Unmaking the West:
Explorations of Alternative Histories and Counterfactual Worlds
Editors: Philip E. Tetlock, Richard Ned Lebow, and Geoffrey Parker
Table of Contents/Tentative Titles
PART I: Conceptual Frameworks
Chapter 1: The Logic and Psycho-logic of Counterfactual Thought Experiments
by Philip E. Tetlock
Chapter 2: Counterfactual Thought Experiments in History
by Richard Ned Lebow
Part II: Radical Re-Routings of History
Chapter 3: The Others’ Last Chance -- Salamis, 480 B.C.E.
Point/Counterpoint by Victor Hanson
Chapter 4: Europe’s Peculiar Path: European Cultures and the Unlikely Transition to
Modernity
by Jack A. Goldstone
Chapter 5: War, Power, and the Rise of the West, 1450-1900
by Jeremy Black
Chapter 6: Undoing World War I: Minor Tinkering Yields Big Effects
by Richard Ned Lebow
Chapter 7: The Role of Viral Plagues in Altering the Landscape of History
by Michael B.A. Oldstone
Part III: Middle-Ground Positions: Between Chance and Inevitability
Chapter 8:
Between Alexander and Mohammed
by Timothy Barnes
Chapter 9:
Islamic Europe
by Ira Lapidus
Chapter 10:
Chapter 11: Aztecs Defeat Cortés
2
by Ross Hassig
Chapter 12: The British Conquest of India and the Swing to the East
by Edward Ingram
Chapter 13: King Kong and Cold Fusion: Entities That Never Were but Could Have
Been
by Joel Mokyr
Part IV: Only Minor Variations on the Observed Theme Were Possible
Chapter 14: The West is More Resilient Than That
by Barry Strauss (counterpoint to Hanson)
Chapter 15: Could World War I Have Been Averted? Only by Radically Altering History
by Paul W. Schroeder
Part V: What Have We Learned?
Chapter 16: Synthetic Observations and Concluding Remarks
by Geoffrey Parker
3
Chapter 1
The Logic and Psycho-logic of Counterfactual Thought Experiments
Philip E. Tetlock
“The vaunted progress of life is really random motion away from simple beginnings, not directed
impetus toward inherently advantageous complexity ... If we could replay the game of life again
and again, always starting at the left wall [the first single-celled organism] and expanding
thereafter in diversity, we would get a right tail almost every time, but the inhabitants of this
region of greatest complexity would be wildly and unpredictably different in each rendition -and the vast majority of replays would never produce (on the finite scale of a planet’s lifetime) a
creature with self-consciousness. Humans are here by the luck of the draw, not the inevitability
of life’s direction or evolution’s mechanism.”
Stephen Jay Gould, Full House
“Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is
animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it -- an intelligence sufficiently
vast to submit these data to analysis -- it would embrace in the same formula the movements of
the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be
uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present before its eyes.”
Pierre-Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities
“Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined
pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following
upon another as wave follows upon wave ... Progress is not a law of nature.”
Herbert A.L. Fisher, History of Europe
4
The Logic and Psycho-logic of
Counterfactual Thought Experiments
Historians have always had the option of framing questions in either factual or
counterfactual forms. The long-running controversy over the rise of the West is no exception.
Many scholars have wondered how a comparatively small number of Europeans, in only a few
centuries, managed to surpass all other peoples on the planet in wealth and power.1 This factual
framing takes a fundamental feature of our world and invites analysts to mobilize their favorite
explanatory themes -- a competitive multi-state system, deep-rooted traditions of private property
and individual rights, the emergence of science and technology -- in ways that render the rise of
the West an inevitable result of powerful forces operating on well-defined initial conditions.
We know that the historical analyst has done a good job when we walk away convinced that
things pretty much had to work out as they did.
Alternatively, scholars have the option of posing the question in counterfactual form:
How close did history come to serving up a different, perhaps radically different, menu of
outcomes? And what can we say about these alternative worlds that almost came into being?
Is it possible, with minimal modification of the historical record, to "undo" the Western
dominance of the last several centuries -- to redirect events so that the West never rises at all
(say, due to a shift in tactics at the Battle of Salamis that permits the Persian fleet to defeat the
Athenians) or so that the rise of the West is nipped in the bud by potentially more dynamic
competitors such as Islam in the 8th century or China in the 15th? And within European
civilization, how easy is it to eliminate -- by accident or disease or other quasi-random
mechanisms -- one of the multitude of necessary conditions for jumpstarting the positive
feedback cycle of scientific investigation, technical innovation, and commercial and military
application widely thought to undergird the exponential expansion of European influence?
Finally, assuming Western ascendancy, could it have taken more malign or benign forms than it
did? Might not one of the many internal bids to achieve European hegemony -- whether by the
Habsburgs in the sixteenth century, by France in the nineteenth century or by Germany in the
twentieth century-- have succeeded, thereby transforming the nature of Western hegemony?
These counterfactual queries remind us that things did not have to work out as they did. History
is not just what happened; what happened acquires its full significance only in the context of our
assumptions about what might have happened.2
1
1. The literature is staggeringly large and highlights a plethora of plausible causal candidates.
See, for example, D.S.L. Cardwell, Turning Points in Western Technology: A Study of
Technology, Science, and History. (New York: Neale Watson, 1972); William H. McNeill, The
Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982); Eric L. Jones, The European Miracle: Environments,
Economies, and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia. (Cambridge: University Press.
2d ed., 1987); Jean Baechler, John A. Hall, and Michael Mann, eds., Europe and the Rise of
Capitalism. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988); Jared Diamond, “Ecological Collapses of Past
Civilizations,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 138, 3 (Sept. 1994),
363-370; Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years.
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1995); David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of
Nations. (New York: Norton, 1997); Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of
Human Societies. (New York: Norton, 1997).
2
2. Many historians echo this theme and stress the central role of counterfactual claims in
5
Factual and counterfactual framings of historical questions need not, of course, be
mutually exclusive: good scholars can and frequently do alternate between these complementary
styles of interrogating archives, witnesses, and participants. Often, however, a palpable tension
exists between these two ways of teasing causal insights from the past. Some influential
historians have excoriated “might-have-been" speculation. They tell us that history is tough
enough as it is -- as it actually is -- without worrying about how things could have worked out
differently in this or that fictitious scenario. Why make a difficult task impossible? We do
scholarship a grave disservice by coordinating conferences and editing volumes on
counterfactual reasoning. We are luring our colleagues "down a methodological rathole" in
pursuit of unanswerable metaphysical questions that revolve around ancient riddles of
determinism and free will.3
The ferocity and stature of the critics are a bit unnerving. But equally authoritative voices
warn of the perils of an exclusive focus on what happened and of the attendant neglect of what
might have happened. Hugh Trevor-Roper put the case with characteristic forthrightness when
he deplored E.H. Carr's dogmatic dismissal of counterfactual history: "To assume that what
happened was bound to happen is to beg the question of why it happened, and to deprive history,
at one blow, both of its lessons and its life... If we are to study history as a living subject, not
merely as a colored pageant, or an antiquarian chronicle, or a dogmatic scheme, we must...leave
some room for the imagination."4 Counterfactual history is not, moreover, the preserve of
imaginative historians in search of dramatic turning points that redirect events down radically
different paths. Practitioners of counterfactual history cover a wide intellectual spectrum within
contemporary social science, including: (a) methodologists5 and philosophers of science6 who
rightly remind us that history provides no control groups and who insist that if we want to extract
any causal lessons from history we cannot avoid posing the counterfactual question: How
would events have unfolded if hypothesized cause x had taken on a different value?; (b)
economic historians and model-builders7, game theorists8, and designers of computer
historical analysis. See H.R. Trevor-Roper, “History and imagination,” in H. Lloyd-Jones, V.
Pearl, and B. Worden (eds.), History and imagination: Essays in honour of H.R.
Trevor-Roper. (London: Duckworth, 1981); N. Ferguson, Virtual history: Alternatives and
counterfactuals. (London: Picador, 1997).
3
3. For strong warnings from prominent historians against wandering down the counterfactual
path, see M. Oakeshott, Experience and its Modes. (Cambridge, 1933); A.J.P. Taylor, The
Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848-1918. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1954); E.H. Carr, What is
History? (London: Penguin Books, 1961); D.H. Fisher, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic
of Historical Thought. (New York: Harper & Row, 1970); E.P. Thompson, ‘The Poverty of
Theory,’ in idem, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays. (London, 1983).
4
4. H. Trevor-Roper, 1960. op. cit.
5
5. James Fearon, Counterfactuals and hypothesis testing in political science. World Politics, 43
(1991), 169-95; G. King, R.O. Keohane, & S. Verba, Designing social inquiry: Scientific
inference in qualitative research. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
6
6. N. Goodman, Fact, fiction, and forecast. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983).
7
7. R. Fogel, Railroads and American Growth: Essays in Econometric History. (Baltimore:
6
simulations9 who rely on formal axiomatic systems to gauge the relative plausibility, sometimes
even probability, of alternative worlds; (c) chaos and complexity theorists who use thought
experiments to illustrate how easily small random events can have massive effects thanks to the
amplifying mechanisms of positive feedback and how easily, as a result of the irreversibility of
such processes, small initial advantages can “lock” societies and economies into decidedly
suboptimal outcomes10; (d) radical constructivists who see the centrality of counterfactual
inference to narratives and plot structures as further proof of the profound subjectivity of all
historical interpretation.11
Especially worth noting here is the double-barreled cognitive science and epistemological
argument that stresses the dangers of exclusively factual framings of historical questions and the
benefits of balancing factual and counterfactual framings. Once we know an historical outcome,
it becomes far too easy to portray the past as inevitable by squeezing now-known events into the
most convenient deterministic scheme (there are so many on offer). "Outcome knowledge," in
the jargon of the cognitive psychologists, contaminates our perceptions of even the recent past,
making it exceptionally difficult to recall how unsure we once were of what was going to
happen.12 Hawkins and Hastie have reviewed the elegant experimental literature documenting
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964); P. David, “Clio and the Economics of QWERTY,”
American Economic Review Proceedings, 75 (1985); Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi,
“Political regimes and economic growth,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 7 (1995), 51-69.
8. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, “Counterfactuals and international affairs: Some insights from
game theory,” In P.E. Tetlock and A.Belkin (eds.) Counterfactual thought experiments in world
politics. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
8
9
9. Robert Axelrod, The complexity of cooperation. (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1997); L.E. Cederman, Emergent Actors in World Politics: How States and Nations Develop
and Dissolve. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
10
10. Curiously enough, this highly mathematical school of thought--with its nonlinear
differential equations and Markovian disturbances--has special resonance among historians who
dislike cliometrics but dislike even more the application of sweepingly deterministic schemes to
the past (from old-fashioned Marxism-Leninism to modern game theory) and who seek to
preserve elements of surprise, contingency, and free will in their narratives (N. Ferguson, op. cit)
Applications of chaos and complexity theory now span the physical, biological and social
sciences: P. Bak and K. Chen, “Self-organized criticality,” Scientific American, 264 (Jan.
1991), 46-53; James Gleick, Chaos. (New York: Viking, 1988); B. Arthur, Increasing Returns
and Path-Dependence in the Economy. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1994); Axelrod, op
cit.
11
11. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe.
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975); Hayden White, The Content of the Form:
Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1990).
12. Baruch Fischhoff, “Hindsight is not equal to foresight: The effect of outcome knowledge
on judgement under uncertainty.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and
Performance, 1 (1975), 288-99. See also Geoffrey Hawthorn, Plausible worlds: Possibility and
understanding in history and the social sciences. (New York: Cambridge University Press,
12
7
this robust "certainty-of-hindsight" effect.13 There is also no shortage of real-life examples.
Events that experts deemed improbable, ex ante, are often judged "over-determined," ex post.
Few predicted World War I, the rise of the East Asian tigers, or the collapse of the Soviet Union
but virtually everyone today -- who claims professional competence in such matters -- stands
ready to trot out half a dozen "fundamental" or "structural" causes why these outcomes had to
happen roughly at the time and in the manner they did.14 Indeed, given the overwhelming array
of causal forces often invoked, it is difficult for some contemporary observers to resist the
inference that the original historical players were a tad dense not to appreciate where events were
heading. Creeping determinism emerges as a key obstacle to the time-honored objective of
historians to see the world as it appeared to decision-makers of the day, not as it appears now
with the benefits and curses of hindsight.
RATIONALE FOR THE VOLUME
In crafting guidelines to contributors to this volume, the three editors--a political
psychologist, a political scientist, and an historian-- staked out a deliberately nuanced
middle-ground position on the role of counterfactual inquiry. On the one hand, we agree with
historians such as Hugh Trevor-Roper and psychologists such as Baruch Fischhoff that
counterfactual framings of historical questions provide an invaluable antidote to the
certainty-of-hindsight bias -- a bias that exclusively factual framings encourage.15 There is a
powerful case to be made for giving freer rein to our counterfactual imaginations and preventing
the world that did occur from occluding our vision of possible worlds that may have "almost"
come into being at various junctures in history (even if, in doing so, we fall prey to yet another
psychological bias -- the "conjunction fallacy"-- of taking our what-if narratives too seriously
because we fail to appreciate how quickly the compounded probabilities of each link in even
1991); Philip E. Tetlock & Aaron Belkin, Counterfactual thought experiments in world politics.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); N. Ferguson, Virtual history: Alternatives and
counterfactuals. (London: Picador, 1997). For parallel arguments in narrative theory, see
Michael Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994); Gary Morson, Narrative and Freedom. (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1994).
13. Scott A. Hawkins and Reid Hastie, “Hindsight: Biased judgments of past events after the
outcomes are known,” Psychological Bulletin, 107 (1990), 311-27. For more extensive
discussion of how the very process of imagining possibilities or scenarios can alter the subjective
probability of the occurrence of the imagined events, see John S. Carroll, “The effect of
imagining an event on expectations for the event: An interpretation in terms of the availability
heuristic,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 14 (1978), 88-96; D.J. Koehler,
“Explanation, imagination, and confidence in judgment,” Psychological Bulletin, 110 (1991),
499-519.
13
14. Philip E. Tetlock, “Social Psychology and World Politics,” In Dan Gilbert, Susan
Fiske, & Gardner Lindzey (eds.), Handbook of Social Psychology. (New York: McGraw Hill,
1998).
14
15. Hugh Trevor-Roper, 1960, op. cit.; Baruch Fischhoff, “Hindsight is Not Equal to
Foresight: The Effect of Outcome Knowledge on Judgment Under Uncertainty,” Journal of
Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1 (1975), 288-99.
