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Introduction Contingency’s Challenge to Political Science Ian Shapiro and Sonu Bedi At its starkest, contingency challenges the very possibility of science. By calling something contingent, at a minimum we are saying that it did not have to be as it is. Things could have been otherwise, and they would have been otherwise if something had happened differently. Science is usually seen as geared to uncovering laws that account for what must be the case. If the universe is law-governed, how can there be genuinely contingent events? Perhaps they seem contingent to us, but for the committed scientist this perception must mark our incomplete understanding. Either things are necessary and science is possible, or they are contingent and it is not. Contingency’s challenge is thus about the nature of reality, not just about the limits to our grasp of that reality. In the lingo: it is about ontology , not just epistemology. Suppose that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had not been assassinated by Yigal Amir in November of 1995, or that South African President F. W. De Klerk had been killed by a disgruntled white right-winger in January of 1992. Because no other National Party leader was willing to face down the Afrikaner hard right, as De Klerk did in March of that year by calling an unprecedented referendum on whether to conclude an agreement with the African National Congress, his death would almost certainly have derailed the negotiations between his National Party government and the ANC. This would have greatly strengthened NP reactionaries and ANC radicals, quite likely sending the country spiraling into chaos if not civil war.1 By contrast, had Rabin escaped Amir’s bullet in 1995, he might well have concluded the agreement to which he was then close with Yassir Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization and which his 1 Shapiro_pp001-018 7/17/07 3:09 PM Page 1 successor, Shimon Peres, did not pursue. The subsequent collapse of the Oslo accords and second intifada might have been avoided, ushering in agreements on Jerusalem, the status of refugees, and Jewish settlements that can scarcely be imagined today. We might have been looking today at a Middle East “miracle” while the ongoing the South Africa basket-case would have surprised no one.2 A bullet kills one leader, not another. Democratic settlements and civil wars occur in different countries as a result. Small contingencies with vast effects. History is replete with such instances of what might, or might not, have been. Had the just-appointed Prime Minister Winston Churchill— widely seen as a hothead at the time—not prevailed in his uphill battle with Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax in May of 1940, Britain would probably have capitulated to Hitler along with Belgium and France.3 How much twentieth-century history would then have been different? Yet many social outcomes do not depend radically on contingencies in this way. My decision to vote or not to vote is unlikely to affect an election ’s outcome. Any of the thousands of New Englanders who headed west in the nineteenth century could have stayed home without affecting America ’s westward expansion. In these cases had a great many people acted differently—which they might have done—the results would have been different, but the actions of any given individual were inconsequential. Choice is often the hallmark of contingency, but not always. Had an infected monkey not bitten someone in Africa in the 1980s, the AIDS pandemic might never have erupted.4 True, there is a connection with a human choice here—the person might have chosen to stay home on the day she or he was bitten. But contingency’s connection to human choice might itself be contingent. The monkey might have been eaten by a lion the day before it bit the person who became the initial human carrier. Then again, the lion might have been shot by a hunter the day before it would otherwise have eaten the monkey. And the hunter might have missed his flight to Africa the day before he would otherwise have shot the lion . . . There are countless contingencies, massively consequential for human existence, that have nothing at all to do with human action—let alone human choice. Had a meteorite not struck what is now the Yucatán peninsula some 65 million years ago, the dinosaurs and thousands of other species of plants and animals might not have become extinct.5 How different would our world be in...

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