A noted historian of modern Germany, Richard J. Evans has entered the lists of historical combatants in recent years as a sharp opponent of counterfactual history—also known as “what ifs.” His entry into this particular fight, one that’s as enjoyable to witness as it is important to understand, shouldn’t be surprising, for, as the author of an earlier work on historical thinking, practices, and findings—In Defense of History (1999)—he’s given sustained, deep, and wide-ranging thought to the labors of his professional tribe. This latest book will add to his reputation as a fierce debater. It’s lively, learned, erudite, and damaging. But it’s not the last word.
As Evans points out, what-ifs have a long history, were satirized as long ago as Livy, and began to make their appearance as serious ventures in historical thinking in the 19th century. It’s only in recent years, though, that they’ve gained a large literature and gone beyond what he dismisses as “mind games.” When he attributes the size and appeal of this literature to conservative historians’ reactions to histories that emphasize large impersonal forces like Marxism, novel theories of historical development like postmodernism, and what they see as the removal of decision-making humans from the center of the field, we know we’re entering an ideological boxing ring. But the ideological dimensions of this argument are beside the point and deflect us (as they deflect Evans) from the basic issue: the validity and utility of historical counterfactuals. For, try as hard as Evans and others do to argue against “altered pasts,” counterfactual thought is woven into the very structure of the historian’s pursuit.
A historical what-if asks what might have occurred if an act, decision, or event had not happened; or, if it had happened, whether things might (or might not) have turned out differently if some preceding act or decision had been otherwise. What if Lee had won at Appomattox?—a famous question wonderfully satirized by James Thurber. What if Truman had decided against dropping atomic bombs on Japan? What if steam power hadn’t been invented?
The best what-ifs, as Evans and others are at pains to point out, are of narrow scope, take a “least re-write” approach (imagining only the most minor and proximate adjustments to actual events), are among the options/information/thinking available to the actors of the time (even if other options are known to us now), and meet the test of plausibility. Thus, one doesn’t ask whether the change in the flight pattern of a butterfly in Europe might have caused the 19th-century revolutions in Latin America. That offends normal thought. One has to stick close to known facts, adopt accepted notions of causation, and proceed with prudence in any counterfactual exercise.
As Evans points out, amateurs break these rules routinely. The worst offenders are writers of science fiction, historical novelists, and those with political axes to grind, most of whose counterfactuals are preposterous and should be taken to be precisely what they are: what E. H. Carr famously called “parlour games.” So-called alternate histories do no harm as long as they’re fenced out of serious historical work. But the fact that counterfactuals have increasingly become a subject of interest and practice to professional historians is what gets Evans’s goat—and I know of no one who’s gone at the job of trying to demolish counterfactual thinking among serious historians with more wounding relish than he.
Evans sees counterfactuals as often originating in disappointment: “If only this had happened, we’d be better off.” To him, this is simply wishful thinking—the tendency to imagine the world improved if certain things had turned out differently. If we’re regretful that Napoleon didn’t win at Waterloo (and elsewhere), we naturally try to figure out how he might have emerged victorious. If only he’d done something he didn’t do—or avoided doing what he did! Such wistfulness comports readily with conservative impulses; but the left is no stranger to the same line of thinking. There’s nothing to be gained by tagging those who support the practice of counterfactual historical speculation as conservatives, at least on the grounds of their employing what-ifs. What-if thinking—whether conservative or liberal, hopeful or dour, dystopian or utopian—can be appealing to all segments of the political spectrum and all kinds of historians.
Evans makes a stronger case in attributing the rise of “if-only” thinking to the decline in the appeal of the ideologies that captivated the past two centuries.
Evans blames much of this newly discovered space on “postmodern skepticism” (which he seems to like about as much as conservatives do), because it “freed up writers of all kinds to imagine what might have been and tie their imaginings in one way or another to real historical events and real historical personalities.” Not surprisingly, Evans has a field day with some of the results. Many of them deserve the drubbing he administers, and here’s where the book best applies its robust energy. But note that Evans himself indulges in an unstated, wistful if-only: If grand ideologies hadn’t lost their authority, then it can be assumed that we wouldn’t have had so much alternate history. Author, you can’t have it both ways!