15
8
well-crafted stories asymptote toward zero).16 On the other hand, we acknowledge that
counterfactually framed questions are often profoundly difficult to answer and that most existing
collections of "what-if" history tend to be highly impressionistic and of markedly uneven quality,
even by the standards of fiction. "Counterfactual historians" often write as if they have carte
blanche to project whatever they wish into their hypothetical worlds -- settling old ideological
scores, indulging personal fantasies, amusing themselves and perhaps their readers with comic
coincidences, and titillating, whenever the opportunity arises, those quintessentially
counterfactual emotions of regret (over better worlds that almost were) and relief (over worse
fates that we barely escaped). Counterfactual history becomes a branch of social science
fiction.17
Entertaining though such literary excursions into possible worlds can be, the editorial
team was determined to avoid this fate for the current volume. Casual counterfactual history tells
us much more about the observer than it does about reality. Underscoring this point,
psychological research on counterfactual reasoning has revealed consistently powerful
correlations between the abstract ideological and theoretical orientations of scholars and their
16. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Extensional versus intuitive reasoning: The
conjunction fallacy in probability judgment,” Psychological Review, 90 (1983), 293-315.
16
17
17. Many counterfactual histories are most aptly characterized as fiction. See, for example,
J.C. Squire (eds.), If It Happened Otherwise: Lapses Into Imaginary History. (London/New
York/Toronto, 1932); D. Snowman (eds.), If It Had Been ... Ten Historical Fantasies. (London,
1979); J.M. Merriman (ed.), For Want of a Horse: Chance and Humor in History. (Lexington,
MA, 1984); Gregory Benford and Martine Greenberg (eds.), Hitler Victorious: Eleven Stories
of the German Victory in World War Two. (London, 1988); Robert Harris, Fatherland. (London,
1992); Niall Ferguson, Virtual history: Alternatives and counterfactuals. (London: Picador,
1997). We should not, however, be too dismissive of such exercises. Two epistemological
intuitions clash here. On the one hand are those who note that the more detail an author inserts
into a counterfactual scenario depicting what would have happened if history had been re-routed,
the more vanishingly improbable the scenario becomes as an inevitable logical consequence of
the compounding of linkage probabilities as we move across nodes in the decision tree. Even if
each connective link in the argument merits great confidence (say 0.8 on a 0 to 1.0 subjective
probability scale), the cumulative likelihood of a scenario that consists of only 10 such
connective links would quickly asymptote toward zero. Readers, however, easily get swept
away by a good story and fail to scrutinize each link as rigorously as they should and fail to
aggregate the cumulative uncertainty in the normatively correct manner (see Tversky and
Kahneman, op. cit.). On the other hand are those who warn that people devote such
disproportionate amounts of mental effort to explaining the real world that they regularly fall
prey to the certainty of hindsight effect. In this view, it is salutary to shift as much attention as
possible to possible worlds that might once have occurred, thereby inflating the perceived
likelihood of these scenarios. The best way to fight the ubiquitous certainty-of-hindsight bias is
by mobilizing two powerful counteracting biases, insensitivity to the compounding of
probabilities in narratives and the tendency to base likelihood judgments on the cognitive
availability or ease of retrieving the target event(s). Tetlock and Lebow develop this
“fighting-fire-with-fire” point further (Philip Tetlock and Richard Ned Lebow, “Alternative
histories of the Cuban missile crisis: Poking indeterminacy holes in covering laws,”
Unpublished manuscript, The Ohio State University, 1999).
9
top-of-the-head beliefs about what would have happened in specific historical situations.18 In
this vein, we know that scholars tend to reject counterfactual scenarios that undercut the
applicability of favorite “covering laws” to the past and that they reject these re-routings of
history all the more emphatically the greater their preference for parsimony and “explanatory
closure.” For instance, one recent survey of professional opinion has revealed that
neorealists--who view world politics as a self-equilibrating system governed by
balance-of-power laws that have prevented any one state from achieving dominance--were
especially disdainful of what-if stories that suggested that Philip II or Napoleon or Hitler might
easily have consolidated their domination of the continent if they had made certain decisions
just a bit differently. Moreover, those neorealists who had especially strong preferences for
parsimony were especially disdainful of these what-if stories. But it would be a mistake to
assume that close-call counterfactuals are always a nuisance to theorists who seek to apply their
neat and tidy generalizations to messy historical situations. Theorists who have forecasted events
that did not occur often embrace close-call counterfactuals enthusiastically when those
counterfactuals imply that the predicted event almost happened. For example, Marxists--who
represent a deterministic approach to history if ever there were one--have been known to argue
that were it not for the paranoid cunning of Stalin, the “Soviet experiment” (as it was once
affectionately known) would not have gone so awfully awry.
Some pessimists take observations of this sort and conclude that there is little point in
commissioning counterfactual case studies. Why bother when all we can reasonably hope to
discover from such exercises are the preconceptions with which we began? Here we confront
potentially the most devastating criticism of our project: counterfactual thought experiments are,
by their nature, hopelessly subjective. What is to stop true believers from drawing whatever
conclusions they want about what would have happened in hypothetical worlds of their own
mental creation--worlds that, needless to say, no one can ever visit or empirically document?
Indeed, what makes us think that counterfactual thought experiments are useful for answering
any kinds of historical questions? The mere fact that we want answers to questions about the rise
and fall of civilizations does not mean that such questions are answerable.
Let’s call the strong form of this position “epistemic despair.” It is impossible to learn
anything from counterfactual thought experiments that we were not already cognitively
(ideologically) predisposed to learn. People are incapable of surprising themselves. To invoke
the terminology of cognitive-science, counterfactual reasoning is necessarily theory-driven
reasoning. And how could it be otherwise? Historians do not have the inferential luxury of
control groups; they cannot rerun Western history with a different winner at Salamis and observe
what would have occurred. The control groups exist (if indeed “exist” is the right word) only in
their more or less disciplined imaginations. Epistemology abhors a vacuum. In the absence of
data, theory (or, if you prefer, ideology) fills the void.
This pessimistic assessment gains added credibility when we examine the determined
ingenuity with which some scholars have promoted their preferred disciplinary, theoretical, or
ideological perspectives on why Europeans, and not some other ethnically, regionally, or
religiously definable collection of people, came to exert influence so disproportionate to their
numbers. The debate over the rise of the West activates primordial intellectual prejudices. At
Philip E. Tetlock, “Close-call counterfactuals and belief-system defense: I was not almost
wrong but I was almost right,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75 (1998),
639-652.
18
10
one pole are the determinists who see the geopolitical and economic ascendancy of the West as
having been inevitable for a very long time indeed (easily back to 1500 A.D., often as far back as
900 or 1000 A.D., and in a few cases as far back as several thousand years). The reasons behind
this belief vary. There are now few open advocates of the racial superiority of European
genetic stock (a once popular position) but there are many more politically palatable forms of
determinism available in the late 20th century marketplace of ideas: biogeographical 19, cultural
and economic20, technological and military21 and geopolitical.22 There are, for example, those
who embrace the notion that history is an extremely efficient process of winnowing out
maladaptive institutional forms and that the emergence and triumph of capitalist forms of social
organization was in the cards all along.23 Complementing this emphasis are those scholars who
note other distinctive structural advantages of European polities: more deeply rooted legal and
historical traditions of private property and individual rights, a religion that encouraged
achievement in this world, and a fractious multi-state system that prevented any single power
from dominating all others and bringing all innovation to a grinding halt.
Epistemic pessimists argue that, try in good faith though these determinists might to
identify junctures at which history could be re-routed (without massively altering background
conditions or invoking preposterous assumptions about human nature and the workings of social
systems), their counterfactual thought experiments will inexorably lead them back to possible
worlds that differ only trivially from our own, real, world. What was and now is had to be.
At the other pole are the radical anti-determinists who believe, to adapt Gould’s famous
thought experiment, that if we were to rerun world history thousands of times from the same
antecedent conditions that prevailed as recently as, say, 1400, European dominance would be one
of the least likely outcomes. These scholars resent what they see as Eurocentric and
neoconservative triumphalism. They believe that the European achievement was a precarious
one indeed that can be easily unraveled at countless junctures. Other civilizations could have
been contenders (to paraphrase Marlon Brando) and would have been but for accidents of battle,
disease, bad leadership, and other miscellaneous slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. South
Asia and perhaps even East Africa might have been seized by 15th century Chinese if only there
had been more interest in the imperial court in technological innovation and territorial expansion;
some modified form of Aztec civilization could still control parts of central America if Cortes
had not been so bizarrely lucky in repeatedly escaping death and disaster; Europe might have
been conquered and “Islamicized” in the 8th century if the Moors had cared to launch a serious
invasion of France and Italy. And just as Europe’s rivals were victims of monumentally bad luck,
so Europe itself was the beneficiary of an extraordinary series of strokes of good fortune. Even
the Black Death, which claimed roughly one third of Europe’s population in the mid-fourteenth
19
Jared Diamond, op. cit.
20
David Landes. (1997). op. cit.
21
Willham McNeill. op. cit.
22
Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics. (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1979).
23
For an affirmation of this position see Francis Fukayama, The End of History and the Last
Man. ( New York: Free Press, 1992). For a critique, see James March and Johan Olsen, “The
institutional dynamics of international orders,” International Organization, 1998.
11
century, may have worked in some peculiar fashion to Europe’s long-term advantage. It was, in
David Herlihy’s absorbing account, a plague of nearly perfectly calibrated lethality: it killed
enough people to destabilize stagnant institutions but not so many people that Europe was fatally
enfeebled.24
Within this anti-determinism camp, counterfactual thought experiments become an
exercise in ontological egalitarianism -- an effort to deflate Eurocentric arrogance and to restore
dignity to those whom history eclipsed -- by elevating possible worlds to the same status as the
actual world. Thought experiments are the only way left to “even the score” -- an observation
ironically reminiscent of the Marxist historian E.H. Carr’s dismissal of anti-Bolsheviks who
contemplated counterfactuals that undid the Russian Revolution as “sore losers.” In this
perhaps overly cynical portrait, all that has changed are the location of seats on the left-right
continuum for the gloaters who claim historical vindication for ideological principles (now on
the right) and the brooders who are absorbed in wistful regret for those who are not here to regret
(now on the left).24
In a nutshell, the pessimists insist that our well-intentioned but hopelessly naive project
of commissioning counterfactual case studies is doomed to degenerate into the intellectual
equivalent of Charles Tilly’s infamous Marbelator: a Rube Goldberg device that Tilly’s uncle
24
24. David Herlihy, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West. (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1997).
25. The notion that counterfactual history is just for “sore losers” is not only an ad hominem
argument; even worse, it is psychologically simplistic. Cognitive researchers have identified a
variety of factors that affect the ease with which people can imagine the occurrence of alternative
outcomes. Many of these determinants have nothing whatsoever to do with our wishes, hopes
and fears. For example, unexpected or unusual events are more easily imaginatively
transformed to “normal” states than are normal events imaginatively transformed to either
abnormal or supranormal states (Daniel Kahneman and Dale T. Miller, “Norm Theory:
Comparing Reality to Its Alternatives,” Psychological Review, 93 (1986), 136-153; D.
Kahneman and A. Tversky, “The Simulation Heuristic,” In Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and
Amos Tversky, (eds), Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, pp. 201-208, (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1982b); Daniel Kahneman and Carol A. Varey,
“Propensities and Counterfactuals: The Loser That Almost Won,” Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 59 (1990), 1101-1110. And when our hopes, wishes and fears do influence
counterfactual thoughts, the patterns of influence are far more complex than the sore-loser theory
suggests (Janet Landman, Regret. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Neil Roese and
James Olson, What Might Have Been: The Social Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking.
(Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1995). Pace E.H. Carr and D. Landes (not to mention Freud),
imagining better possible worlds may sometimes serve as a symbolic wish fulfillment but it can
also be both profoundly frustrating (the negative contrast to reality will magnify one’s
unhappiness) and profoundly adaptive (by highlighting mistakes of the past that can be avoided
in the future). Imagining worse possible worlds may be useful in consoling oneself (when I
think things are bad, I stop feeling sorry for myself by focusing on the truly terrible things that
could have happened) and useful in justifying past policies to others (if you think we messed up,
you should appreciate how bad things could have been) but it can also play a constructive role in
learning from history (by highlighting missteps that were almost made and should be avoided in
the future).
12
invented in which “you insert a small marble (or in our case, a counterfactual antecedent) in the
slot at the top, and the ball begins its antic trip through the machine. It clicks and whirs across
bridges, down steps, and around corners, sometimes speeding and sometimes dawdling, often
veering into the depths of the runways only to shoot out unexpectedly at a lower level. But
when it rolled out from the bottom chute, the marble is still the same glass marble that went
in.”25 Counterfactual thought experiments -- whether run in human minds or computer software
-- reduce in the end to conceptual marbelators: after all the subjunctive-conditional clicking and
whirring has subsided, all we have is a convoluted way of rediscovering our original prejudices.
CHECKING SOLIPSISM: SOME POTENTIAL STANDARDS FOR EVALUATING
COUNTERFACTUAL CLAIMS
No doubt many counterfactual arguments are empty tautologies, ritualistic reaffirmations
of faith in some orthodoxy. We have kept this damning indictment in mind in planning the
current volume. But we err if we suppose that “anything goes” in counterfactual thought
experiments because direct empirical tests of claims are impossible. In an earlier volume,
Tetlock and Belkin grappled with this issue.26 They conducted a comprehensive review of the
various logical, historical, and theoretical standards that scholars have proposed for
distinguishing frivolous from serious counterfactuals. We shall apply these criteria to the
counterfactual arguments advanced in this volume so it is instructive to review them briefly here.
Ideally, a compelling counterfactual scenario should pass:
(a) Tests of logical clarity and co-tenability which require that the antecedent, consequent, and
connecting principles for linking antecedent to consequent be well specified and conceptually
compatible with each other.
This recommendation may strike readers as a tad obvious. Like actual experiments, thought
experiments should manipulate one cause at a time, thereby isolating pathways of influence.
