“History is not merely what happened: it is what happened in the context of what might have happened.” - Hugh Trevor-Roper.
One of the main criticisms of counter-factual histories is that they typically involve wishful thinking. This is an important charge, and obviously often true, sometimes troublingly so. However, there is an important sense in which I am willing to plead guilty to the charge.
How I wish the past had been different. How I wish various people and peoples in it had been more brave, more truthful, more ethical. How I wish more people had possessed active social hope.
How I wish the past had been different. But it wasn’t.
Yet the future can be. We can avoid making similar mistakes. We can to some extent avoid falling similarly short in our will, in our organising, in our authenticity, in our ambition, in our sense-making, in our reality-basedness.
This is a key reason for engaging in counter-factual history. Learning from when we fell short before.
History as it is lived, history as it is made, presents continually as involving choices. It presents thus, over and over, in the present. That’s what it is to be in the present: to appreciate that you are not a puppet, and that your future is to some real extent open. To ignore this is to ignore shared subjective reality, and thus to ignore how history is actually made. Choices only make sense if other outcomes contingent on those choices being made differently are actively contemplated and envisaged. Historical actors constantly and routinely imagine futures that are counter-factual to what actually happens (or to what they decide to try to help to happen), in large and small ways, across short and long reaches of time.
Those imaginings should be our starting point in looking back on the past, on paths not taken.
As Allan Megill has pointed out, all historical explanations, explanations of why something happened, are counter-factual in that they only make sense in contrasting what happened to other things that might have happened (Historical Knowledge, Historical Error, Chicago, 2007, pp.151-4).
It’s worth remembering too the obvious truth that whenever we criticise someone, anyone, for what they’ve done, including if we criticise counter-factual historians or for that matter their critics, we are implicitly engaging in a miniature counter-factual history! We do so in hope of their or our going forward better.
At every single point in time alternatives are possible; either alternative chances (random) or alternative decisions (deliberate) or (and this is the norm) some combination of both. To a lesser or a greater extent, an infinite number of possible pasts or futures open up at every single moment. We need eternal vigilance for the opportunities that present themselves or that may be magicked up from the seemingly impossible even, by way of changing the agenda, the frame, or the level of ambition. We need not determinism but determination. We need to recognise contingency as well as agency so that we try our very best, determinedly. Contingency means that what is possible may be much wider than it seems. Agency means that there is always something that is possible, and to avoid the tyranny of hindsight we need to notice that all historical actors including ourselves operate under conditions of epistemic restriction. So, leaders need to appeal to the possible achievability of things that may be possible given what they believe possibly might be possible; even if sometimes it turns out in retrospect that the sphere of the possible was rather less. In writing counter-factual history, we need to operate within the confines of what was actually possible but bear in mind that those confines are often not apparent at the time, and that sometimes rupturing the confines of the apparently possible may be the only way to expand the collective sense of the possible enough to achieve the maximum that is possible.
The considerations I’ve outlined here in this brief introduction to my counter-histories project are, it will be noted, in some cases especially relevant to historians, and in some cases especially relevant to others. Professional historians have rather different interests from activists, thought-leaders, engaged and organic intellectuals. Counter-factual history is not mainly a contribution to historic research but a crucial aspect of action-preparation, of movement-strategy, of agential orientation to the possible. This is why it matters. This is why we need counter-factual history now more than ever. We don’t generally engage in counter-factual history to find out more about the period of the past that the history concerns, but to better relate our history to the present and the future. Counter-factual history matters more for the philosophy of history and for politics than it does for history itself.
The agents who make change are rarely just individuals. My counter-histories differ from most in that they often include an essential role for movements or collectives doing different. Often, if an individual alone tries to change something, inertial forces revert back to the norm. This is what historians call ‘over-determination’. In a counter-history, it is often not credible that things could take a significantly different path than they actually did, unless there is something weighty, such as an organisation or a social movement willing to back that path.
Often, historians and others have supposed that progress or even history is somehow itself a force that will over-determine the big picture of how things pan out. This is a very dangerous idea. It is utterly unwise the assume that history is on ‘our’ side. No. We have to make it turn out well. As best we can. In circumstances rarely or never of our choosing.
To change the future, we will be best served if we dare to contemplate pasts that weren’t, so that our wishes for a different future have their maximum possible efficacy. When you can identify the different past you wish for, then the different path you want to set the future on becomes clearer, too… and then perhaps you can take it. With determination.