Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (10 page)

Clearly, this relegation of the ‘trivia of the past’ - ‘the actions of a few princes and rich men’ - beneath ‘the slow and powerful march of history’ was simply a new kind of determinism. Unconsciously, Braudel had even lapsed back into the distinctive language of the nineteenth-century determinists: once again, as in Marx, as in Tolstoy, mere individuals were being ‘ruthlessly swept aside,’ trampled underfoot by superhuman historical forces. There are two obvious objections to this. The first is that, in dismissing history as it was felt and recorded by contemporaries, Braudel was dismissing the overwhelming bulk of historical evidence - even the economic statistics which were his bread and butter. ‘In the long run,’ as Keynes said, ‘we are all dead’; and for that reason we are perhaps entitled to reverse the order of Braudel’s hierarchy of histories. After all, if the short term was what primarily concerned our ancestors, who are we to dismiss their concerns as mere trivia? The second objection concerns Braudel’s assumptions about the nature of environmental change. For, in assuming the imperceptible nature of long-run ecological change and the rhythmic, predictable quality of climatic change, he was perpetuating a serious misconception about the natural world.

In fairness to Braudel, he later qualified this dogmatic insistence on the ‘longue durée’. With the development of capitalism, clearly the dominance of the terrain and elements was diminished: ‘The chief privilege of capitalism ... [is] the ability to choose.’
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In capitalist society, it was harder to prioritise. Which hierarchy was more important, Braudel asked himself in the third volume of
Civilisation and Capitalism
: that of wealth, that of state power or that of culture? ‘The answer is that it may depend upon the time, the place and who is speaking.’
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Thus the subjective element was at least temporarily rescued from the objective constraints of the long run: ‘Social time does not flow at one even rate, but goes at a thousand different paces, swift or slow.’
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There was at least some scope for the existence of ‘free, unorganised zones of reality ... outside the rigid envelope of structures’.
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Such insights might have been developed further had Marc Bloch lived longer. It is clear from his notes for the later and never-written sixth and seventh chapters of
The Historian’s Craft
that he had a far better grasp of the problems of causation, chance and what he called ‘prevision’ than Braudel.
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As he made clear in the completed sections of the book, Bloch had no time for ‘pseudogeographical determinism’: ‘Whether confronted by a phenomenon of the physical world or by a social fact, the movement of human reactions is not like clockwork, always going in the same direction.’
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This raises a counterfactual question of its own: What if Bloch had survived the war? It seems likely that French historiography would not have succumbed to the implicit determinism of Braudel and the later
Annales
.

Sociological history outside France was never as concerned with environmental determinants (perhaps because other countries had witnessed far greater migrations of people and physical transformations of the land in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries). Nevertheless, similar kinds of determinism can be found. In the German case, this was partly due to a revival of Marxian ideas in the 1960s and 1970s. The school of ‘societal history’, whose John the Baptist had been the Weimar ‘dissident’ Eckart Kehr, posited a model of German historical aberrance based on the idea of a mismatch between economic development and social backwardness.
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On the one hand, nineteenth-century Germany successfully developed a modern, industrial economy. On the other, its social and political institutions continued to be dominated by the traditional Junker aristocracy. At times, explanations for this failure to develop according to the Marxist rules (that is, to progress, like Britain, towards bourgeois parliamentarism and democracy) have been couched in unmistakably Gramscian terms; hegemonic blocs of manipulative elites became a wearisome feature of much German historiography after 1968. More recently, reviving interest in the ideas of Weber has led to less overt determinism, as in the most recent work of the doyen of societal historians, Hans-Ulrich Wehler. Yet, despite the efforts of non-German historians to question the validity of the ideal-typical relationship between capitalism, bourgeois society and parliamentary democracy,
¹²⁴
there remains a deep reluctance within the German historical establishment to consider alternative historical outcomes. Societal historians remain deeply committed to the idea that ‘the German catastrophe’ had deep roots. Even conservative historians have relatively little interest in the role of contingency: some abide by the Rankean commandment to study only what actually happened; others, like Michael Stürmer, take refuge in an older kind of geographical determinism, in which Germany’s location in the middle of Europe explains much, if not all, of the problem.
¹²⁵

Anglo-American historiography too has had its fair share of sociologically inspired determinism, some of it Marxian, some more Weberian. Lawrence Stone’s
Causes of the English Revolution
is noteworthy for its reliance on another kind of three-tiered model, this time distinguishing between preconditions, precipitants and triggers. Unlike Braudel, Stone does not explicitly arrange these in order of importance: indeed, he explicitly avoids ‘decid[ing] whether or not the obstinacy of Charles I was more important than the spread of Puritanism in causing the Revolution’.
¹²⁶
But the strong implication of the book is that the combination of these and other factors made the Civil War inevitable. Equally cautious in tone is Paul Kennedy’s
Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
, which posits nothing stronger than a ‘significant correlation
over the longer term
between productive and revenue-raising capacities on the one hand and military strength on the other’.
¹²⁷
Certainly, a close reading of the book acquits him of
crude
economic determinism. But the thrust of the argument is nevertheless that there is a causal relationship between economic factors and international power - subtle economic determinism maybe, but determinism nonetheless. Other attempts to propound grand theories on the basis of some sort of sociological model range from Wallerstein’s Marxian
Modern World System
to Mann’s more nuanced
Sources of Social Power
, Grew and Bien’s
Crises of Political Development
and Unger’s
Plasticity into Power
.
¹²⁸
A classic illustration of grand theory at its pseudo-scientific worst is ‘catastrophe theory’, with its reductionist topology of seven ‘elementary catastrophes’.
¹²⁹
The search for a unifying sociological theory of power will doubtless continue. It remains to be seen whether it will eventually be abandoned as futile, like the alchemists’ search for the philosopher’s stone; or whether it will go on for ever, like the search for a cure for baldness.