Although an excellent exhortation, implementation is often profoundly difficult. It is hard,
arguably impossible, to satisfy the “all other things equal” clause when we perform thought
experiments on social systems that are densely interconnected.27 As soon as alter anything
other than the most trivial butterfly-effect background conditions, there is a case to be made that
we have inadvertently altered a host of other antecedent conditions that also need to be spelled
out. For example, when we deduce counterfactual implications from the neorealist claim that
“multipolar international systems are inherently less likely to yield wars than bipolar systems,”
we wind up with hopelessly vague counterfactual claims of the form “If the post-World War II
system had been multipolar instead of bipolar, a great-power war would have been more
likely”.28 This counterfactual is unsatisfactory, in part, because it glosses over what exactly
would have had to be different in the hypothetical post-1945 multipolar war. Most scholars who
Charles Tilly. “Review of Revolutions and the Transformation of Societies,” American
Historical Review, 84, (1979), 412.
25
26
Philip E.Tetlock & Aaron Belkin. Op. cit.
27
Robert Jervis, Systems: Dynamics and Effects. (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1977).
John Mearsheimer. “Back to the future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War,”
International Security, 15, (1990), 5-56.
28
13
do the called-for thought experiment find it is hard to believe that it is irrelevant who the
additional great powers were -- Great Britain, France, China...
We run into an analogous conceptual problem on the consequent side. Perhaps it is true that “if
Cleopatra had had an unattractively large nose, World War I would not have occurred” but the
Cleopatra’s-nose counterfactual hardly belongs in any reasonable explanatory account of World
War I. After all, if Cleopatra’s nose were that consequential, the hypothetical world of 1914 is
not just a minor variant of the actual world of 1914 but rather a radically different world in which
the nonoccurrence of a major war in the early 20th century is but one of countless points of
difference that go back 2,000 years. There might also be no Germany or Great Britain. Tetlock
and Belkin propose as a pragmatic rule of evidence that we consider only those counterfactuals
in which the antecedent seems likely to affect the specified consequent and very little else. This
argument invokes what Tetlock and Belkin called a surgical-strike model of counterfactual
inference in which we not only manipulate one thing at a time, we give priority attention only to
those causes specifically relevant to the consequent of interest.
There is also a third common way in which counterfactuals run afoul of the clarity/consistency
standard. Philosophers never tire of reminding us that every counterfactual is a condensed or
incomplete argument that requires connecting principles that sustain, but do not imply, the
conditional claim. When explicitly articulated, these connecting principles are often complex,
even in the case of such deceptively simple counterfactuals as “if the match had been scratched,
it would have lighted.” The connecting principles specify, within reasonable limits, everything
else that would have to be true to sustain the counterfactual, including the necessary amount of
friction generated by the scratch, the chemical composition of the match, the absence of water,
the presence of oxygen, and so forth. Sometimes these usually invisible connecting principles
are in direct logical tension with the historical antecedent that has been altered in the
counterfactual. The best known example is John Elster’s critique29 of Robert Fogel’s
counterfactual assertion30 that “if the railroads had not existed, the American economy in the
19th century would have grown only slightly more slowly than it actually did. Elster did not
show that Fogel was wrong but he did show that it is nonsensical to postulate as a supportive
connecting principle that the internal combustion engine would have been invented earlier in
America without railroads because the postulate presupposes a theory of technical innovation
that undercuts the original antecedent. If we have a theory of innovation that requires the
invention of cars 50 years earlier, why does it not also require the invention of railroads? In a
similar vein, one might take to task John Mueller for his counterfactual claim that, even in the
absence of nuclear weapons, the Cuban Missile Crisis would not have escalated into war.3136.
29
Jon Elster, Logic and society: Contradictions and possible worlds. (New York: John
Wiley, 1978).
30
Robert Fogel, Railroads and American economic growth: Essays in econometric history.
(Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1964).
John Mueller. “The essential irrelevance of nuclear weapons: Stability in the post-war
world,” International Security, 13, (1988), 55-79.
31
33. Max Weber. Objective possibility and adequate causation in historical explanation. In
The methodology of the social sciences, 164-188. (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press of Glencoe, 1949).
34. H. L. A. Hart and A. M. Honoré, Causation in the law. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
14
G. Hawthorn, Plausible worlds: Possibility and understanding in history and the social sciences.
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). This is an even more straightforward
violation of cotenability of antecedent and connecting principles. Why would the Soviets go to
all the trouble of placing conventionally armed intermediate-range missiles in Cuba? Why take
so large a risk for so small an advantage?
Taken together, the logical clarity and consistency standards are helpful for screening out
ambiguous and oxymoronic counterfactuals. But they define a bare minimum for
quality-control purposes. We need additional, historical and theoretical, standards for
winnowing out other forms of what-if foolishness.
(b) Tests of historical plausibility which require that counterfactual thought experiments should
rest on antecedents that alter as little history as possible--a principle that Tetlock and Belkin dub
the minimal-rewrite rule.
We rely on this standard to eliminate whimsical counterfactuals of the form “If Napoleon had
possessed a Stealth bomber (and known how to use it), he would have won the Battle of
Waterloo.” But we also need it to eliminate less transparently idiotic subjunctive conditionals.
As the reader will discover shortly, exactly which counterfactuals do or do not pass the
minimal-rewrite test is central to the controversies examined in this book: How many historical
background conditions must we “alter” to suppose that China could have transformed itself into a
global power, that the Aztecs could have defeated Cortes and perhaps future invaders, that the
Persians could have defeated the Greek 2500 years ago and, in the process, nipped the “West” in
the bud ...? There are deep cleavages in scholarly communities over how close alternative
histories came to actually occurring.
Advocates of the minimal-rewrite standard argue that counterfactuals are worthy of serious
historical attention only to the degree they: (a) start with the real world as it was otherwise
known before asserting the counterfactual; (b) do not require us to unwind the past to rewrite
vast stretches of history; (c) do not unduly disturb what we otherwise know about the original
actors and their beliefs and goals. Operationally, investigators might agree to constrain
counterfactual speculation in a host of more specific ways: by considering as antecedents only
those policy options that participants themselves considered and almost accepted (a requirement
that Paul Schroeder emphasizes in his chapter for this volume),33 by giving extra weight to
counterfactual antecedents that undo unusual events that appear to have made the decisive
difference between the occurrence and nonoccurrence of the target event (and perhaps only the
target event),34 by ruling out counterfactuals in which the antecedent and consequent are
separated by such wide gaps in time that it is silly to suppose that all other things can be held
equal,35 and by linking antecedent and consequent with connecting principles that are faithful to
what we know about how people at the time thought and about the constraints within which
people had to work.36
Finally, it is worth stressing that the minimal-rewrite rule, as normally conceived, applies only to
1959).
35. Tetlock and Belkin. op cit.
15
the selection of antecedents for insertion into counterfactual arguments. It is not designed to
rule out the possibility that permissibly small causal alterations can have huge effects.
(c) Tests of theoretical plausibility which require that the connecting principles for linking the
antecedent to consequent should be grounded, to the extent available, in sound theoretical or
statistical generalizations bearing on the causal claim.
Just as we need logical and historical constraints on counterfactual reasoning, we need
theoretical constraints on the connecting principles used to link antecedents and consequents.
Otherwise, we cannot rule out counterfactuals that start from historically reasonable antecedents
but end in far-fetched consequences by invoking preposterous principles of causality such as “if
the Black Death had not struck Europe in 1348, another plague would have struck shortly
thereafter because Europe was astrologically fated to lose one-third of its population in this way”
or “if the Industrial Revolution had not occurred, per capita income in Europe would have
increased far more rapidly than it did.” The economic historian Robert Fogel is the pre-eminent
advocate of the view that it is essential to rely on strong theory to fill in the missing
counterfactual data points of history. Theory-guided counterfactuals are the sine qua non for all
serious assessments of historical causality:
“the net effect of such things on development involves a comparison between what actually
happened and what would have happened in the absence of the specified circumstance.
However, since the counterfactual never occurred, it could not have been observed and hence is
not recorded in historical documents. In order to determine what would have happened in the
absence of a given circumstance, the economic historian needs a set of general statements (that
is, a set of theories or a model) that will enable him to deduce a counterfactual situation from
institutions and relationships that actually existed.”32
In this view, counterfactual reasoning is a straightforward application of Hempel’s covering law
of historical explanation: counterfactual propositions are inferences from hypothetico-deductive
models. Most theoretically-minded social scientists do counterfactual thought experiments in
this fashion. And so do most historians up to a point. Historians certainly rely on implicit
theories of human nature and of socio-economic systems to draw conclusions about how events
would have transpired in the hypothetical worlds they invoke. It would be a mistake, though, to
ignore the tension (documented in detail in Tetlock and Belkin) between history-constrained and
theory-driven counterfactual reasoning. For most social scientists but not for most historians,
the historical plausibility of imagining that the antecedent took on a different value (central to the
minimal-rewrite rule) is far less important than the theoretical relevance of the hypothesized
cause that is being subject to mental manipulation in the thought experiment. If our theory
demands that we imagine that a large bourgeois class existed in society x at time y (when, in fact,
none existed) or that a completely different type of weaponry prevailed or that radically different
technologies of production were in use, the appropriate response is to simulate the hypothetical
world, not to quibble about whether it was historically possible. Here we discover a deep
disciplinary divide between social scientists and historians over the legitimate uses of
counterfactual inquiry.
(d) Tests of “projectability” which stipulate that the causal logic that allows us to “postdict” the
32
Robert Fogel, Railroads and American economic growth: Essays in econometric history.
(Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1964).
16
consequent given the antecedent (going backward in time) should also allow us, mutatis
mutandis, to predict analogous outcomes in the future.
The philosopher Nelson Goodman drew sharp line in the epistemological sand between
coincidental generalizations that just happen to be true at a particular time and place (and are
therefore unprojectable) and robustly law-like generalizations that hold up over a broad range of
circumstances and permit projection into the past and future.33 An example of a merely
coincidental generalization is “all the coins in my pocket yesterday were silver.” Nothing
follows from this observation - certainly not “if this penny were in my pocket yesterday, it would
be silver.” The counterfactual fails because “if this penny were in my pocket yesterday”, we
would simply assume that the original generalization - “all the coins in my pocket yesterday
were silver” - was false. By contrast, a robustly law-like generalization - such as that oxygen is
a necessary but not sufficient condition for fire - inspires confidence when we move either
backward in time (if there had been no oxygen, the great fire of London would not have
occurred) or forward in time (if we cut off any future fire’s source of oxygen, the fire will
expire).
The projectability standard highlights why there seems to be such a strong correlation between
positions that professionals take on the plausibility of counterfactual “undoings” of the West and
their preferred ideological visions of the future. If the phenomenal success of the West is
traceable not to phenomenal good luck but rather to a head start in getting certain social-system
fundamentals right — fundamentals such as respect for private property, separation of church
and state, limitations on state power, and a healthy respect for the power of markets — then it
should hardly be surprising that those who endorse this view of the past think it a good idea to
structure societies in the future along the same lines.
PLAN FOR THE VOLUME
We plan to subject all chapters to a process of rigorous review from the standpoint of
these (and other) criteria at the follow-up conference in May, 1999. The acid test of our
volume will, however, be the willingness of both our authors and readers to engage in acts of
“self-subversion” in which they aggressively pursue the possibility that their core assumptions
are, if not flat-out wrong, at least in need of radical qualification.34 The best counterfactual
thought experiments engage both authors and audiences in a self-consciously Socratic search for
gaps, ambiguities, and contradictions in their own world view as well as that of adversaries.
Our hope is that even devout LaPlacean determinists will occasionally be surprised by the
compellingness of counterfactual re-routings of history and that even card-carrying Gouldian
anti-determinists will be occasionally surprised by how easy it is to challenge initially plausible
re-routings of history and restore events to their original trajectories. To be candid, though, we
hold out the greatest hope for impact not among true believers but among the ambivalent
majority of the scholarly community,35 a constituency that is skeptical of extreme claims in
33
Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1983).
34
A.O. Hirschman, A Propensity to Self-Subversion (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard, 1995).
35
For a self-conscious effort to stake out a viable middle-ground position, see Michael Mann
17
either metaphysical direction and inclined to support some kind of synthetic compromise that
constrains the range of highly possible outcomes but does not reduce the range to just our world.
Our volume initiates this debate in explicitly counterfactual form. We have
commissioned a set of counterfactual thought experiments that address a fundamental set of
historical problems--why the West (and not the Rest) rocketed to economic, technological, and
geopolitical supremacy from roughly 1500 onward and why Western hegemony has taken the
forms it has (as opposed to more malign or benign alternatives). Our contributors approach this
massive challenge from a variety of temporal and disciplinary angles. Some start at the putative
dawn of Western civilization in classical Greece and explore how easily ideas usually deemed
central to Western success might have been snuffed out whereas others commence inquiry with
an event that arguably marked the beginning of the end of European (geographically defined)
dominance, the first world war, and grapple with the inevitability of that conflict. Contributors
also draw upon diverse disciplines to guide their search for worthy causal antecedents to insert
into counterfactual thought experiments (searches that yield not only the usual suspects but also
some strikingly unusual ones). No single discipline can plausibly claim precedence when there is
literally an infinity of possible causal candidates that could be mentally manipulated in thought
experiments--from military oversights and technological insights to pathogenic microbes and
climate shifts--and the connecting principles for linking mentally manipulated antecedents to
hypothetical consequences draw on such far-flung domains of knowledge as military strategy
and biochemistry.
Regardless of their explanatory agenda, we have asked all contributors to frame their
specific historical questions in explicitly counterfactual forms and to try to answer these
questions in analytically self-conscious ways. Each contributor addresses one or more of the
following issues:
(a) How easy or difficult is it to rewrite diplomatic, military, technological, intellectual, cultural,
economic, or even epidemiological history in ways that "undo" the global ascendancy of Europe
and its colonial offshoots?
(b) Is the outcome easier to "undo" by altering initial historical conditions within Western history
(thereby weakening the West in key respects) or by altering initial conditions in the Islamic
world, in China or in other potential rivals (thereby strengthening the competition)?
(c) At what point does Western dominance become extremely difficult, arguably impossible, to
reverse?
(d) Did Western dominance have to take the forms it did? Could it, for example, have taken
more malign or more benign forms?
(e) Regardless of whether the “results” of the counterfactual thought experiments point to
strongly deterministic conclusions (things pretty much had to work out as they did) or to
radically indeterminate conclusions (the world that did occur was, ex ante, one of the least
probable of a large set of possible worlds), can you identify those schools of thought that are
most likely to be offended?
We also made three procedural requests of all contributors as they go about trying to
answer these substantive questions:
(a) to be explicit about what they consider to be the key choice points at which history might
have been re-directed, about how they singled out these choice points, and about the assumptions
they had to make in drawing inferences about what would have happened if key antecedent
(1986). Op cit.
