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Authors: Niall Ferguson

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Hollywood never tires of exploiting our fascination with what grammarians call the subjunctive conditional (‘But for X, there might not have been Y’). In Frank Capra’s
It’s a Wonderful Life
, Jimmy Stewart’s guardian angel catches him on the brink of suicide and gives him a glimpse of how much worse the world - or at least his home town - would have been if he had never lived.
Peggy Sue Got Married
revolves around Kathleen Turner’s middle-aged regrets about her choice of husband years before; while in
Back to the Future
, Michael J. Fox very nearly prevents his own conception by travelling back in time and unwittingly luring his mother-to-be away from his father-to-be. Appalled at the death of his girlfriend in an earthquake, Christopher Reeves’s
Superman
reverses time and extricates her from the ‘future’ disaster he and the audience have just witnessed. Authors of science-fiction have returned time and again to the same fantasy. In John Wyndham’s
Random Quest
, for example, the physicist Colin Trafford is catapulted into a parallel universe where there has been no Second World War and no atom bomb, to find that his
alter ego
is a womanising, wife-abusing novelist. In a similar story, Ray Bradbury imagines the entire world subtly but profoundly altered by a time traveller who inadvertently treads on a prehistoric butterfly.
1
Of course, Hollywood and science fiction are not academically respectable. However, the same idea has engaged the attention of impeccably reputable writers too. In his Weimar masterpiece,
The Man without Qualities
, Robert Musil reflected at length on our predisposition to think counterfactually:
If there is such a thing as a sense of reality - and no one will doubt that it has its
raison d‘être
- then there must also be something that one can call a sense of possibility. Anyone possessing it does not say, for instance: Here this or that has happened, will happen, must happen. He uses his imagination and says: Here such and such might, should or ought to happen. And if he is told that something is the way it is, then he thinks: Well, it could probably just as easily be some other way. So the sense of possibility might be defined outright as the capacity to think how everything could ‘just as easily be’, and to attach no more importance to what is than to what is not.... [For] the possible covers ... the not yet manifested intentions of God. A possible experience or possible truth does not equate to real experience or real truth minus the value ‘real’; ... in the opinion of its devotees, it has in it something out and out divine, a fiery, soaring quality, a constructive will, a conscious utopianism that does not shrink from reality but treats it, on the contrary, as ... an invention.
Nevertheless - as Musil also suggested - there will always be those for whom this sense of the possible is deeply suspect:
Unfortunately [the consequences of such a disposition] not infrequently make the things that other people admire appear wrong and the things that other people prohibit permissible, or even make both a matter of indifference. Such possibilitarians live, it is said, within a finer web, a web of hazy imaginings, fantasy and the subjunctive mood. If children show this tendency it is vigorously driven out of them, and in their presence such people are referred to as crackbrains, dreamers, weaklings, know-alls, and carpers and cavillers. When one wants to praise these poor fools, one sometimes calls them idealists.
2
And that, it might be said, rather neatly sums up the attitude of generations of historians, for whom, in the dismissive phrase of E. H. Carr, ‘counterfactual’ history is a mere ‘parlour game’, a ‘red herring’.
3
In this view, there are and were literally no two ways about it, and questions beginning ‘What if?’ are simply not worth asking. To contemplate ‘the things that might have happened’ is not only to subscribe to ‘the Bad King John‘ or ’Cleopatra’s Nose’ theory of history. It is to be a bad loser too:
Plenty of people who have suffered directly or vicariously from the results of the Bolshevik victory ... desire to register their protest against it; and this takes the form, when they read history, of letting their imagination run riot on all the more agreeable things that might have happened.... This is a purely emotional and unhistorical reaction.... In a group or a nation which is riding in the trough, not on the crest, of historical events, theories that stress the role of chance or accident in history will be found to prevail. The view that examination results are a lottery will always be popular among those who have been placed in the third class.... History is ... a record of what people did, not what they failed to do.... The historian is concerned with those who ... achieved something.
4
This hostility to counterfactual arguments has been and remains surprisingly widespread among professional historians. Indeed, E. P. Thompson has gone so far as to dismiss ‘counterfactual fictions’ as mere
Geschichtswissenschlopff
, unhistorical shit’.
5
To be sure, not all historians would call themselves ‘determinists’ even in the loose sense of the term favoured by Anglo-Marxists like Carr and Thompson. There are important differences between believers in historical predestination - the idea that events are in some way preprogrammed, so that what was, had to be - and believers in more limited notions of causation. Not all believers in a linear chain or stream of causation, in which all events are the sole possible consequences of their ‘determining’ antecedents, share the belief of many nineteenth-century determinists that it has a purpose or meaningful direction. There are certainly profound differences between religious historians, who see divine agency as the ultimate (but not necessarily the sole) cause of events; materialists, who regard history as intelligible in terms analogous to, or derived from, those of the natural sciences (such as universal laws); and idealists, for whom history is the transformation of past ‘thought’ into an intelligible (and often teleological) structure by the imagination of the historian. Nevertheless, there is a consensus which transcends all these differences. All three schools of thought regard ‘what if’ questions as fundamentally inadmissible.