An alternative to colossal simplification - and the alternative favoured by many historians in recent years - has been ever-narrower specialisation. It had, of course, been Bloch’s hope that history would draw inspiration from as many other scientific disciplines as possible. In practice, however, this has tended to happen at the price of the holistic approach to which he and Braudel had aspired. Indeed, recent years have seen a bemusing fragmentation of scientific history into a multiplicity of more or less unconnected ‘inter-disciplinary’ hybrids.

This has certainly been true of attempts to import psychoanalysis to history. Freud himself was, of course, a positivist at heart, whose main goal was to reveal laws of the individual unconsciousness - hence his call for ‘a strict and universal application of determinism to mental life’. A strict historical application of his theories, however, would seem to imply the writing of biography. Even attempts to write the ‘psycho-history’ of social groups must depend heavily on the analysis of individual testimony;
¹³⁰
and such testimony rarely lends itself to the sorts of analysis Freud could apply to his patients, whom he could interrogate with leading questions and even, on occasion, hypnotise. For this reason, Freud’s real influence on historical writing has tended to be indirect: a matter of terminology which has passed into general, casual usage (‘the unconscious‘, ‘repression‘, ‘inferiority complex’ and so on) rather than strict imitation. Similar problems arise with the historical application of more recent forms of behaviourist psychology. Here too there is a determinist tendency, most obviously manifest in the attempts to import game theory and rational-choice theory into history. True, the assumptions about human behaviour made in the prisoner’s dilemma game and its various derivatives are often more readily observable than those suggested by Freud. But they are no less deterministic - hence the tendency of psycho-historians to dismiss contemporary expressions of intention when they do not fit their model, using the old Gramscian excuse of ‘false consciousness’. Game theory, like psychoanalysis, is also necessarily individualistic. The only way around this problem for historians who wish to apply it to social groups is to take up diplomatic history, where states can, in the time-honoured tradition, be anthropomorphised.
¹³¹

Partly because of this individualising tendency, it has been anthropological models of
collective
psychology or ‘mentality’ which have been most popular with historians.
¹³²
In particular, the approach of Clifford Geertz - ‘thick description’ which aims to fit a set of ‘signifying signs’ into an intelligible structure - has attracted influential imitators.
¹³³
The result has been a new kind of cultural history, in which culture (broadly defined) has been more or less freed from the traditional determining role of the material base.
¹³⁴
For a variety of reasons - partly the way anthropologists tend to do their fieldwork, partly the disrepute into which the notion of ‘national character’ has fallen and partly the political vogue for ‘communities’ - this has more often meant popular and local culture than high and national culture. Emmanuel Leroy Ladurie’s
Montaillou
and Natalie Zemon Davis’s
Return of Martin Guerre
are perhaps the classic examples of what has become known as ‘microhistory’.
¹³⁵
But similar techniques have been applied to high culture at a national and even international level, most successfully by Simon Schama.
¹³⁶

There are obvious objections, however, to this new cultural history. Firstly, it can be objected that ‘microhistory’ chooses such trivial subjects for study that it represents a relapse into antiquarianism (though the historian’s choice of subject is usually best left to him, his publisher and the book market). A better objection relates to the issue of causation. Anthropologists, like sociologists, are traditionally concerned more with structures than with processes of change. Historians seeking to adopt anthropological models therefore tend to be thrown back on their own discipline’s traditional resources when seeking to explain - for example - the decline of belief in witchcraft.
¹³⁷
Finally and most seriously, there is a tendency for the ‘thick description’ of mentalities to degenerate into rampant subjectivism, a game of free association with only tangential links to empirical evidence. The claims of this kind of history to be scientific in any meaningful sense seem dubious.

It has been partly because of this creeping subjectivism and partly because of the historian’s distinctive and perennial preoccupation with change as opposed to structure that recent years have seen a revival of interest in the narrative form.
¹³⁸
Of course, the notion that the historian’s primary role is to impose a narrative order on the confusion of past events is an old one. In their different ways, both Carlyle and Macaulay had seen their role in these terms. Indeed, Louis Mink was really rephrasing a Victorian idea when he summarised ‘the aim of historical knowledge’ as ‘to discover the grammar of events’ and ‘convert congeries of events into concatenations’.
¹³⁹
This explains the renewed interest of Hayden White and others in the great ‘literary artefacts’ of the previous century.
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It also explains why the revival of narrative has been welcomed by some traditionalists, particularly those who (simplistically) equate scientific history with cliometric number-crunching.
¹⁴¹
In his critique of ‘new’ history, Barzun rejoiced in the subjectivism of historical writing, and echoed Carlyle’s view of the fundamentally confused nature of past events:

To Barzun, this was plain ‘common sense’: the historian’s task was not to be a social scientist but to ‘put the reader in touch’ with ‘events’ and ‘feelings’ - to feed his ‘primitive pleasure in story’. On the other hand, the revival of narrative has been just as congenial to followers of fashion, who would like nothing better than to apply the techniques of literary criticism to the ultimate ‘text’: the written record of the past itself. The revival of narrative has therefore been Janus-faced: on one side, a revival of interest in traditional literary models for the writing of history;
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on the other, an influx of modish terminology (textual deconstruction, semiotics and so on) for the reading of it.
¹⁴⁴
Post-modernism has hit history,
¹⁴⁵
even if the post-modernists are merely rehashing old idealist nostrums when they declare history ‘an interpretative practice, not an objective, neutral science‘ When Joyce writes that ’History is never present to us in anything but a discursive form’ and that ‘the events, structures and processes of the past are indistinguishable from the forms of documentary representation ... and the historical discourses that construct them’, he is merely repeating what Collingwood said (better) over half a century ago.