18
conditions had taken on different forms from the ones they did;
(b) to make a strong case about what would have happened in the hypothetical worlds that they
do construct but to remain sensitive to the rapidity with which specific counterfactual scenarios
become improbable as we embellish them with speculative details;
(c) most important, to acknowledge the preconceptions with which they approached the
counterfactual thought exercise and to specify what, if anything, surprised them in the course of
working through the exercise. Here it is worth dwelling on some intriguing parallels between
the mental process of simulating what would have happened in possible worlds and that of
constructing computer simulations of natural or social phenomena. Both the software and
“wetware” exercises require making explicit previously implicit and ill-thought-through
assumptions.36 In the course of running these computer or mental simulations, one can learn a
great deal about hitherto concealed gaps and contradictions in one’s knowledge.37 It is not
unusual for scholars to discover surprising things about themselves as they work through the
logical and historical implications of well-crafted thought experiments for their own world view:
discoveries of the sort “I did not previously appreciate the tension between those two ideas” or “I
should now be either less or more confident that x was a necessary cause of y” or “I should more
sharply qualify the applicability of this theoretical law to this historical case.” We have asked our
contributors, each a distinguished scholar in his or her own right, to reflect on what, if anything,
they learned from working through their counterfactual thought experiments.
This stress on learning is key. Pessimists may snicker that the phrase “counterfactual
thought experiment” is but an affectation, a linguistic slight-of-hand designed to obfuscate the
negligible value-added from working through what-if exercises. “Some experiment,” they
might remark, “when the result is known in advance.” The pessimists do risk, however, being
hoisted on their own petard if they press this point too hard. For their claim itself rests on a
counterfactual thought experiment to which they have supplied the answer in advance: a thought
experiment in which they ask us to imagine that whenever accomplished scholars are asked to
think counterfactually about historical processes, they will invariably fail to discover something
both new and noteworthy. For our part, we think that the results of this thought experiment are
not a foregone conclusion and that the actual experiment is well worth doing. Our project can be
viewed as an instantiation of this idea and, in implementing the “experiment”, we have bent over
backwards to avoid biasing the results. We have, for example, indicated to our contributors that
we harbor no a priori commitment to the notion that good counterfactual thought experiments
invariably lead to the conclusion that history is hopelessly indeterminate. Quite the contrary:
we have repeatedly emphasized the wide range of (occasionally surprising) results that can
emerge from counterfactual thought experiments. Some investigators may "discover" that small
causes can indeed have large effects and that, for want of the proverbial nail, events are often
being redirected onto radically different historical trajectories. Others may "discover" that
history is remarkably robust to minor variations in antecedent conditions and that, try though
they may, it was remarkably difficult to identify hypothetical histories that strayed long or
dramatically from what we know as reality. Still others may draw conclusions that lie
somewhere between these polar opposite positions.
36
Robert Axelrod, 1997 op. cit.; L.E. Cederman, Emergent Actors in World Politics: How
States and Nations Develop and Dissolve. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
Daniel Kahneman, “Varieties of counterfactual thinking,” In What might have been: The
social psychology of counterfactual thinking, ed. N.J. Roese and J.M. Olsen, 375-96. (Mahwah:
Erlbaum, 1996).
37
19
Here it is worth stressing that failing to find choice points at which events might have
been radically re-directed is not automatic evidence of a poverty of historical imagination (or that
one has fallen prey to the dreaded certainty-of-hindsight bias); it may reflect a shrewd grasp of
the fundamental forces at work. Conversely, the capacity to spin out radically different
alternative histories is not automatic evidence of creative genius; it may reflect a failure to
recognize second-order counterfactual arguments that take the form of "yes, counterfactual event
x would have led to event y, but other forces quickly would have undone y and returned us to
something resembling the historical status quo." (For example, Philip II of Spain’s Armada
might have conquered England in 1588, dramatically extending his power in Europe; but his
family’s sustained preference for endogamous marriages would, sooner or later by the laws of
behavioral genetics, have placed the expanded empire in the hands of an incompetent ruler who
would have failed to preserve Habsburg hegemony.) Striking the right dialectical balance
between chance and necessity is a delicate affair.
PREVIEW OF COUNTERFACTUAL CASE STUDIES
Our central historical problem -- the emergence of Western hegemony and the forms
that it takes-- is an ideal candidate for counterfactual exploration. This is true, in part, for
strictly logical and methodological reasons. The two most prestigious methods of drawing
causal inferences in behavioral and social science -- experimental control and statistical control
-- just do not get us very far. Time machine fantasies to the side, we cannot travel back in time,
experimentally tweak this or that antecedent condition in the theoretically prescribed manner,
and then observe what happens in the re-run of history. And statistical control is almost as far
out of reach as experimental control. Our sample of civilizations is just too small. There are
only a few plausible contenders for geopolitical supremacy -- Europe, Islam, China -- and these
contenders differ in many ways, even if we limit ourselves to entertaining only very large-scale
causal candidates like culture, ecology, economy, religion, law, patterns of governance and the
presence or absence of multi-state competition.38 The number of “independent variables”
quickly exceeds the number of observational units -- a condition that statisticians call “negative
degrees of freedom” and that provides a surefire guarantee of indeterminacy. (To compound the
intractability of the inferential problem, the observational units (civilizations) did not even
evolve autonomously of each other. Islam was in contact with both the far west and far east of
the Eurasian landmass.)
To narrow the explanatory options, there is no alternative to in-depth exploration of
historical narratives that tell the stories of specific civilizations, trying as best we can to establish
whether what happened next is best thought of an inexorable unfolding of invariant principles, as
a lawful process with some contingent branching points, or as an extraordinarily improbable
series of coincidences (one damned thing after another, with frequent straying into decidedly
suboptimal culs-de-sac and with as much thematic integrity as a Dr. Seuss story). We do not
think it adequate, however, simply to treat this investigative process as an impenetrable
blackbox. Integral to the logic of creating any historical narrative is the process of generating,
refining and testing counterfactual thought experiments that pose variants of the question: If
this antecedent condition had taken another form, how would events have unfolded? Indeed
38
Michael Mann, The sources of social power: A history of power from the beginning to A.D.
1760. Volume 1. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
20
thought experiments of this form are so fundamental to historical interpretation that it does not
even matter whether the intrepid investigator endorses a neopositivist/quantitative/covering law
epistemology or a radically constructivist/qualitative/story-telling epistomology. In either case,
the investigator is compelled to rely on thought experiments: in the first case, to affirm the
applicability of the pertinent covering laws and to explore their boundary conditions, in the
second case, to decide which events merit inclusion in the narrative as well as to identify the plot
structure that holds these events together in a coherent whole for the reader.39
Fundamental though thought experiments are to historical inquiry, the logic of the
process is rarely spelled out. As already noted, one of our central goals is to make this
traditionally implicit process explicit. The contributors to this volume have agreed to allow
their counterfactual reasoning to be subjected to unusually intense scrutiny.
But our goals are not purely procedural. Creative and disciplined counterfactual thought
experiments should shed light on specific historical controversies as well as on theoretical
frameworks that purport to explain why events took the courses they did. The chapters under
commission highlight the centrality of counterfactual reasoning to all efforts to draw causal
inferences from history. Popular misconceptions notwithstanding, counterfactual thought
experiments are not just conceptual playthings of radical anti-determinists who like to weave
fanciful what-if stories and to savor the sheer arbitrariness of the world they happen to inhabit.
Our contributors take a wide range of positions on the points at which and the degrees to which
the rise of the West was inevitable. Their counterfactual arguments cover the spectrum on the
determinism continuum running from “complete fluke” to “utterly foreordained” and we have
organized the bulk of the book into three parts corresponding to three regions of that spectrum
(see Appendix I for more detailed summaries).
Toward the indeterminate end are chapters that fit the conceptual template of
butterfly-effect arguments: the historical equivalent of variation in air pressure produced by the
flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Beijing triggering hurricanes off the coast of Florida.
Outlandish though these arguments may seem on their face, computer simulations of a host of
natural phenomena suggest that: (a) sensitive dependence on initial conditions is a rather
common property of complex systems; (b) there is no warrant for categorically ruling out
counterfactual thought experiments that manipulate small causes and discover big effects
(notwithstanding that some eminent scholars have dismissed such “Cleopatra’s-nose” arguments
as nothing more than an epistemological nuisance).
The four chapters that most closely fit this mold are those of Hanson, Goldstone, Lebow,
and Oldstone:
Hanson sees numerous ways in which the Athenians might have failed to stop the Persian effort
to conquer Greece five centuries before the birth of Christ. So much, in this view, hinges on one
man: Themistocles. Hanson is also convinced that he can refute second-order counterfactual
arguments that downplay the long-term significance of a Persian victory: if the Persian navy
had defeated the Athenians at Salamis, the resulting hypothetical world would differ dramatically
39
Robert Fogel, Railroads and American Growth: Essays in Econometric History. (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964); Hawthorne, G., Plausible worlds: Possibility and
Understanding in History and the Social Sciences. (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1991); Tetlock & Belkin, 1996, op. cit.
21
from our world (subtract out, for example, democracy and science);
Goldstone advances the counterfactual thesis that, but for a host of theoretically trivial but
historically consequential coincidences, Britain in the 17th century could have fallen into the
grip of a rigid Anglican or Catholic orthodoxy that would have repressed the Quaker merchants
and inventors who played pivotal roles in the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century;
Lebow views World War I -- a turning-point conflict that activated the historical path that,
among other things, brought us the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany -- as the culmination of a
highly probabilistic confluence of events and forces. Timing, in his view, is critical. To delay
the outbreak of World War I (say, by blocking the Archduke’s assassination) may well be to
prevent it. To permit the war to occur earlier may well be to alter the victors;
Oldstone highlights the indefinitely large number of occasions at which pathogenic microbes
(causes cannot get much smaller than that) played a pivotal role in redirecting recorded history -from the epidemic that stopped Nebuchadnezzar’s army at the gates of Jerusalem in 586 B.C. E.
to the Black Death that swept Europe in 1348 to the influenza outbreak of 1919. These
documented re-routings of history must, moreover, represent the tip of the iceberg. No one
knows how many how many would-be inventors, philosophers and mass murderers were cut
down before they could shape our world. Nor does anyone know how many actual inventors,
philosophers and mass murders came close to being cut down before they did shape our world.
The universe of possibilities is overwhelming.
Other authors draw back from claiming to have identified dramatic “bifurcation points”
but still see considerable latitude for rerouting history:
Barnes searches a vast stretch of time (from Alexander to Mohammed) for historical junctures
relevant to the rise of Christianity “where choice was possible” and where, had a different option
been taken, the religious foundations of Western civilization would have been transformed,
perhaps radically so. He sees many historical trends as hard to escape from as far back as 200
B.C.--for example, the establishment of a Roman Empire of considerable territorial scope--but
sees plenty of potential for redirecting events within those parameters. For example, the Roman
Empire might have taken on a quite different political and organizational form had Julius Caesar,
instead of being assassinated, lived long enough to marry Cleopatra and acknowledge his
legitimate heir. Barnes also sees nothing at all necessary about Pontius Pilatus’s decision to try
and execute Jesus Christ--an example of what fundamentalist Christians might view as an
heretical counterfactual inasmuch as it challenges the notion that Christ’s life and ultimate
crucifixion were divinely planned and foreordained, hence historically immutable;
Lapidus explores the socioeconomic ramifications of a possible Muslim conquest of Europe in
the 8th century, and identifies two plausible scenarios -- one in which transplanting Middle
Eastern societal forms extinguishes any possibility of the formation of technological, capitalistic
societies and one in which there occurs a unique fusion of European and Islamic values that is
fully compatible with the emergence of scientific inquiry, technological evolution, and
capitalistic growth;
Waldron identifies a potentially critical military mistake that the Southern Song dynasty made in
its struggle against the Mongol invaders (specifically, the shift from a relatively successful
defensive strategy to an offensive one). He speculated that if the advice of the best generals had
22
followed, the dynasty might have survived into the 14th century, perhaps leading to the creation
of a far stronger Chinese state as well as greater interest in technological innovation, economic
growth, and external expansion. Waldron recognizes, however, the precariousness of
counterfactual extrapolations that relocate the Industrial Revolution to 15th century China and
then assign a dominant geopolitical role to that country;
Hassig identifies numerous junctures at which Cortes’ conquest of the Aztecs can be easily
“undone” (although he is less confident in his ability to rule out second-order counterfactual
arguments of the form “yes, if x had happened, then Cortes would have failed but the Spaniards
would have soon been back in much greater force and the march of history would have been but
briefly interrupted”);
Black argues that the notion of an early modern world as a prelude to a modern Western world is
“an artificial and misleading” construct that blinds us to the very real possibility that the new
ideas of the Enlightenment might have done little more than shore up and legitimize existing
social structures. He can easily imagine possible worlds, branching off as late as the 16th and
17th centuries, in which European dominance either did not occur or took quite different forms;
Ingram can quite readily imagine alternative histories in which the British are rebuffed in their
effort to absorb India into their Empire and a multipolar states-system survives in India but he is
not convinced that this setback (from the British point of view) would have altered the
underlying power relationships between the industrialized and pre-industrialized worlds;
Mokyr uses set-theoretic concepts to highlight the enormous gap that often exists between the
set of “feasible technologies” and the set of technologies actually in use. Hot-air ballooning,
steam power, and antibiotics may have been within the intellectual grasp of the 15th century
Chinese; eyeglasses and navigational instruments were “inventable” at the time of the Roman
Empire. Even after making generous allowance for developmental constraints -- political
interest groups, institutional inertia, social taboos -- Mokyr concludes that “it is not hard to
imagine that certain inventions, had they been made or adapted in societies and times they were
not would indeed have changed history.”
Still other authors see remarkably little potential for altering key historical outcomes via
minimal modifications of antecedent historical conditions:
Strauss disagrees with Hanson that the West can be undone by reversing victors at Salamis.