Although a firm opponent of the materialist determinism favoured by the likes of Carr and Thompson, Benedetto Croce’s attack on the ‘absurdity’ of counterfactual questions was unequivocal:
When judgement is brought to bear upon a fact, the fact is taken as it is and not as it might otherwise have been ... Historical necessity has to be affirmed and continually reaffirmed in order to exclude from history the ‘conditional’ which has no rightful place there. ... What is forbidden is ... the anti-historical and illogical ‘if’. Such an ‘if arbitrarily divides the course of history into necessary facts and accidental facts ... Under the sign of this ‘if’, one fact in a narrative is graded as necessary and another one as accidental, and the second is mentally eliminated in order to espy how the first would have developed along its own lines if it had not been disturbed by the second. This is a game which all of us in moments of distraction or idleness indulge in, when we muse on the way our life might have turned out if we had not met a certain person ..., cheerfully treating ourselves, in these meditations, as though we were the necessary and stable element, it simply not occurring to us ... to provide for the transformation of this self of ours which is, at the moment of thinking, what it is, with all its experiences and regrets and fancies, just because we did meet that person ... For if we went on to such a full exploration of reality, the game would soon be up ... When the attempt is made to play this sort of game on the field of history, where it is thoroughly out of place, the effect is too wearisome to be long maintained.
6
Still more fiercely antagonistic to counterfactualism was the English idealist philosopher Michael Oakeshott. In Oakeshott’s view, when the historian ‘considers by a kind of ideal experiment what might have happened as well as what the evidence obliges him to believe did happen ‘he steps ’outside the current of historical thought’:
It is possible that had St Paul been captured and killed when his friends lowered him from the walls of Damascus, the Christian religion might never have become the centre of our civilisation. And on that account, the spread of Christianity might be attributed to St Paul’s escape.... But when events are treated in this manner, they cease at once to be historical events. The result is not merely bad or doubtful history, but the complete rejection of history ... The distinction ... between essential and incidental events does not belong to historical thought at all; it is a monstrous incursion of science into the world of history.
And Oakeshott went on:
The question in history is never what must, or what might have taken place, but solely what the evidence obliges us to conclude did take place. Had George III not been King of England when the trouble arose in the American colonies, it is possible that the differences there might never have led to war; but to conclude from this that George III was an odd chance which at this critical point altered the ‘natural’ sequence of events is to have abandoned history for something less profitable if more entertaining.... The Historian is never called upon to consider what might have happened had circumstances been different.
7
To imagine alternative courses of events is thus, in Oakeshott’s words, ‘a pure myth, an extravagance of the imagination’. This must be one of the few things about which he agreed with Carr and Thompson.
Such hostile views from such disparate figures partly explain why answers to the kind of counterfactual questions I began by listing have more often been provided by writers of fiction than by historians - one thinks, for example, of Robert Harris’s recent novel
Fatherland
, a detective story set in an imaginary Europe twenty years after a Nazi victory.
8
As such books go, it is well researched. But it is irredeemably fictional, in as much as the narrative follows the classic pattern of a popular thriller; and as such it tends to diminish the plausibility of the historical setting. Instead of being a catastrophe which very nearly happened - and to avert which millions perished - a Nazi victory in the Second World War becomes merely a titillating backdrop for a good departure-lounge yarn. Numerous other works of fiction have been predicated on such counterfactual historical assumptions: Kingsley Amis’s
The Alteration
, which wishfully undoes the English Reformation, is another good example.
9
But they have no more to do with history than the books of ‘futurology’ which the London Library politely categorises as ‘Imaginary History’. Futurologists offer guesses as to which of the plausible alternatives which confront us today will prevail in the years ahead, and usually base their predictions on the extrapolation of past trends. To judge by the accuracy of such works, however, they might as well be based on astrology or tarot cards.
10
Nevertheless, there have been serious historians who have ventured to address (or at least to pose) counterfactual questions. Gibbon was always fascinated by the tenuousness of certain historical developments, and occasionally allowed himself to write in an explicitly counterfactual way. A good example is his brief sketch of what might have happened had it not been for the victory of Charles Martel over the Saracens in 733:
A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire; the repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the Highlands of Scotland; the Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or the Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mohammed.
11
This, of course, was a mere ironical aside, a Gibbonian joke at the expense of the university which had taught him so little. Altogether more ambitious was the French writer Charles Renouvier, whose
Uchronie
(published exactly a hundred years after the first volume of Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall
) was nothing less than a ‘Historical and apocryphal essay on the development of European civilisation as it has not been, but as it might perhaps have been’. Renouvier described himself as ‘a sort of Swedenborg of history - a visionary who dreams the past’, and characterised his book as a ‘mixture of real facts and imaginary events’.
12
Presented as the testament of a seventeenth-century anti-determinist, relayed and supplemented by his descendants,
Uchronie’s
central counterfactual is not wholly dissimilar to Gibbon’s. Christianity fails to establish itself in the West, as a result of a slight change in the course of events at the end of the reign of Marcus Aurelius. Only in the East does Christianity take root, leaving the West to enjoy an extra millennium of classical culture. As a consequence, when Christianity does reach the West, it is merely one of many religions tolerated in an essentially secular Europe. As might be expected in view of Renouvier’s liberal sympathies, the book has a marked anti-clerical thrust.
13
In 1907 - six years after Renouvier published a second edition of
Uchronie
- that most self-consciously literary of Edwardian historians G. M. Trevelyan wrote (at the suggestion of the editor of the
Westminster Gazette
) an essay entitled: ‘If Napoleon had won the Battle of Waterloo’. Like Gibbon‘s, Trevelyan’s is an alternative past calculated to unnerve rather than inspire. With Napoleon supreme on the continent following his victory at Waterloo, Britain remains stuck on the ‘beaten track of tyranny and obscurantism’. A revolution led by Byron is brutally suppressed and a generation of young radicals is driven to fight for freedom on ‘the distant South American pampas. Napoleon dies at last in 1836, the enemy alike of the ancien regime and of democratic liberty’. In short, no Waterloo, no Whig history.
14
BOOK: Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals
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