Altered Pasts by Richard J Evans (Little, Brown, £20.99)
In this characteristically pugnacious book, Cambridge historian Richard J Evans attacks the current fashion for “counter-factual” history—the imagining of alternative versions of the past. Evans’s principal target is not the counter-factual as “entertainment,” though he is grouchily dismissive of such “frivolities,” especially when they’re written by those unfortunates who don’t have a PhD. Rather, he has in his sights the brand of “virtual” history practised by Niall Ferguson and other, predominantly right-wing, historians. The political dimension here is important: as Evans rightly points out, counter-factuals are never “valueneutral” and, almost invariably, cast more light on the present, and on their authors’ beliefs and prejudices, than they do on the past. For Ferguson and others, one major purpose of counter-factual history is to restore free will and contingency to history— factors, they argue, that Marxist historians have tended to downplay.
Evans insists that this is a caricature of Marxism, and of Marx himself. “People make their own history,” Marx wrote, “but they do not make it as they please.” And this turns out to be a point that Ferguson himself endorses when he concedes that the range of possible alternatives to what actually happened is not infinite. Evans, for his part, allows that counter-factual hypotheses do have a role to play in serious historical research, since they allow historians to test the strength of their causal explanations. Counter-factuals, it seems, “come in many guises”—a more judicious conclusion than the polemical brio of the early parts of this book leads the reader to expect.
In this characteristically pugnacious book, Cambridge historian Richard J Evans attacks the current fashion for “counter-factual” history—the imagining of alternative versions of the past. Evans’s principal target is not the counter-factual as “entertainment,” though he is grouchily dismissive of such “frivolities,” especially when they’re written by those unfortunates who don’t have a PhD. Rather, he has in his sights the brand of “virtual” history practised by Niall Ferguson and other, predominantly right-wing, historians. The political dimension here is important: as Evans rightly points out, counter-factuals are never “valueneutral” and, almost invariably, cast more light on the present, and on their authors’ beliefs and prejudices, than they do on the past. For Ferguson and others, one major purpose of counter-factual history is to restore free will and contingency to history— factors, they argue, that Marxist historians have tended to downplay.
Evans insists that this is a caricature of Marxism, and of Marx himself. “People make their own history,” Marx wrote, “but they do not make it as they please.” And this turns out to be a point that Ferguson himself endorses when he concedes that the range of possible alternatives to what actually happened is not infinite. Evans, for his part, allows that counter-factual hypotheses do have a role to play in serious historical research, since they allow historians to test the strength of their causal explanations. Counter-factuals, it seems, “come in many guises”—a more judicious conclusion than the polemical brio of the early parts of this book leads the reader to expect.