Strauss sees many non-Grecian paths to modernity. We may have borrowed extensively from
classical Greece but that does not mean that key components of the classical tradition would not
have been created elsewhere by others;
Schroeder disagrees with Lebow and asserts that World War I--the event that signals the decline
of Europe from world leadership-- was well-nigh unavoidable given the distribution of power,
rules, and norms that prevailed in the pre-1914 international system.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
The thought experiments that we have commissioned for this volume will not settle the
23
long-standing and occasionally acrimonious debates over the rise of the West. Anti-determinists
will complain that we have but skimmed the surface of the potentially infinite number of ways in
which history from Salamis to Sarajevo could have been re-routed. From this standpoint, we
should have devoted the entire volume to aggressively exploring counterfactual scenarios that
could serve as a necessary counterweight to the pervasive bias of 20/20 hindsight and “creeping
determinism.” By contrast, determinists will complain that those contributors who see
considerable latitude for re-routing history have failed to attach sufficient importance to the
fundamental forces that made both the phenomenal rise of the West, and the relative stagnation
of the Rest, a foregone conclusion a very long time ago indeed. From this standpoint, if the
anti-determinists had not been so transfixed by the search for counterintuitive butterfly effects
and dramatic bifurcation points, they might have cultivated a more sober appreciation for the
constraints on possible outcomes. It is one thing to identify plausible ways in which history
might have worked out somewhat differently at a particular time and place; it is quite another to
show that the consequences would have been profound and long-lasting. Determinists insist that
a close-call counterfactual argument is complete only when it successfully refutes all
second-order counterfactual arguments that imply that, although history might have been briefly
side-tracked, it would have eventually arrived at much the same destination as did our world.
We do not pretend that this volume will resolve the West-versus-the-Rest debate. But we
do claim to have identified a more productive, general-purpose approach to working through
controversies over historical causation. Factual and counterfactual approaches to framing causal
questions are in dialectical tension with each other. A factual focus on “why x happened” and on
“when x became inevitable” encourages us to try to construct as comprehensive and
deterministic an explanatory scheme as we can. The further back in time we can show x to have
been inevitable, the more potent and fundamental the causes we have identified and the better a
job we have done. A counterfactual focus on “why non-x outcomes did not happen” and on
“when non-x outcomes became impossible” might seem to be just the logical mirror-image of the
factual focus. After all, in elementary probability theory, the probability of x and of non-x should
sum to 1.0 or certainty (assuming x and non-x are exhaustive of all possibilities and mutually
exclusive). But, pragmatically and psychologically, the two framings of the “same” question are
anything but redundant. The former factual framing entices us to look long and hard for causal
paths that converge on the observed historical outcomes; the latter counterfactual one entices us
to look equally long and hard for diverging causal paths that lead to possible worlds that are
strikingly different from, perhaps incompatible with, the world we inhabit. Historical observers
who try to answer the factually framed question about ‘when x became inevitable” will often
identify points in time substantially earlier than those proffered by historical observers who try to
answer the counterfactually framed question about “when all non-x outcomes became
impossible.”40
From a purely logical point of view, someone must be wrong. Outcome x cannot be
40
Evidence that subjective probabilities often violate probability theory and sum to values
greater than 1.0 can be found in in Amos Tversky and Craig Fox, “Support theory: A
nonextensional approach to probability,” Psychological Review, 1994, xxx-xxx. Estimates of
event likelihood are, in support theory, largely a function of the ease with which people can
generate causal scenarios leading to the event and the accessibility of these scenarios is, in turn,
largely a function of the framing and specificity of the question asked. Direct evidence that
historical observers’ judgments of event likelihood are shaped by whether the question is framed
factually or counterfactually can be found in Tetlock and Lebow, op. cit.
24
inevitable at the same time non-x outcomes are possible. Our preferred resolution of this
paradox, and it is a paradox in the strictest meaning of the term, is to conclude that both framings
of the historical question are inherently misleading, inherently misleading because they are
inherently selective. The Hegelian synthesis is to recognize the necessity of alternating back and
forth between these two styles of interrogating the historical record. Each framing encourages a
pattern of thinking that checks the excesses of the other. The goal should be to continue this
process of both internal and external dialogue until the individual scholar and the scholarly
community feel they have reached a reflective equilibrium that incorporates the key insights and
discoveries generated by both forms of questioning. 41
41
The theory of reflective equilibrium stipulates that a set of general principles is justified if: (a)
those principles are consistent with specific judgments in which the relevant
professionals--usually logicians or ethicists--have confidence; (b) the specific judgments, in turn,
can be derived from the general principles. Nelson Goodman concedes that the process is
circular but insists that it is a virtuous circle: “Principles of deductive inference are justified by
their conformity with accepted deductive practice. Their validity depends upon accordance with
the particular deductive inferences we actually make and sanction. If a rule yields unacceptable
inferences, we drop it as invalid. Justification of general rules thus derives from judgments
rejecting or accepting particular deductive inferences. This looks flagrantly circular. I have said
that deductive inferences are justified by their conformity to valid general rules and that general
rules are justified by their conformity to valid inferences. The point is that rules and particular
inferences alike are justified by being brought into agreement with each other. A rule is amended
if it yields an inference that we are unwilling to accept; an inference is rejected if it violates a
rule that we are unwilling to amend. The process of justification is a delicate one of making
mutual adjustments between rules and accepted inferences; and in the agreement achieved lies
the only justification needed for either.” Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, 4th
edition. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 63-64.
Since Goodman’s formulation of reflective equilibrium, this analytical method has been
applied outside logic to moral and political philosophy (for the classic example, see John Rawls,
A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971). There is also good reason to
suppose that, mutatis mutandis, the method may be helpful in sorting out conflicting intuitions
about historical causation--in particular those stemming from competing factual and
counterfactual framings of initial questions. As noted earlier, factual frames encourage historians
to search long and hard for “deterministic” arguments that portray outcomes as foreordained by
abstract forces that may date back decades, centuries, and even millennia ( e.g., the Holocaust
was inevitable due to the humiliating Versailles treaty imposed on Germany, due to deeply
ingrained “eliminationist anti-Semitism” in the German national character or due to the
inherently anti-Semitic character of Christianity itself). Counterfactual frames encourage
historians to search for close-call “event junctures” at which history might have been
substantially or radically redirected ( e.g., If Hitler had been still-born or admitted to art school
or killed in World War I, the first man on the moon might well have been German). One key task
of the historian is to strike some reflective equilibrium between “inevitabilist” and
“contingency” arguments that, on their face, often seem equally compelling. What counts as a
reasonable reflective equilibrium hinges, however, largely on the exact ground rules for
developing and evaluating competing arguments bearing on when observed outcomes became
inevitable and alternative outcomes became impossible. Certain epistemological ground rules
stack the deck in favor of the “inevitabilists”--for example, rules that dismiss all counterfactual
arguments as hopelessly speculative. Other ground rules tilt the evidential playing field
decisively toward the pro-contingency camp--for example, rules that encourage observers to seek
25
It is appropriate therefore to close with an appeal that should appeal to both neo-positivist
and post-modernist skeptics of our enterprise (at least as long as each side closes its eyes while
the other side is being wooed). Neopositivists may fear that legitimizing counterfactual history
will lead to a proliferation of untestable hypotheses and a further blurring of the boundary
between fact and fiction as “what happened” and “what almost happened” become equally
acceptable dependent variables. But this constituency should be partly placated by the
indispensable role that counterfactual historical exercises play as methods of eliminating
otherwise incorrigible cognitive biases (especially certainty of hindsight) that distort historical
observers’ assessments of the past and give them undue confidence in their ability to see into the
future. 42Desires can color our assessments of thought experiments in diverse ways. Dennett
out as many plausible turning points as they can and to “unpack” these scenarios in rich detail
that brings alternative worlds to “life” for the reader (thereby breaking the oppressive hold of
certainty of hindsight on the historical imagination). The current volume tries to advance our
understanding not only of history but of the process of historical understanding. It attempts to
achieve this latter objective, in part, by designing dialectical confrontations between conflicting
framings of historical questions and, in part, by drawing on recent advances in cognitive science
that shed new light on systematic biases in human thought and on possible correctives.
42
47. For an extended discussion of the links between certainty of hindsight and
overconfidence, see Philip E. Tetlock, “Theory-driven reasoning about possible pasts and
probable futures in world politics: are we prisoners of our preconceptions?”American Journal of
Political Science, 43 (1999), 335-366, as well as Philip E. Tetlock, Close-call counterfactuals and
belief-system defense: I was not almost wrong but I was almost right,” of Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 75 (1998), 639-652.
26
MISCELLANEOUS NOTES: For analytical completeness, there are three fundamental ways of
arguing that the Western hegemony is undeserved or unjust: (a) variants of the flukiness thesis
that stress the sheer improbability of the observed outcome (one of the least likely worlds, ex
ante, happened to occur); (b) variants of the “theft-and-usurpation” thesis that Greek and
therefore Western civilization owe their finer qualities to the appropriation of talent and ideas
from the non-white peoples of northern Africa and the Near East (Bernal, 1988); (c) variants of
the evil-empire thesis that attributes Western dominance to the uniquely brutal, exploitative, and
expansionist attitudes of Europeans to the other peoples who inhabit the planet (Sales, 1990) and
that stresses the key causal roles of slavery and colonial empires in financing European
dominance. These theses are obviously far from mutually exclusive and would could easily
endorse some version of all three. From the standpoint of counterfactual thought experiments,
these arguments imply that, after we subtract out the most improbable and unconscionable
sources of European success, Europe in the year 2000 would still be very much the intellectual
and geopolitical backwater that it was in the year 1000.
36. Imagine the following thought experiment that could quite easily be turned into an actual
experiment. There is virtual unanimity among historians that, for better or for worse, the West
had achieved virtually complete geopolitical, economic, and technological dominance by the
early 19th century (to be safe, let’s say 1850 — although there is very substantial agreement that
dominance had been achieved quite a bit earlier). Let’s say that we ask experts to divide the
universe of all possible worlds as of the mid- 19th century into two logically exclusive and
exhaustive cagegories:
(1) All forms that Western domination of the globe could have taken (of which the actual world
is one member of the set) and all alternatives to Western dominance by the mid- 19th century.
Let’s say that we ask experts to identify the historical juncture at which Western dominance of
the globe became inevitable (a subjective probability of 1.0). Some experts may go back a long
way (seeing it as inevitable as far back as the early Middle Ages or even further back) whereas
other experts may see Western dominance as having become inevitable only relatively recently
(perhaps as recently as the 18th century or even early 19th century). Let’s also say that we ask
another group of experts (or the same group of experts but at a different time) to identify the
historical juncture at which all alternatives to Western domination became impossible (assigned
a subjective probability of 0.0). Once again, we should expect individual differences to emerge,
with some experts seeing possibilities persisting until quite late and other experts seeing few if
any possibilities even when we go back several centuries.
27
Once experts have identified the impossibility or inevitability juncture, we could ask
them — going back by 10 or even 25 year intervals — to identify how they felt the subjective
probability of the outcomes in question waxed and waned as a function of the vicissitudes of
fortune and the unfolding of underlying historical processes. We might, for example, take the
exercise back as far as 1000 A.D. or even as far back as the Roman Empire or Classical Greece
(we might want to shift to larger time gaps between judgment points to avoid the task becoming
intolerably tedious).
Strictly speaking, the factual and counterfactual framing of the historical question are
complementary but logic and psycho-logic are not the same. If past work is a guide, there will
be substantial stretches of time when the same experts deem Western global dominance
inevitable but alternatives to Western dominance possible (periods that, in a few cases, may
extend over a few centuries). It should also be the case that when we add the subjective
probabilities assigned to the two logically exclusive and exhaustive sets of outcomes, that the
sum will typically be substantially greater than 1.0.
These anomalies become even more pronounced when we begin to unpack the sets of “all
alternatives to Western dominance” and “all forms of Western dominance.” For example, all
forms of Western dominance might be unpacked into three mutually exclusive and exhaustive
sets: possible worlds in which the West detains global dominance even more rapidly than it did,
possible worlds in which the West is slower to attain dominance than it actually was but still
does attain dominance, and the actual world in which the West attains dominance in the manner
and at the time as actually occurred. In a similar vein, all alternatives to Western dominance
might be unpacked into the mutually exclusive and exhaustive sets of those that reach the
alternative outcome by “fatally enfeebling the West” and those that achieve the alternative
outcomes by “strengthening adversaries.”
In principle, the unpacking exercise could go on at ad infinitum. In practice, of course,
there are limits. Unpacking into second and third order subsets quickly exhausts the patience of
participants. For example, the set of counterfactual worlds that involve fatally enfeebling the
West” might be broken down into those that achieve these outcomes by disease. Those that
extend intra-European wars and create new intra-European wars, those that alter intellectual or
religious history in ways that undo critical sources of inspiration for the West (classical Greece,
the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution), and all other
mechanisms for fatally enfeebling the West. Similarly, the set of counterfactual worlds that
involves strengthening adversaries of the West might be broken down into those that strengthen
Islamic challengers, a Chinese challenger, the Aztecs, the Mongols, ... Turning to the sets of
counterfactual worlds in which Western dominance either occurs either more quickly or more
slowly, the sets, in turn, might be divided into those in which Western dominance is sped up or
slowed down by less that 100 years or by more than 100 years.
The net result of these unpacking exercise is to highlight a plethora of hypothetical
probabilities that would not have spontaneously come to mind when experts are asked to judge
the binary complements of “all forms of Western domination” and “all alternatives to Western
domination.” Thus, when we add up the subjective probabilities assigned to the logically
exclusive and exhaustive subsets of all forms of Western domination, the subjective probability
often approaches or exceeds one 1.0 in and of itself (leaving, in effect, no room to assign any
likelihood whatsoever to any alternatives to Western domination). And, something not all that
different occurs when we add up the subjective probabilities assigned to be logically exclusive
and exhaustive subsets assigned to all alternatives to Western domination. Here the subjective
probabilities also begin to sum to values close to, or even greater than 1.0.
28
37.) Ira Lapidus: Lapidus is sensitive to the political sensitivities that the Rise of the West
debate raises. He notes that many scholars want to distance themselves from the celebration of
Western cultural supremacy, the arrogance, and the violence imposed upon non-Western
peoples. Rather than celebrating the unique virtues of Western civilization, more recent work
has emphasized different themes. For example, Marshall Hodgson has stressed the unity of the
ancient and late medieval ioauemene, and the intimate interdependence of all civilizations
students of the Renaissance and early modern era have emphasized the parallelism of
developments across major civilizations and have downplayed the disparities between West and
East by minimizing the significance of the differences between civilizations as late as the early
18th century. Dependency theorists have argued that similar capitalists and political
developments were underway in other parts of the world and might easily have created parallel
achievements to that of Europe. But that European military power and commercial exploitation
cut off these lines of development. “European supremacy is not a cultural achievement but an
act of violence.” In short, the others contributed to European success, the others almost
achieved the same successes as the Europeans, and the others would have achieved those
successes but for ruthless European conquest and exploitation. Each line of argument implies a
set of counterfactual scenarios that puncture European claims to exceptionalism.
