Response

28Historically Speaking · March 2004 tual rests on counterfactual assumptions, and these linkages need to be addressed byhistorians . Social "facts," moreover, are reflections ofthe concepts we use to describe social reality , not ofreality itself. They are ideational and subjective, and even the existence of"precise " measures for them—somethingwe only rarely have—would not make them any less arbitrary. For, as Willard VO. Quine has shown, theoretical concepts insinuate themselves into the "data language" of even the hardest sciences. The construction of "factual " history is therefore entirely imaginary, and its onlyclaim to privilege is thatthe concepts and categories in terms ofwhich it is constructed tell us something useful or interesting about the social world. The same holds true for counterfactual history. RichardNedLebow is theJames 0. Freedman PresidentialProfessor ofGovernmentat Dartmouth College. He is the authorof"The Tragic Vision ofPolitics: Ethics, Interest, and Orders (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and coeditorwith Philip Tetlock and Geoffrey Parker o/Unmaking the West: Counterfactual Thought Experiments in History (forthcoming). 1 R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (Longmans, Green, 1912), 177. 2 Richard Ned Lebow andJanice Gross Stein, We AllLost the Cold War (Princeton University Press, 1994), ch. 2. 3 JayM. Winter, The Great Warandthe British People (Macmillan, 1986), 76-83. 4 Donald Kagan, The Outbreak ofthe Peloponnesian War (Cornell University Press, 1969), 203-342. s MarkElvin, The Pattern ofthe ChinesePast:A Social and Economic Interpretation (Stanford University Press, 1973). Response Richard J. Evans Let's start by clearing away the rubbish. Most ofit is in Edward Ingram's contribution , which attributes to me many views that I do not hold and devotes a lot of space to confused attacks on arguments I have never advanced. To begin at the beginning— and disregardingthe cheap and ratherpuerile sarcasm which is evidentlyIngram's stock-intrade —I do not have a Manichaean view of the world, whatever that is. I do not think that what happened is good: in my practice as a historian, I do not ascribe anymoral qualities to what happened, but ifI did, I would certainly not think that, for example, the deliberate murder ofnearly6 millionJews by the Nazis, something that undoubtedly did happen, was good. I have on many occasions written about the difficulty of ascertaining whathappened in the past, though I persist in thinking that one can do it. A large part of the challenge ofbeing a historian lies in this difficulty, but I do think that it often is possible to achieve certainty about what did happen and to distinguish it from what did not. Despite his claim that "what happened, we do not know and cannot find out," Ingram actuallydoes seem prettycertainnonetheless that he himself can distinguish what happened from what didn't. Ingram's piece is Uttered with his own certainties about what happened, starting with "The Holocaust. It happened."—a statementmade just a couple of lines after the one I've just quoted—and going on to Britain's declaration ofwar in 1914, Churchill's drinking champagne, and much more. So we're not really disagreeing there, then, though for some reason he clearly thinks we are. Ingram's next section contains a whole series of confusions about contingency and determinacy. Contingencyjust means uncertainty (one uncertain event is dependent on the occurrence of another uncertain event, and so on); determinism, though you'll find several different definitions ofit in Niall Ferguson 's introduction to his collection on Virtual History, usually means that things are caused by factors external to the human will. To put it another way, we can't be sure that things were bound to happen the way they did, but we can usually be sure that they did not happen just because someone wanted them to. At this point, Ingram brings in the example ofa butterfly beating its wings in one place leading to a chain ofchance events that causes a hurricane in another, an example I've never used in any of my work, though he claims I have. And he also brings in Carr's example of a car crash. Perhaps because he had spent two decades working as a civil servant before he turned to history, Carr thought that a car crash...