Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (review)

Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals. Edited by Niall Ferguson (New York, Basic Books, 1999) 548 pp. $30.00

Ferguson begins his introductory essay to this thought-provoking volume with the phrase, "what if?" The words are not frequently entertained by professional historians, who all too often dismiss this sort of speculation as a parlor game, or more damningly, in Thompson's phrase, as "Geschichtswissenschlopff, unhistorical shit."¹ Ferguson, however, makes a compelling case that such resistance is misplaced. The books' nine essays, by a range of distinguished historians, help to bear him out.

Counterfactual speculation--the formation of hypothetical scenarios in the past--is a commonplace of individual experience, as well as of Western logic, science, and legal theory, where "if then"/"but for" propositions are standard fare. Why not for history? Ferguson is quick to admit that counterfactual history itself has often been part of the problem. By "posing implausible questions or by providing implausible answers," its practitioners have tended to render the pursuit little more than an exercise in fantasy or wish fulfillment--the very parlor game that its detractors allege (19).

Yet, Ferguson avers a deeper reason for its dismissal--the dominant current of determination that flows through the Western historiographical tradition. In a sweeping (at times relentless) exposition, Ferguson presents a grand overview of the philosophy of history from Polybius to the present day, showing how deeply determinist assumptions are embedded in how we think about the past. Whether viewed from providential, materialist, idealist, or narrative perspectives, what happened, it is too often assumed, had to happen--the proof being that it did.

For Ferguson, this determinism is absurd, the relic of now untenable assumptions about linear causality that have greatly distorted history. Taking a methodological cue from developments in twentieth-century mathematics and science (chaos theory, the uncertainty and anthropic principles, and fractal geometry), Ferguson argues that we should view the past as many scientists now view the natural world--as stochastic--contingent, unpredictable, seemingly random. This is not, however, to assert that all history is a mere crap shoot, or that historians should play dice with their universe. Ferguson's belief that we can deal with probabilities--and, indeed, that we ought to do so--generates his rule for framing the right counterfactual questions. We should deal speculatively only with those outcomes that were probable in the past, with those "alternatives which we can show on the basis of contemporary evidence that contemporaries actually considered" (86). To understand how the past actually was, in short, we need to know how it actually was not.

Hence, the books' nine essays seek to strip away teleological blinders with a host of counterfactual scenarios. What if there had been no English Civil War? (John Adamson) No American Revolution? (J. C. D. Clark) What if Hitler had conquered Russia? (Michael Burleigh) What if Kennedy had lived? (Diane Kunz) There is a modern bias to the volume (seven of the essays deal with the twentieth century); a penchant for great conflicts (though strikingly no essay on the French Revolution); and an English tinge (five of the pieces concern British history). There is, as well, fuel for controversy--notably, Ferguson's assertion that Britain would have fared better "standing aside" in 1914, or Kunz's claim that had he lived, Kennedy would likely have been a lackluster civil rights leader.

Some may bristle at the contributors' attempts (of varying success) to write for both a popular and a professional audience. This, however, is not the least of the work's merits--one that poses a counterfactual of its own: What if published history could be serious, engaging, and fun? Ferguson is to be congratulated for having indulged this fantasy?

Darrin M. McMahon
Yale University

Note

1. Edward P. Thompson, "The Poverty of Theory," in idem, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London, 1978), 100.

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