Lapidus is of the view that had an Islamic army conquered Europe in the 7th, 8th, or 9th
centuries, European society would have developed with very different values, social
organization, and political institutions. In particular, Lapidus believes that the emergence of
technologically and bureaucratic capitalism depended historically upon the formation of a
bourgeois-commercial class in a particular context of political autonomy and intellectual
differentiation that allowed it to pursue its own values and interests in an aggressive, rationalistic
way. Lapidus is less convinced, however, that an Ottoman conquest of Europe in the 17th
century could have altered the trajectory of European development (he is also skeptical that
such a conquest was even possible).
Lapidus believes that his conclusions hark back to a Weberian point of view both in
method and substance. “It is a renewed challenge to a variety of theories about global history
which have attempted to downplay the historic differences among Western European and other
societies. These contrary points of view have stressed a number of considerations which do not
seem to me to decisively refute the Weberian assessment.” (page 18)
One constituency likely to be offended by Lapidus’s argument is followers of Marshall
Hodgson who argued long ago that “the transformation of Europe was not due to the uniqueness
of European civilization, nor to its character and values, nor to specifically European attitudes
and traditions, nor to some inherent European genius; certainly not to European “activism”
contrasted with way of tradition and torpor in the rest of the world...” In Hodgson’s view, the
developments that occurred in Europe could have occurred anywhere in the world. They
29
constitute a permutation within a shared historical context, and are not the result of specific
European cultural, institutional, or psychological conditions. The okumene global civilization,
defined by parallel developments in warfare, metallurgy, science, axial-age religions, writing,
scholasticism, trade, and literary motifs, this larger, common society maintained an integral unity
despite its division into secondary zones defined by religion and language. We should not
forget the contributions of Islamic societies to the West — contributions which include scientific
concepts, agricultural products, technologies of gunpowder, the compass, paper and printing,
philosophic method, and others that underlie the European transformation. Western Europe
was a peripheral region in the larger civilization — a dependent region and a beneficiary of
innovations made elsewhere in the afro-Eurasian zone. Only in the Renaissance did Europe
come abreast of the accomplishments of other regions. Lapidus responds that “the shared
features of global history and the late blossoming of Europe does not change the fact that Europe
in an historically unique way. By trying to treat the transformation of Europe as an accidental
or conditional phenomenon, Hodgson ignores the powerful arguments that Europe possessed
peculiar institutions, cultures, and resources, that, in combination at the right historical moment,
could launch a unique drive toward world domination (and stimulate the cultivation of a new
type of human personality — individualism, anonymity and impersonality in bureaucratically
organized endeavors, high personal moral standards, respect for individual rights, and
opportunities for accomplishments). Lapidus believes that Hodgson does not come to terms
with the long Weberian tradition that saw in Europe pluralistic institutions and social structures,
broad autonomy for different groups, especially for the bourgeoisie, a powerful commercial
ethos, a high level of technological invention, substantial accumulated urban capital as a result of
trading profits and industrial developments that go back to the middle ages in Italy, Southern
Germany, Flanders, and eventually Holland and Britain — considerations that do indeed
differentiate Europe’s past history from that of global history. Lapidus also feels that
Hodgson’s systematically underestimates other distinctive features of European civilization,
including secularism, the institutional separation of political regimes from the church, Roman
law and individualism.
If Europe is to nipped in the bud, it must be nipped early in its development and by a
social force that crushes critical prerequisites for the emergence of capitalism.
Lapidus is willing to concede that European supremacy may have been achieved, in part,
by the exploitation of other societies but feels that the dependency-theory argument begs the
question of how the Europeans came to be in a position where they were able to exploit other
societies. Lapidus also dismisses the argument that parallel capitalist developments were
underway in other societies and given enough time would have produced parallel capitalist
civilizations. See also Landes, 1996. He notes that the Middle Eastern shashiya (cap) industry
was an isolated case and it is hard to see how an industrial revolution could have emerged out of
the cloth industries.
In short, Lapidus offers a qualified defense of European exceptionalism. It could have
been undone sometime between 700 A. D. and 1000 A.D.
Ross Hassig. Could the Aztecs have repulsed the Spaniards and won? Was the conquest of
Mexico so determined by the factors in evidence that no significant alteration of historical events
was plausible? Or could a minimal alteration that was reasonable within the power of either
side in this conflict have shifted the subsequent chain of events in such a way as to lead to a
radically different result from the one we know historically? Hassig offers the answers “yes”,
“no”, and “yes” to these three questions.
30
Hassig lists the following conventional explanations for the defeat of the Aztec empire,
including the Aztec belief that the Spaniards were returning gods, the psychological and
ideological collapse of the Aztecs, Cortes’s and the Spaniards’ personal characteristics, the
Spaniards’ cultural, religious or psychological superiority, the Indians’ poor or misguided
war-making ability, and the Spaniards’ superior weapons and tactics, flaws in the Aztec political
system, the impact of smallpox, and the Spaniards’ superior grasp of the symbolic system.
Hassig argues that when we give equal weight to Mesoamerican politics and circumstances a
different list of causal candidates emerges. To be sure, luck, skill, deceit, and daring all played
a role but there was nothing miraculous about the Conquest. It can be understood largely in
terms of power differentials: the ability of the Spaniards to secure and retain Indian allies, the
ability of the Spaniards to hold together as a cohesive force, and the ability of the Spaniards to
thwart the Aztecs’ in their efforts to retain their own allies. Had any of these efforts been
frustrated, and especially the first two, the conquest would likely have failed. It is here that
Hassig concentrates his counterfactual explorations.
There are, of course, many historians quite willing to concede that Cortes could have
failed but who then invoke second-order counterfactuals of the form “the Spaniards (or more
generally, the Europeans) would be back.” Hassig tried to see as far as he plausibly can into a
counterfactual world in which Cortes has been defeated. He suggests that Governor Velasquez
would probably have insisted on his own approach to Mexican contacts. He wanted to establish
trade relations and would probably have opposed any further military plans at least for the
foreseeable future, preferring instead to use Vera Cruz as a trading base, much as the Portuguese
were to use Macao to trade with China and Japan. Of course, Velasquez died in 1524 so this
policy might have been reversed. But, if Spanish/Aztec relations were re-established on a
peaceful basis, the ties between Mesoamerica and Europe might have taken a different turn with
some military goods ending up in Aztec hands (iron knives, swords, if not firearms) — a transfer
that would have more nearly balanced the two sides and made any subsequent invasion more
difficult.
Cortes’s defeat would also have altered demographic history. Smallpox epidemic would
still have killed about 40% of the population but the devastating typhus epidemics of 1545-48
and 1576-81 might well have been deferred, if not avoided altogether, leaving Mexico with a
large population throughout the 16th century.
Hassig also raises the question of what the Spaniards could do and would have been
motivated to do under the altered circumstances. A new invasion would have taxed manpower
resources in the Indies and alternative invasion routes (from the south or from the north) raised
their own unique sets of difficulties. Moreover, Spanish attention would have been directed
southward as Pizarro conquered the Incas in 1531-32.
The key issue though in Hassig’s view is what, if anything, the Aztecs would have done
to prepare for an eventual Spanish return. Would they take advantage of the expertise of the
Spaniards they had captured (or would they humiliate, torture, and decapitate them)? Would
they acquire horses? Hard metallic weapons, perhaps even firearms? Would they adopt new
tactics? Much hinges here on one’s estimates of their capacity to innovate and to learn. The
longer the reconquest was deferred, the more the Aztecs could, in principle, strengthen their
position. New threats and opportunities also arose by the 1540's when Spain and France went to
war (1543) and French and later English predation began in the Caribbean. These attacks
obviously weaken the Spanish but they also brought new potential invaders close to Mexico.
In short, Hassig sees a number of possible worlds: (1) successful Spanish conquest that
comes later; (2) successful conquest of Mexico by another European power such as France or
England; (3) the Aztecs are able to resist colonial subjugation for a prolonged period (up to
31
1650, 1700, 1750...).
Let’s define two exclusive and exhaustive sets of possible outcomes: subjugation of
Aztecs by Spain or some other European power by 1750 and successful preservation of Aztec
autonomy as of 1750. The first set could be decomposed into temporal units (conquest between
1500-1550, 1150-1600,...) and into identity-of-conqueror units (Spain, France, England, others).
Successful preservation of Aztec autonomy might be achieved because other powers do not
pursue conquest after the Cortes mission or because the Spanish do attack again but fail or
because some other power attacks and fails or because the Aztecs successfully entered into an
alliance with the European power committed to offer protection and weapons...
Something analogous could be done for Lapidus. Imagine all possible ways in which
Europe could have been conquered by Islamic forces between 700 A.D. and 1000 A.D. and the
set of all alternative worlds. Lapidus argues, in effect, that there are no possible worlds in
which Europe is Islamicized early on and develops robust capitalist institutions.
Chronology of close-call counterfactuals in European history (J.M. Roberts). European history
might have unfolded quite differently if: (a) there had not been a major earthquake and volcanic
eruption at Thera around 1500 B.C.E. that destroyed the great palace center at Knossos (ending a
potentially dominant civilization in the region); (b) if the Greeks had not defeated the Persians at
the battles of Marathon and Salamis; (c) if Alexander the Great had either died before his
extraordinary string of conquests (thus not spreading Greek influence throughout the Middle
East) or lived much longer (making Greek influence all the more pervasive); (d) if the
Carthaginians had prevailed in the Second Punic War (218 B.C.E.) (Note, Alexander, 324
B.C.E.); (e) if Christianity had been crushed some time in its early development (A.D. 33-49) or
had been defined by the key proselytizers as a Jewish sect (undoing Jesus or Paul the Apostle);
(f) if Constantine had lost or had not converted to Christianity in A.D. 312 (making Christianity
the official religion of the Roman Empire); (g) the Barbarians are more barbaric (eliminating far
more of civilization than they did in the period A.D. 400-600); (h) no Islam; Islamic conquest of
Western Europe (A.D. 720-800); (i) undo late 10th century conversion of Kiev Rus to Orthodox
Christianity (it becomes Roman Catholic or Islamic instead); (j) increase or decrease lethality of
black death.
Niall Ferguson offers an ironic counterfactual on the significance of World War I to
western civilization. Not only did it hasten the demise of Europe as a geopolitical center of
influence, it also represented, in his view, the most painful possible path to German hegemony
on the continent. He argues that if, as was conceivable in August 1914, Britain had kept out of
the war, the Germans would have won; but the long-term effect on the world would’ve been less
harmful than the actual course of history after 1918: “Had Britain stood aside--even for a matter
of weeks--Continental Europe could...have been transformed into something not wholly unlike
the European Union we know today--but without the massive contraction in British overseas
power entailed by the fighting of two world wars.” Even more miraculously, “with the Kaiser
triumphant, Adolf Hitler could’ve eked out his life as a mediocre postcard painter...in a
German-dominated Central Europe about which he could’ve found little to complain. And
Lenin could’ve carried on his splenetic scribbling in Zurich, forever waiting for capitalism to
collapse--and forever disappointed.” In Ferguson’s eyes, the trouble was that British leaders did
join the war and thereby helped to ensure that, when Germany finally did achieve predominance
on the Continent, Britain was no longer strong enough to provide a check to it.” So,
preoccupied with the state of Europe and his marginalized country now, Ferguson concluded that
the outbreak of war in 1914, which the British entry put into a cataclysmic world conflict was
“worse than a tragedy, which is something by the theater to regard as ultimately unavoidable.”
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In trying to restore human agency to catastrophe, he finds that WWI was not only “at once
piteous...and ‘a pity’”, it was “nothing less than the greatest error of modern history.”
DEEPAK LAL (1998) UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES, MIT PRESS. Many economists
treat culture and the realm of ideas as residual categories to which fuzzy minded social scientists
all too readily resort when formal materialistic models fail. Lal argues that, although certain
material factors were critical in the evolution of particular civilizations (for example, the caste
system in India may have arisen as a result of the need to tie scarce labor to the land in a country
lacking a centralized state), these “factor endowments” by themselves are not up to the task of
explaining the rise of the modern economic world. India in the Mauryan period, China in the
Sung dynasty, Islam under the Abbasids were never able to realize more than what Lal terms
Smithean gains from trade. Only the Christian West was able to achieve “Promethean growth”
based on long-term fixed investment in technology, for reasons ultimately grounded in
cosmological beliefs and cultural traditions.
Lal’s account of the differences between the West and the Rest is in many ways standard Weber.
He maintains that only in the Christian West did there arise a culture of genuine individualism
where belief in a transcendent God gave individuals the idea that they had a principled basis for
defying the authority of the immediate social structures around them, from the family to the state
to the Church. A universal God trumped not only secular authority but gave people the idea that
nature itself was subject to hidden, universal laws, hence making possible the emergence of
modern science. “It was only this individualism, which freed people from the strictures of
family, clan, tribe, and tradition, that made possible the endless innovation, exchange, and
technical mastery of nature that characterizes modern capitalist society.” In brief, in Lal’s words,
“Max Weber was right, he just got the dates wrong.” Instead of having emerged during the
Reformation, modern individualism grew out of a change in Eurpean family structure that began
a thousand years earlier. Building on the work of Jack Goody, John Hajnal, and Peter Laslett, Lal
asserts that the nuclear family in Western Europe was not, as once commonly believed, a
by-product of industrialization but rather predated industrial society by many centuries and was
in fact a precondition for later economic growth. Its origin can be traced to Pope Gregory I and
the greed of the seventh century Church, which discouraged marriage between close kin, the
re-marriage of widows, and other practices which tended to keep property within close knit
family groups. The relative ease with which property could be alienated benfited the Church
directly, and in the long run gave individuals material incentives for breaking off from the large,
tightly bonded kin groups that characterized china, India, and the Islamic lands. “Individualism
in the family is the mother of all individualisms: well before industrialization and the rise of the
modern state-funded social security systems, nuclear families were already making contractual
arrangements for the care of the aged. By this account, the spread of the nuclear family freed
western societies from the suffocating web of kinship bonds that prevail in virtually all other
Eurasian cultures and was a precondition for the industrialization that followed. In this sense,
“Western individualism and the modernity it spawned had a material root (the self interest of the
early Church) but a root that was accidental and unpredictable by any economic theory of
history.
WHAT DO EXPERTS ON EARLY CHRISTIANITY HAVE TO SAY ABOUT THE
GREGORY I DECISION--FORCED OR CONTROVERSIAL?
