Book Review

Method/Theory

Robert Cowley, editor. What If? The World's Foremost Historians Imagine What Might Have Been. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1999. Pp. xiv, 395. $27.50.

E. H. Carr denounced counter-factual history as a parlor game, and E. P. Thompson, rather more bluntly, as Geschichtswissenschlopf (unhistorical crap). Indeed, all who espouse some variety of determinism or teleology, be it materialist, idealist, or providential, consider "what if" questions absurd because they believe that whatever happened in the past must have happened. By contrast, historians more humble about their ability to discern meaning in history are keenly aware of the often decisive roles played by contingency, accident, chance, or free will in human affairs. Years ago it was tempting to conclude with the Annales school that events such as the Battle of Lepanto are mere epiphenomena, like the foam atop waves, by comparison to the deep currents that define the movement of history over the longue durée and make possible a scientific "total history." But even Fernand Braudel trimmed his ambitions later in life, and few today defend determinism or positivism. Hence we remain face to face with the conundrums that vexed the ancients from China to Greece: if the futures of whole civilizations often hinge on capricious occurrences, where can meaning be found in the pageant of human life?	1
I had expected that reviewing these collections of "what if" historical scenarios would be easy and fun. Niall Ferguson's ninety-page introduction surveying four centuries of counter-factual speculations and philosophies of history sufficed to persuade me otherwise. It is loaded with rich material, as one might expect from the erudite Oxford fellow, but the burden of Ferguson's essay is that counter-factual speculation has gotten a bad rap due to the silly jeux d'esprit and reductionism of some its practitioners (e.g. Blaise Pascal's theory of Cleopatra's nose and Bertrand Russell's "if Henry VIII had not fallen in love with Anne Boleyn, the United States would not now exist"), not to mention the smug caricatures of "what if" speculation by would-be scientific historians. In fact, Ferguson argues, there are two sorts of counter-factual history: "those which are essentially the products of imagination but (generally) lack an empirical basis; and those designed to test hypotheses by (supposedly) empirical means" (p. 18). He means to defend the second sort and establish methodological and theoretical bases for its refinement.	2
Ferguson illustrates what he has in mind by invoking Jorge Luis Borges's short story, "The Garden of Forking Paths," and Michael Scriven's principle to the effect that we would be obliged to "abandon history if we sought to eliminate all surprise" (p. 71). That is, accident, chance, contingency—far from making the historical exercise problematical—are exactly what make it real, fruitful, and potentially meaningful as long as the historian who asks "what might have happened?" proceeds according to the same rigorous empiricism as the historian who asks "what did happen?" Thus, it is by no means pointless to ask "what if Napoleon Bonaparte had invaded the Middle East instead of Russia?" because evidence abounds that he (and the tsar) considered that option at length. Demonstrable plausibility is the key, and turning from decisions to accidents it is certainly plausible that the storm that abated on June 6, 1944, might well have canceled D-Day or resumed soon enough to doom the invasion.	. . .