As Evans also points out, the fading of “isms” has freed more space for the consideration of the roles of major figures in the past—usually political and military ones, who always make for faster-paced history than others. This, Evans argues, makes it easier to speculate counterfactually. It’s far simpler to imagine alterations in the actual past had a single major figure acted differently than to imagine what our world would be like without, say, industrialization or mass communication.
Yet, as Evans argues, when historians indulge in such possibilities, they put “enormous imaginary power” into the hands of such major figures—the ability to see and comprehend more than most mortals can. And, Evans implies, the historians who bestow such power on their subjects no doubt enjoy holding (if only on paper) the same enormous power as their subjects in imagining what these figures might have done. Nevertheless, what-ifs do restore a sense of contingency to history when it’s lacking, and no one disputes that contingency has diminished in interpretive power over the last century and has needed resuscitation. Historians know well the lure of assuming that what happened had to happen, even if they don’t always escape it. Counterfactual thinking offers protection against that assumption.
Evans is on strongest ground when he attacks the frequent nonideological defects in counterfactual history. One of the most significant, even if one follows the “least re-write” rule by avoiding large deviations from what actually happened, is the tendency of what-ifs to exfoliate without limit into endless causal chains. Once we start unraveling the known past with an imaginary one—what if, say, General William Howe had joined up with General John Burgoyne at Saratoga instead of heading for Philadelphia in 1778, and had thus secured New York for the British?—there opens a horizonless frontier of possibilities. If the British had won that New York battle, they would have cut off New England from the middle states, which would have allowed the British Navy to venture further south and to the Caribbean, which would have led to the defeat of the revolution—and so on.
Who knows? The White House might now be the Governor-General’s House, and Her Britannic Majesty might sail up the Potomac in the royal yacht to preside over Congress. However, one only has to posit the occurrence of a hurricane off the northeast coast just when a large British fleet was en route to Yorktown for the entire imaginary train of events to collapse.
Given the absence of any real limit on the possible number and kind of unanticipatable events and decisions, a counterfactualist historian can only exert self-control. And, as Evans observes and historians seem to understand, the best way to exhibit self-control is simply to avoid stating the many consequences that may ensue from a single act by keeping counterfactual speculation short—to essay form. You just can’t sustain an imaginary set of claimed-to-be-possible historical events going without exhausting readers’ credulity. So, tellingly, you don’t find long works of what-if history. You can almost hear the sneering in Evans’s words: If extended what-if history could be written, it would be; that it hasn’t been proves its weakness.
These are points worth scoring against what-if practitioners, and those who are in Evans’s sights—none more so than Niall Ferguson, on whom Evans is especially rough—will have to defend themselves. Yet Evans’s irritation with counterfactuals seems as much a matter of temperament as of thought. We all tire of the schoolmarmish tendency to scold people for having failed to do what we’re sure they could have done. It’s easy to throw cold water on alternate history; but we shouldn’t be quick to do so, even after applauding Evans’s approach. Why? Because there’s no escape from counterfactual thinking.
It’s puzzling that Evans doesn’t grapple with this fact, well-established by logicians and philosophers. Their demonstrations are tucked away in scholarly literature, and they’re not easy to read. But a great number of formidable minds have made clear that within every historical argument is a complementary one, usually not stated, that something else would have occurred—what else we don’t know—had the event for which we have evidence not happened. This renders invalid Evans’s argument that one has to posit a specific alternative for what we know to have happened in order for a counterfactual to have any weight. And it makes his study less authoritative than it might have been had he dealt with this objection.
Yet it would be a mistake to ignore what Evans argues, just as it would be a mistake to dismiss this book as nothing more than a leftist attack on rightist history. There’s too much value in it, more than any review can cover. If you overlook the slashing academic tactics that Evans musters—and for some, it will be difficult to do so—you have here the best evaluation of the genre we possess. In many respects, it even salvages the value of thoughtful counterfactuals. It surely provides support for the heuristic value of controlled, prudently argued what-ifs. Most important, it’s likely to make for stronger counterfactual argumentation among students of the past. No historian can afford to ignore it. And for nonhistorians interested in the way historians go about their work, how and why they argue as they do, and what’s at stake in their disagreements, Altered Pasts is hugely illuminating. It’s also hugely enjoyable.
James M. Banner Jr. is the author, most recently, of Being a Historian.