Lal: third century B.C.: under the Mauryas, Hindus slip into high-level equilibrium trap? as does
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China under the Sung? Points of no return? Also note article from new what if volume on
mongol invasion of europe (but for an accident of death the mongols would have done to europe
what they did to china and islam
Dialectical theorists, of course, have long been drawn to the notion that the same individualism
that catapulted the west into Promethean growth and geopolitical dominance (making possible
science, technology, and instrumental rationality) has also had the effect of undermining the
communal values that are key sources of social cohesion in Western societies. Western
individualism is thus a double-edged sword: it threatens to corrode not just those stifling
ascriptive, patrimonial social arrangements handed down by tradition but also the voluntary
elective affinities created by modern life, making all social connections shallow and transitory
(see also Alasdair MacIntyre, Peter Berger and Ralf Dahrendorf).
Jack Goody, 1999, Food and love: A cultural history of East and West.
His basic theme has been that Europe and Asia are a unit; that economic and political divergence
between east and west is a very recent phenomenon and the real divide is between Eurasia and
africa, pre-Columbian Americas and the South Pacific. Since the Bronze Age, Eurasians have
been using animal power to draw ploughs and have developed cities, literacy, and social
stratification. Africans have not, broadly speaking, created these and have as a result developed
looser forms of social organization were hampered by the lack of a literary apparatus... “in
Goody’s view, Eurasia was more or less homogeneous from the bronze Age to the Industrial
Revolution: towns and cities were the center of courtly or governing activity, had flourishing
craftsmen, busy merchants engaged in wide ranging trade, increasingly efficient governments,
and cultures based on writing, hence reflective and skeptical... (TLS, J. Davis, page 6, July 30,
1999). To be sure, these developments were not evenly spread within Eurasia--indeed, until the
Renaissance, Europe had been backward in key respects but by the late 18th century, Europe had
become modern and the global hegemon and Asia had not.
Goody comes into sharp conflict with a host of scholars who have sought to explain why and
exactly how Europe came out “on top” (Immanuel Wallerstein’s phrase) by identifying
distinctive forms of European social organization that pre-date the Industrial revolution. For
example, Goody rules out feudalism and mercantile capitalism because these are Eurasian and
did not metamorphose everywhere into industrial capitalism. Similarly, with respect to the
nuclear family and the complexities of household organization. And the Protestant Ethic is not
up to the task because goody claims to identify forms of Daoism, hinduism, Judaism, andIslam
that place equal stress on the delay of gratification. “Indeed, goody is at magnificent odds with
all social, cultural, political, and economic historians who have considered why England in
particular (or europe in general) launched modernity.
Goody is perhaps more effecetive at debunking explanations advanced byothers than he is at
proposing explanations of his own. It was “not feudalism, mercantilism, love, logic, cuisine,
household organization, or religion; it was not a 15th or 16th or 17th century development. But
what it was, or rather what the several factors were that inevitably or fortuitously combined to
permit the 200-year ascendancy of the West is largely outside goody’s scope. He merely offers
hints: the European bourgeoisie was broody with the industrial revolution from the
enlightenment onwards; printing; bullion from South America and west Africa to finance guns
and ships; maps and adventures; the machines that spun off from the spirit of scientific inquiry
that followed the decline of religion; and then the need for european manufacturers to compete
34
with china and cloth from the east. Goody faces up to a hydra-headed Eurocentrism,
decapitiating each new account of exceptionalism as it arises.
ROY SORENSON, 1991, THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS. NEW YORK: OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS.
There is no shortage of critics of thought experiments. E.H. Carr dismissed them as silly
parlor games hardly worthy of serious intellectual attention. Indeed, some Marxists take the
analogy proposed by Polsby (1981) quite literally and depict social science counterfactuals as
forms of social science fiction and as a genre of escapist literature. One feminist critique holds
that the reliance on hypothetical counterexamples is part and parcel of a coercive, abstract,
reductive, male-based form of philosophy that needs to balanced by a more cooperative, holistic,
female-based approach. Richard Rorty contends that the method is ultimately circular because
our prior beliefs determine what we regard as imaginable. In a similar vein, Gilbert harman has
warned that thought experiments only tell us what we believe, not the nature of reality. Daniel
Dennett cautions that much of the persuasive impact of thought experiments (he calls them
intuition pumps) to imagery, making thought experiments seem more likely poetry, fiction, or
rhetorical devices than instruments of rational persuasion. Dennett also warns that thought
experiments systematically over-simplify, and are biased against complex processes that cannot
be summed up in vignettes.
Kathleen Wilkes (Real people: personal identity without thought
experiment) warns against equating logical (psychological) conceivability and empirical
possibility.
Most, if not all, skeptics of thought experiments are vulnerable to the tu quoque objection
for they themselves turn out on close inspection to be regular practitioners of the very method
they condemn. The “hypocrisy” defense is, however, hardly compelling (tu quoque is a logical
fallacy after all). Skeptics do, of course, have the option of recanting their epistemic sins of yore
and trying to adhere to higher standards. The apparent fact that it is hard to practice what you
preach need not count as evidence against what you preach. But what if it is more than hard to
avoid slipping into counterfactual forms of argumentation? What if, as tetlock has argued in the
introductory chapter, it is downright impossible? Ought still implies can.
The recurring theme among critics is that counterfactual thought experimentation is but a
disguised form of an already discredited form of inquiry. In this view, thought experimentation is
just a variant of introspection or an atavistic appeal to common sense and shared intellectual
prejudices embodied in ordinary language and professional subcultures.
Although the cognitive revolution in psychology long ago made respectable the study of
thought and mental imagery, introspection continues to hover at the fringes of intellectual
respectability. Standard definitions of introspection assert that to introspect is to attend to the
workings of one’s own mind. Many philosophers and psychologists are suspicious, however, of
claims that we can track the progress of our own thought processes in the same way that we can
track the movement of objects in physical space. The argument takes both logical and empirical
forms. Consider first the logical objections.
Whereas cars, trains, and planes exist even if undetected, mental states are subjective
entities that depend on our awareness of them. John Locke, for instance, insisted that
propositions about our own mental states must be strongly self-intimating: if you have mental
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state M, then you know that you have state M. Gottfried Leibniz, one of Locke’s most
distinguished adversaries, correctly warned however that self-intimation implies an infinite
regress in which having state M1 requires another state M2 (awareness of M1) which , in turn,
requires another state M3 (awareness of the M2 awareness of M1)... This Leibnizian analysis
opens the analytic door for misperception and self-deception. There are surely attentional limits
to our ability to monitor the contents of consciousness and quite likely other sources of
systematic distortion in the conclusions people draw about their own cognitive and emotional
processes.
Contemporary psychologists have vigorously pursued the potential limits on
self-awareness. People are often swayed in their judgments by factors or cues that they either
never consciously registered or that firmly believed to have been inconsequential. And people
often claim to be basing their judgments on factors that could not possibly be shaping their
judgments to the degree claimed. Introspective access to the mental machinery of inference is, to
say the least, limited and unreliable. Thought experimenters may claim that they have been led to
certain conclusions via a certain chain of logic and evidence but observers well versed in the
psychological literature have plenty of reasons to be skeptical. What mental organ or module
could conceivably be responsible for achieving the state of inner omniscience that thought
experiments seem to require (at least to be taken at face value). Indeed is self-observation even
possible--given the inevitable time lags between cause and effect in perception and
apperception? Perhaps, following Herbert Simon, we should talk about retrospective
reconstructions of past frames of mind, retrospective reconstructions that are inevitably
incomplete and unstable.
Can thought experiments move opinions by revealing hitherto latent contradictions within
belief systems? The potential change that thought experiments can produce is constrained by
our model of the belief system within which the thought experiment unfolds. Here the distinction
that physicists draw between stable and unstable and neutral equilibria is helpful. A marble is in
equilibrium is in stable equilibria because it returns to its equilibrium point when disturbed.
Balancing the marble on top of the bowl yields an unstable equilibrium because it readily rolls
far away from rthe equilibrium point at the slightest provocation: the potential energy of the
marble points awy from, rather than toward, the original position. When the marble is on a flat
floor, it is in neutral equilibria because a disturbance will move it away from its original position
but its potential energy points neither away from, or toward this point. Each of these equilibria
corresponds to the initial state of a potential belief system prior to conducting a thought
experiment: the marble should be viewed as the initial subjective probability or value placed on a
proposition (X is or is not likely or desirable), the spatial positions as alternative positions that
could be taken on the likelihood or value that should be placed on that proposition, and the
disturbances as the impact of the thought-experiment recharacterizations of events on beliefs.
The ideal thought experiment should be replicable so Sorenson asserts that we should
only prize the stable sort of constancy. Indeed, our satisfaction grows with the degree of stability:
we like the marble to be located in a tall and narrow bowl that permits minimal movement. This
distinction illuminates cognitive thought experiments that produce uniform results under one
mode of presentation but not under slightly different modes (e.g., choice versus matching studies
in jdm, other examples?). It may also apply to historical thought experiments that yield different
professional judgments of outcome as a function of minor variations in details (especially true
for those historical observers who see bifurcation points).
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This constancy criticism should be distinguished from the infidelity objection. There are
thought experiments that systematically produce the “wrong” answers. Imagine folding a sheet
of tissue paper, originally 0.001 inch thick. How think would it be after 50 folds? Most people,
lacking refined mathematical intuitions for exponential growth functions, guess less than five
feet.. In fact, the answer is 17,770,000 miles, roughly a quarter of the distance to Venus. These
types of exercises offer the salutary reminder that thought experiments could fail to yield the
right answer even thought they succeed in persuading everyone to accept the intended result.
Other objections bear note. Sorenson, page 36: “A favorite use of thought experiments is
to establish a possibility. The emphasis on fresh possibilities gives thought experiements a
reputation as a liberating enterprise: we discover more degrees of freedom. Love of liberty
confers a diffuse positive aura over the imaginative exercise. But since the possibility is usually
marshaled as a counterexample to some promising definition or entailment thesis, the effect
tends to be the negative one of refutation.” Critics of thought experiments often argue that
advocates of the “method” incorrectly assume (implicitly or explicitly) that imaginability or
conceivability implies empirical or logical possibility. Consider, for instance, a standard thought
experiment deployed by mind-body dualists to refute behaviorist/materialist theories of mind
which insist that mental discourse must reduce to claims about actual or possible human
behavior. This position implies that one must possess a body in order to exist. However, we can
conceive or imagine a disembodied existence. Imagine, say, leaving your body and observing
events from a perspective within, say, the White House. Dualists then conclude that, Q. E. D., it
is possible to exist without a body and that behaviorism must be false. This demonstration, of
course, demonstrates nothing. It may indeed still be impossible to detach our perceptual and
cognitive apparatus from its neyral and biochemical substrate.
On the one hand, there are large classes of thought-experiment questions that, at various
stages of scientific development, could not even be posed because we lacked the conceptual
infrastructure. Aristotle or Ptolemy could not even ask--less still answer— the question of
whether black holes exist. There are thus events that fall in the set of the possible but not in the
set of the imaginable. On the other hand, there are events that the most imaginative of us can
visualize but will turn out to be physically or logically impossible (carbon-based life in
super-cold or hot worlds).
Note this amusing but revealing counterargument: the weakest interpretation of
“possibility implies conceivability” makes any specific empirical counter-example
self-defeating. If, for example, I declare that “p is possible but inconceivable”, you can counter
that if either of us understands what I have just said, the sentence must be false. To understand
the first conjunct, p is possible, I must be able to conceive of the possibility of p. And if neither
of us understands the sentence stating the counterexample, how can we assess whether it is a
counterexample? The difficulty here is analogous to that faced by those who believe there are
ineffable truths: if they are right, they cannot state the example.
Note also that it is possible to refute universal generalizations without giving a specific
counter example. Recall mark twain’s proof that not all of europe’s reliquaries contain genuine
fragments of Jesus’ cross: when added together, the reliquaries have enough wood to make more
than one cross.
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One popular analogical argument against “possibility implies conceivability” is
evolutionary. Humans can think of possibilities that no other animals can think of: the speed of
light as a constant, reincarnation, DNA,... It follows that all of these animals have imaginative
limits, there are possibilities beyond their ken. By analogy, human beings, as animals that are
also the product of natural selection, must also have imaginative limits. The only way to dodge
this conclusion is to adopt the highly suspect position that humans have somehow passed a
cognitive threshold at which all possibilities have become conceivable.
Some kinds of nonsense can be illuminating. Unlike austin who stuck close to home in
his selection of hypotheticals, Wittgenstein was a marco Polo of the imagination who imagined
surgeons discovering that he is brainless, a man whose expressions of joy and sorrow alternated
with the ticking of a clock,, people who like alike but have their features migrate from body to
body... The function of such bizarre thought experiments is to promote awareness of scaffolding
facts: it is as if our concepts involved a scaffolding of facts--that would presumably mean “if you
imagine certain facts otherwise, describe them otherwise, than they are, then you can no longer
imagine the application of certain concepts, because the rules for their application have no
analogue in the new circumstances” footnote 48 Wittgenstein...) Similar to Goodman’s
co-tenability.
Advocates of thought experiments are caught on the horns of a dilemma: the explanans is
either synonymous with the explanandum (making the analysis trivially true or tautological) or
not synonymous (making the analysis either speculative or false). This dilemma for thought
experiments is rooted in their evidential inferiority to public observation and experiment. Carl
H notes a continuum of thought experiments anchored at one end by rigorous theoretical thought
experiments that rest on explicitly defined principles and theoretical deductions (See fogel) and
at the other end by intuitive thought experiments in which underlying principles are left
unarticulated and inferences are made casually. Most thought experiments fall somewhere
toward the middle and serve what Hempel calls a heuristic function (they may suggest
hypotheses which must then be subjected to appropriate tests).
At the other end of the philosophical continuum from the neo-positivist hempel, we find
radicaal constructivists such as Alexius Meinong who deplores the prejudice against the
cognitive value of thought experiments as the product of a bias in favor of the actual. A key
argument for this position appeals to the possibility of true negative existential statements such
as “Santa Claus does not exist. How do we manage to refer intelligibly to non-existent entities
such as Santa, phlogiston, and unicorns. Meinong’s answer: because they possess subsistence
From this standpoint , thought experiments broaden the traditional focus of history and social
science on actual things to the neglected realm of subsistence! (See also david lewis on possible
worlds).
