The New Counterfactualists

March 2004 * Historically Speaking1 7 The New Counterfactualists Allan Megill To make sense ofso-called counterfactual historywe need to get clear about the theoretical issues that counterfactualityraises . We also need to make some distinctions . I would begin with a distinction between two types ofcounterfactual history, "restrained" and "exuberant." "Restrained" counterfactual history involves an explicit canvassing of alternative possibilities that existed in a real past, whereas "exuberant" counterfactual history deals in pasthistorical outcomes that never in fact came to be. "Exuberant" counterfactual history diverges radically from normal historical the playingoutofWorldWar? bya group of givevirtual historyits opening. But the same fifteen-year-olds. One can certainlyspeak of contingency that makes virtual history posplausibilities , but the plausibilities are far harder to judge than normalhistorical plausibilities , which are tied down to a world that actually existed. When historians imagine what might have happened if John F. Kennedy had not been shot or ifthe USSR had avoided collapse, theyare on shaky epistemologica ! ground. Historians must always speculate, but speculations concerning virtual history are far more deeply permeated by under-supported assumptions about the real nature ofthe world than is the case when research and writing. This is the kind of the normal canons ofhistorical method opercounterfactual history that tries to imagine what might have resulted ifBritain had intervened in the American Civil War, if an Irish Home Rule Bill had passed the British parliament in 1912, or if Germany had invaded Britain in 1940. All three ofthese imagined situations appear in Niall Ferguson 's edited volume, Virtual History .1 In fact, this sort ofcounterfactual history might better be called "virtual history," to emphasize that it addresses no actual past. "Virtual history" evokes "virtual reality." It also evokes the world ofhistorically-based gameplaying : one thinks, for example, ofthe well-known board gameAxis & Allies, now available in a computer version, which attempts to simulateWorldWar? from 1942 onward.2 Such games allowplayers to go back to some chosen point in historical time and make decisions that diverge from the decisions made by the real historical actors. What then eventuates results from chance, and also (this is no small matter) from assumptions embedded in the game by its makers. There is no pretension here to be replaying historical reality, at least none that a grown-up could take seriously. It is a game, dressed up with certain features ofa real past. When professional historians write virtual historywe ought to treat their claims as to "what might have been" with about the same distanced skepticism thatwe would treat ate. Indeed, quite apart from the specific ideological preferences ofthe historian or gamemaker , virtual historycannotbe invented nor Thefact is, historians do need to engage in counterfactual reasoning . I note with dismay that I have encountered, more often than I would have liked, historians to whom thisfact appears to be news. the game played without a set ofrules that are in large measure arbitrary. Itwill clarify matters ifwe look at virtual history in the light ofissues oftemporality. The virtual historian cuts into the real past at some particular moment—normally just before one of the historical actors involved made a weighty decision. The virtual histosible also undermines it. If we have contingency in its beginning, we must surely have contingency in its early middle: to paraphrase Weber, contingencyis not a train one can get on or off at will. This means that virtual history cannot follow any definable course at all. More precisely, it can follow a definable course onlyuntil the next contingency arises. Although the virtual historian may well try to getawaywith daiming anormalhistorian's authority, once pastthis moment ofrenewed contingency he or she is better thought ofas a writer ofimaginative literature. This is not necessarily bad, but it is not history. Virtual history ought not to be confused with counterfactual history in general. Virtual historystarts outfromamomentin the real past where things might have worked out differently, and thenmovesfimvardintime, getting ever further from a world that existed. "Restrained" counterfactual history moves in the opposite direction. It starts outfrom an actual event, such as the English Civil War, and then looks back in time, canvassinghowitmighthave come topass thatthe CivilWarmightnot have occurred (or might have occurredinasharplydifferentway). InFerguson's anthology,JohnAdamson'sessay "EnglandwithoutCromwell: WhatIfCharles IHadAvoidedtheCivilWar...