Letters

50 Historically Speaking March/April 2006 Letters John Lukacs, Meet Monsieur Jourdain In "Counterfactual is Wrong" (Historically Speaking, January/February 2006) John Lukacs asserts at the outset that counterfactual "is a very bad word." It is hard to decipher an argument in the rambling narrative that follows . But one thing is clear: Lukacs is very unhappy with both my contribution to the forum on counterfactuals in the March 2004 issue of Historically Speaking and Barry Strauss's article in the July/August 2004 issue. I tried to demonstrate that counterfactuals are necessary to evaluate causal claims. If we argue that ? caused y, we assume, ceteris paribus, that y would not have happened in the absence of x. Without a large sample of comparable cases with variation of the dependent and independent variables (i.e., outcomes and putative causes of them)— something we rarely find in history—we need to engage the counterfactual case. I further contend that the difference between so-called factual and counterfactual arguments is greatly exaggerated; it is one ofdegree, not ofkind. Both kinds of argument rest on the quality of their assumptions, the chain of logic linking antecedents to consequences, and their consistency with available evidence. Lukacs rejects my assertion that "good history needs counterfactuals ." "Good history," he writes "is the result ofgood historians," and they are people who understand "the complexity of human nature" and the limitations of their potential knowledge of history. In his article Strauss elaborates the example of the Battle of Salamis, making the case for its contingency. In a forthcoming book Strauss and Victor Hanson debate whether Greek victory was essential for the survival of Greece and the subsequent rise of the West.1 Their argument is, of course, unanswerable, but it compels both of them to articulate a set of unspoken assumptions that underlies their respective claims. By doing so, they raise new questions that are amenable to empirical investigation and push the debate to a higher plane. Lukacs is uncomfortable with uncertainty . Strauss, he insists, should accept John Huizinga's deterministic view of Salamis and its outcome. How can Huizinga and Lukacs know that Poster for Detroit Federal Theatre Project presentation of It Can't Happen Here, 1936-37. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-DIG-ppmsca-10448]. the Greek victory at Salamis was inevitable without considering counterfactuals? Unless we assert that everything that happened had to happen, which is patently absurd (and something , we will see, that Lukacs himself does not believe), we need to consider what might have led to an alternative outcome, or no outcome at all. To know just how contingent or determined any outcome was, we need general laws against which to assess individual outcomes . There are no historical laws, so we need to engage in thought experiments and ask how much context we must mutate to get a different outcome, andjust how malleable that context was. If Themistocles had not convinced the Spartan commander Eurybiades, and with his support, commanders from other city-states—something Herodotus tells us was nip and tuck—non-Athenian forces would have evacuated Salamis and there would have been no battle in the narrow straits where the lighter, more maneuverable Greek ships had a decided edge. For this reason and others that Herodotus and Strauss lay out, both Salamis and the victory ofthe Greeks were contingent, not determined. This knowledge is critical to evaluating the contribution Themistocles made to Athens, and Hellas more generally. John Lukacs can be compared to Moliere's Monsieur Jourdain in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, who was shocked to discover that he spoke prose. Despite his scorn for speculation about alternative worlds, Lukacs speaks counterfactually. His Five Days in London: May 1940 is riddled with "what ifs."2 The first comes on page 6 where he describes Churchill's declaration on May 28 that Britain would go on fighting as a key turning point in World War II. At the outset he insists that Hitler came close to winning World War II. Churchill was the leader who could have lost the war, and his decision to continue fighting at any cost "saved Britain, and Europe, and Western civilization." The implicit counterfactual...