that both Carr and Thompson were as dismissive as they were of counterfactual arguments. Yet even the British Marxists found it hard to dispense with counterfactual analysis altogether. When Carr himself pondered the calamities of Stalinism, he could hardly avoid asking the question whether these were the inevitable consequence of the original Bolshevik project, or whether Lenin, ‘if he had lived through the twenties and thirties in the full possession of his faculties’, would have acted less tyrannically. In his notes for a second edition, Carr actually argued that a longer-lived Lenin would have been able ‘to minimise and mitigate the element of coercion.... Under Lenin the passage might not have been altogether smooth, but it would have been nothing like what happened. Lenin would not have tolerated the falsification of the record in which Stalin constantly indulged.’
¹⁰²
Exactly the same kind of argument underpins the last volume of what may be regarded as the British Marxists’ greatest achievement - Eric Hobsbawm’s four-volume history of the world since 1789.
The Age of Extremes
in many ways revolves around an immense, though implicit counterfactual question: What if there had been no Stalinist Soviet Union, sufficiently industrialised (and tyrannised) to defeat Germany and ‘rescue’ capitalism during the Second World War?
¹⁰³
Whatever one thinks of the answers Carr and Hobsbawm provide to these questions, it is striking that, despite all their ideological commitment to determinism, both ultimately felt obliged to pose them.

Regrettably, such moves away from strictly teleological argumentation have been rare among the younger generation of Marxist historians. Inspired by Gramsci, they have tended to address themselves to questions about the oppression or manipulation of the working class and, with the growth of feminism (which substituted gender for class in the Marxist model of conflict), women. The new left’s ‘history from below’ may have conclusively overturned Carr’s dictum that history is about the winners (though in a sense yesterday’s losers are being consciously studied as today’s or tomorrow’s winners). But it has only stuck the more firmly to the determinist model of historical development.

Not all modern determinists have been Marxists, of course. The emergence of sociology as a distinct subject has allowed a variety of less rigid theories to develop which historians have been quick to import. Like Marx, the intellectual ‘fathers’ of sociology, Tocqueville and Weber, retained a belief in the possibility of a scientific approach to social questions and distinguished analytically between the economic, the social, the cultural and the political. But they did not insist on any simple causal relationship leading from one to the others and propelling historical development inexorably forwards. Thus, in
L’Ancien Regime et la Révolution
, Tocqueville discussed the roles of administrative change, class structure and Enlightenment ideas in pre-Revolutionary France without according primacy to one or other as a solvent of the ‘old regime’. Moreover, the conclusion he drew from his pioneering study of regional administrative records was that the basic framework of government had not been significantly changed by the Revolution. The processes which interested him - of governmental centralisation and economic levelling, which he saw as posing an insidious threat to liberty - were long run; they preceded the events of the 1790s and continued long after 1815.
¹⁰⁴
Weber went still further. In some respects, his idea of sociology was world history with the causation left out: in essence, a typology of social phenomena.
¹⁰⁵
When he thought historically, he tended to illustrate selectively and with a broad brush, as (for example) in his
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,
which linked the development of Western capitalism to the peculiar culture (not the theology) of the Protestant sects.
¹⁰⁶
The key word here is ‘linked’: Weber was at pains to avoid suggesting a simple causal relationship between religion and economic behaviour : ‘It is not ... my aim to substitute for a one-sided materialistic an equally one-sided spiritualistic causal interpretation of culture and of history. Each is equally possible ... ’.
¹⁰⁷
The historical tendencies which interested Weber - rationalisation and demystification in all walks of life - seemed to unfold themselves.

This relegation of causation - the elevation of structures above events, the preoccupation with long-run rather than short-run change - had important implications for the development of twentieth-century historiography. These were perhaps most obvious in France, where the sociological approach was first systematically applied by historians. The ultimate aim of what became known as the
Annales
school was to write ‘total history’, that is to say, to consider all (or as many as possible) of the aspects of a given society: its economy, its social forms, its culture, its political institutions and so on. As Marc Bloch conceived it, history was to become an amalgam of different scientific disciplines : everything from meteorology to jurisprudence would have a part to play, and the ideal historian would be a master of umpteen technical specialisms.
¹⁰⁸
But this holism also applied to the periods which historians had to consider: in Braudel’s characteristically heroic terms, the
Annales
historian would ‘always wish to grasp the whole, the totality of social life ... bringing together different levels, time spans, different kinds of time, structure, conjunctures, events’.
¹⁰⁹

Of course, without some kind of organising principle, some hierarchy of importance, such history would be unwritable (for reasons Macaulay had spelt out a century before).
¹¹⁰
In practice, the historians of the
Annales
prioritised geography and long-run change, an ordering most explicit in the work of Braudel. As a self-proclaimed ‘historian of peasant stock’, Braudel instinctively assumed ‘the necessary reduction of any social reality to the plane in which it occurs’, meaning ‘geography or ecology’.
¹¹¹
‘When we say man, we mean the group to which he belongs: individuals leave it and others are incorporated, but the group remains attached to a given space and to familiar land. It takes root there.’
¹¹²
From this geographical determinism - which bore more than a passing resemblance to the materialist theories of French Enlightenment - followed Braudel’s elevation of long-run development over short-run events. In his
Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II
, he explicitly distinguished between three levels of history: firstly, the ‘history whose passage is almost imperceptible, that of man and his relationship with the environment, a history in which all change is slow, a history of constant repetition, ever-recurring cycles’; secondly, ‘history ... with slow but perceptible rhythms’, the history of ‘groups and groupings ... these swelling currents [of] economic systems, states, societies, civilisations and finally ... warfare’; and thirdly ‘traditional history’, that of ‘individual men’ and ‘events’, the ’surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs. A history of brief, rapid, nervous fluctuations.‘
¹¹³
Here, last was very definitely least. ‘We must learn to distrust this history ’ [of events], warned Braudel, ‘as it was felt, described and lived by contemporaries’; for it is merely concerned with ‘ephemera ... which pass across the stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion.’
¹¹⁴
The delusive smoke of an event might ‘fill the minds of its contemporaries, but it does not last and its flame can scarcely ever be discerned’. For Braudel, the mission of the new sociological history was to demote ‘’the headlong, dramatic, breathless rush of [traditional history’s] narrative’. The ‘short time span’ was merely ‘the time of ... the journalist’, ‘capricious and delusive’.
¹¹⁵
Whereas: