Fact or Value

Dakin: The first one: when Chamberlain resigned as Prime Minister in 1940 Churchill wasn’t the first thought; Halifax more generally acceptable.
But on the afternoon when the decision was taken Halifax chose to go to the dentist. If Halifax had had better teeth we might have lost the war.
[. . .]
Montgomery took over the Eighth Army before Alamein but he wasn’t the first choice. Churchill had appointed General Gott. Gott was flying home to London in an unescorted plane when, purely by chance, a lost German fighter spotted his plane and shot him down. So it was Montgomery who took over, seeing this afterwards, of course, as the hand of God.

Irwin: That’s brilliant. First class.

Dakin: It’s a good game.

Irwin: It’s more than a game. Thinking about what might have happened alerts you to the consequences of what did.

Dakin: It’s subjunctive history.

(Excerpt from Alan Bennett’s The History Boys)

If history is the study of things that happened in the past then what do we call the study of things that didn’t happen? Is ‘counterfactual history’ merely an outrageous oxymoron designed to provoke the votaries of the ‘science of res gestae’ (Collingwood)? Meaningless exercises in ‘what-iffery’?

Around the time that modern historians and philosophers of history were engaged in defining the historical method, the earliest forays in the realm of counterfactual history had already started. Even as Benedetto Croce famously banished the conditional tense from the precincts of history, his contemporary G. M. Trevelyan wrote a prize-winning essay titled ‘If Napoleon had won the Battle of Waterloo’ (1907), prophetically anticipating the central preoccupation of the counterfactual method: what if Hitler had won the Second World War? In 1931, J. C. Squire published a collection of essays titled If It Had Happened Otherwise, featuring, among others, an essay on the American Civil War by Winston Churchill, another perennial favourite of the subjunctive historians. But it could be argued that its origins are as old as history itself. From Tacitus’s musings on ‘What if the Pisos ruled Rome’ to Machiavelli’s wistful digressions on Cesare Borgia’s missteps, to Gibbon’s speculation on Saracen victory over the Franks, haven’t speculation and suggestion always been the cornerstones of the historian’s craft?

The speculative method really came into its own in the second half of the century, building up to a crescendo in the last twenty years. Scholars like Philip Tetlock, Aaron Belkin, Niall Ferguson and Catherine Gallagher have sought to define the epistemic boundaries of what is, in effect, neither fact nor, properly speaking, fiction. Gallagher (2018) rigorously distinguishes between ‘alternate history’ (a series of counterfactual events leading to the creation of a sustained fictional world), ‘alternate historical’ fiction (with invented characters) and the more rigid ‘counterfactual history’ which to varying degrees sticks to the ceteris paribus rule, i.e. imagines the possible worlds created by the variation of one or a few factors, other things remaining unchanged.

In this series, we are primarily interested in this third sort of subjunctive history: what is the point of such enquiries, and what are its pitfalls? Does it even merit the label of history? And, when we willingly suspend the clarity of hindsight to immerse ourselves in the chaos of the past, do we emerge as better readers of history?

Of note is the curious alliance between conservative, rightwing politics and counterfactual history. From Squire to Churchill to Ferguson, they range from fascist to racist to conservative. On the other hand, Marxist historians like E. H. Carr and E. P. Thompson have been dismissive of speculative history. Why are thinkers most invested in envisaging alternate futures so vehemently opposed to ‘what-iffing’ the past? And conversely, what are the stakes of the political right in imagining other historical realities?