Hans Hahn’s skepticism re thought experiments: “The idea that thinking is an instrument for
learning more about the world than has been observed, for acquiring knowledge of something
that has absolute validity always and everywhere in the world, an instrument for grasping general
laws of being, seems to us wholly mystical. Just how could it come to pass that we could predict
the outcome of an observation before having made it?...
Ernst Mach, mentor of the youthful Albert Einstein, coined the term
gedankenexperimente.. He argued that the analogy to actual experiments was justified on
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biological grounds. People, products of natural selection that we are, surely must possess the
power to simulate mentally how a wide range of physical processes would unfold under this or
that contingency. Sheer biological necessity dictates that powerful similarities hold between our
inner private world and the outer public one. The built-in human cognitive tendency to mimic
natural patterns ensures that “iron-fillings dart towards the magnet in imagination as well as in
fact, and, when thrown into the fire, grow hot as well.” The primordial knowledge tapped by
thought experiments apes reality with tropistic inevitabilty:: heavy bodies do not rise of
themselves, equally hot bodies in each other’s presence remain equally hot,... Our intuitive sense
of the absurd facilitates the pursuit of truth not because instinctive knowledge is always right but
rather because it allows us to rule out so many implausible scenarios. To illustrate how
instinctive knowledge--rooted in our animalistic origins--can metamorphose into explicit
scientific principle, Mach cites a thought experiment of Simon Stevin, a bookkeeper and
engineer who, in 1605, published a book on idealized machines whose parts do not stick or bind.
One of his problems is to calculate the force required to prevent a ball from sliding downhill on
an inclined plane. The two extreme cases are easy: the ball on a perfectly horizontal plane is
already at rest so zero force is required to hold it in place whereas a ball that is flush against a
vertical plane requires its exact weight to be fully held in place. What happens though when the
ball is on a plane inclined at 45 degrees. Intuition tells us that some force is needed but not
exactly how much. Stevin advances a three-step thought experiment that decisively solves the
problem. First, imagine a triangular prism. Second, lay a circular string of fourteen equally
spaced balls over the prism in the manner of Figure xx. Logically, the balls must be in
equilibrium or not. If they are not in balance, we should be able to give the balls a slight tug that
sends the balls into motion--forever. But perpetual motion is absrd and we therefore conclude
that the balls must be in equilibrium. The finals step is to cut the string simultaneously at the
lower corners. Intuition tells us that the balls won’t fall off because the eight balls on the bottom
strand (four on each side) must have been pulling each side equally. (After all, if the balls did
slide, our intuition would be agnostic about the direction in which the slide would occur--our
intuition is itself in equilibrium.) It now becomes transparent that the short portion of the stringed
balls (two of them) is sufficient to balance the long portion (four of them) and, more generally,
that the force required to hold objects in place on inclined planes varies with the steepness of the
angle.
Physical science and to a certain degree economics abounds with compelling
counterfactual thought experiments. Consider Galileo’s pendulum thought experiment which
undermined the prevailing Aristotelian theory of motion. Galileo’s fascination with the motion of
pendulums led him to design an inclined plane that demonstrates the law of equal heights.
Sorenson describes the logic of the study as follows (p. 8): “Just as the pendulum’s bob recovers
its original height as it swings from its top-left point to its top right, a ball rolled along a double
inclined plane will recover its original height. In real life the ball does not quite reach its original
height because some of its energy is spent in the good fight against friction and air resistance.
The law of equal heights only directly applies to an idealized counterpart of the physical set-up,
one in which there is no friction or air resistance... galileo’s idealization lets us sidestep this mess
and test the law with the behavior of an imaginary ball and plane. This line of inquiry brings us
to a more dramatic kind of thought experiment in which we are doing more than stipulating away
nuisance factors. Galileo asks us to suppose that one side of the plane is progressively
lengthened, so that the ball must travel farther and farther to regain its original height. In the
limiting case of infinite lengthening, the ball never returns to its original height. But since the
law of equal heights says the ball must continue until it does regain its original height, it follows
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that the ball will continue forever in a straight line.
This thought experiment inverted the prevailing Aristotelian theory of motion (and, Mach
notwithstanding, common sense) which maintained that it was natural for things to slow down
and come to rest; continued movement is what needs explaining. As Toulmin notes, after
Galileo’s thought experiment, continued movement seemed natural and slowing required
explanation. Toulmin calls this shared sense of what is in need of explanation an “ideal of natural
order”--one of those standards of rationality and intelligibility which... lie at the heart of
scientific theory. These ideals are important because they set the agenda for discussion. Our
ideals of natural order provide basic referemce points for what counts as strange--and thus what
stands in need for additional inquiry. And, in this way, they control lines of inquiry Change
investigators’ implicit conceptions of the natural (or social order) and the result will be some
questions dropping from the lead pages of the lead journals and new ones appearing.
In a similar vein , imagine thought experiments designed to place counterfactual thought
experimentation at the analytic center of historical inquiry. Hofstadter’s question: of the infinity
of possible events, personalities, contingencies... we could mentally undo and insert as
antecedents into thought experiments, which ones do we choose and why (a pro-constructivist
thought experiment that underscores the centrality of theory. Fogel/Fearon question: all causal
inferences frm history rest on counterfactual assumptions about what would have happened in...
because of absence of control groups in history... (note controls can be only approximated so
generalization still holds). Tetlock factual versus counterfactual framing of history questions.
Note thought experiments whose purpose is not to guide inquiry but rather to tell us how
we should live (Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence which remains quite compelling even
after its alleged logical basis had been removed by Georg Simmel). Good example of
metaphysical thought experiments at their polar extremes.
Another illustration of a QED thought experiment. Here Mach cites Galileo’s criticism of
Aristotle’s principle that the natural velocity of a heavier object is greater than that of a lighter
one. Aristotle’s theory seems to be vindicated by everyday observation; if you simultaneously
drop a brick and a feather, the brick lands first. Aristotle also observed that when a faster object
joins a sklower one, the faster one slows down. The swift charioteer who locks onto a lumbering
ox cart slows down. Galileo shows how these commonsense principles are logically
contradictory by constructing a counrefactual thought experiment in which he calls on us to
imagine that a big stone becomes connected to a little stone in the middle of their fall to the
earth. The natural-velocity principle requires that heavier objects fall faster and therefore the
attachment operation should accelerate the stone. The averaging-out-of-velocity principle makes
the opposite prediction: a slowing of the larger object. As it is impossible for the stone to fall
both faster and slower, Aristotle’s theory is refuted without need for an actual experiment. The
theory has been shown to be logically incoherent.
Counterfactual thought experiments can run on the wetware of the human mind or the hardware
of silicon-chip intelligence (and the latter is still ultimately reducible to the former). Given the
impossibility of eliminating the subjectivity of such exercises, it should be assumed that all
conceivable sources of clouded judgment have had some form of influence on some form of
thought experiment or other. Tetlock divides these sources of bias into those produced by desires
and those produced by misleading habits of thought.
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explains the impact of Searle’s Chinese Room as deriving from a yearning to claim a different
status from machines. Anti-deterministic thought experiments receive an “illicit boost from our
craving for freedom” (261). To understand the enthusiasm with which Maxwell’s Demon was
welcomed, it is necessary to appreciate what Victorians feared science was on the verge of
conclusively demonstrating. In 1852, Lord Kelvin had published a paper on the universal
dissipation of energy which argued that because mechanical energy continually dissipates into
heat by friction and heat continually dissipates by conduction, the second law of thermodynamics
seals the fate of the universe: heat-death. Against this grim backdrop, Maxwell’s Demon was a
savior: it saved humanity from an unwanted identity (ultimately doomed). His argument took the
form of imagining that a creature small enough to observe and handle individual molecules could
violate the law (hardly a compelling argument given the state of technology of the day). At the
other end of the epistemological universe, post-modernists may fear that counterfactual thought
experiments are yet another monstrous intrusion into the humanities of the jargon and
pretensions of hypothetico-deductive science. This constituency should be mollified insofar as
they can be persuaded to think of such exercises not as a method of testing deterministic
covering laws but rather as a means of continuing a thoughtful dialogue about the past and of
ensuring that the full spectrum of potential points of view is represented reasonably fairly. In the
end, counterfactual history, like history itself, straddles the boundary between science and art.
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APPENDIX I: COUNTERFACTUAL CASE STUDIES.
Chapter 2: Counterfactual Thought Experiments in History (by Richard Ned Lebow)
This, second theoretical chapter argues for the utility -- indeed, the necessity -- of using
counterfactual arguments to understand history. It describes appropriate protocols for the
conduct of counterfactual arguments and thought experiments. Most controversially, it argues
that the difference between counterfactual and “factual” arguments is more one of degree than of
kind.
Knowledge of outcomes affects our understanding of the past by making it difficult for us
to recall that we were once unsure about what was going to happen. Events deemed improbable
by experts (e.g., the peaceful resolution of the Cold War and subsequent dissolution of the Soviet
Union), are often considered “overdetermined” and all but inevitable once they have occurred.
The well-documented hindsight bias is best counteracted by counterfactual thought experiments
that make alternative worlds vivid and accessible.
Counterfactuals can be used to tease out the generally unspoken assumptions on which
historical interpretations rest. Implicit in every historical interpretation is the counterfactual that
the outcome would not have occurred in the absence of the stated cause(s). For this reason,
counterfactual arguments can be used to criticize existing interpretations. Because every causal
argument has its associated counterfactual, critics have two strategies open to them: they can try
to offer a different and more compelling account, or show that the outcome would still have
occurred in the absence of the claimed cause(s).
Counterfactual experiments allow us to introduce the kind of controlled variation that is
necessary for meaningful comparative analysis. Because historians typically study single
cases, history confronts what social scientists call the “small-N problem.” Single case studies
can always be challenged as unrepresentative of the phenomenon in question. Validation is
especially difficult when outcomes are attributed to multiple causes. Historians typically
attempt to establish causation by process tracing. They try to document the links between a
stated cause and a given outcome. This works best at the individual level of analysis, but only
when there is enough evidence to document the calculations, and the motives behind them, of
relevant actors. Even when such evidence is available, it may not permit historians to determine
the relative weight of the several causes they contend were at work, and which of them, if any,
might have produced the same outcome in the absence of the others. Intra-case, counterfactual
experiments, are one means of introducing the controlled variation helpful in making a stronger
case for causation.
These several goals employ “plausible world” and “miracle” counterfactuals. The
former have antecedents that seem possible in that they do not violate our understanding of what
was technologically, culturally, temporally or otherwise possible. “Miracle counterfactuals are
particularly useful for purposes of theory building and testing. The body of the chapter explores
“plausible world” counterfactuals, and describes rules for distinguishing plausible from
implausible counterfactuals. Plausible counterfactuals should be clear, cotenable, historically
consistent, generally avoid the “conjunction fallacy,” take account of the interconnectedness of
events, and consider additional consequences and address their implications. The chapter
explores these tests in detail.
Historical argument is built on chains of inference that use putative behavioral
“principles” as anchor points. Documents or other empirical evidence -- when available — may
be used to try to establish links between these principles and behavior. But frequently, such
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evidence is not available or not exploited for this purpose. Like many social scientists,
historians are sometimes content to show that their explanation is consistent with the outcome
they are trying to explain. Readers, including other historians, evaluate historical speculation on
the seeming “reasonableness” of the inferences being made, the quality and relevance of the
evidence offered in support, and the extent to which that evidence permits or constrains
alternative interpretations. Receptivity to arguments is also significantly influenced by the
appeal of the underlying, political and behavioral “principles” in which the inferences are rooted.
When these “principles” run counter to the reigning orthodoxy, the arguments may be dismissed
out of hand regardless of the evidence.
Counterfactual thought experiments are fundamentally similar to “factual” historical
reconstruction. Suppose we attempt to evaluate the importance of Mikhail Gorbachev for the
end of the Cold War by considering the likely consequences for Soviet foreign policy of
Andropov’s survival or Chernenko’s replacement by someone other than Gorbachev. To do
this, we would study the career and policies of Andropov or an other possible successors to
Chernenko (e.g., Grishin, Romanov, Ligachev), and infer their policies on the basis of their past
preferences and commitments, the political environment in 1986 and the general domestic and
foreign situation of the Soviet Union. There is a lot of documentary evidence on all three
leaders, evidence that sustains informed arguments about the kind of domestic and foreign
policies they might have pursued. Of course, random events, like Mathias Rust’s Cessna flight
to Red Square, which Gorbachev exploited to purge the military of many hardliners, can have
significant influence on policy, and such events, by definition, cannot be predicted.
In the final analysis, counterfactual arguments, like any other historical argument, are
only as compelling as the logic and “evidence” offered by the researcher to substantiate the link
between the hypothesized antecedent and its expected consequences. Every good counterfactual
ultimately rests on a large number of “factuals.”
Chapter 3: The Others’ Last Chance -- Salamis, 480 B.C. E. (by Victor Hanson)
The Greek-led victory in September 480 B.C.E. stopped the invasion of Xerxes I, and
ended Eastern entry into the Balkans until the fifteenth century of our own era. A compelling
case can be made that the Greeks should not have won -- their fleet was outnumbered 1200 ships
to 368, and the Attic coast off Salamis was entirely in the hands of the Persians who had just
looted Athens and burned the Acropolis. Three aspects of the battle are of enormous
importance.
First, the Greek victory seems to have been inordinately due to a single individual,
Themistocles, whose personal magnetism convinced the quarreling Greeks to unite, to mount
resistance north of the Peloponnese, and to fight at sea and in the straits of Salamis. His
pre-battle stratagem of communicating to Xerxes that victory was possible at Salamis against a
Greek fleet that was on the verge of capitulation lured the Persians to fight unwisely in the
narrows around the island, where their enormous advantages in numbers and considerable skill in
seamanship were neutralized. Had Themistocles lost the vote to assume the Greek leadership,
failed in his efforts at galvanizing the resistance, not tricked Xerxes, or been killed during the
early fighting, the Persians would not have fought where they did and thus not have lost where
they fought. A single man, then, seems responsible for the victory in a way not true of other
major battles of the war such as Marathon or Plataea.
Second, by 480 the Greek polis and the institutions of Western culture were still in
embryonic form and vulnerable to extinction by an array of Eastern Mediterranean powers -Persia for example possessed a population forty times larger, in a geographical expanse eighty
times greater, than Greece. Had the Greeks failed at Salamis, they would have lost the Persian
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wars and thus have become a satrapy of the Persian empire. The Ionian Greeks’ experience in
Asia Minor suggests that, once conquered, they would have been querulous, but never strong
enough on their own to have become again fully independent. Thus the nascent institutions of
the polis — civil liberties, a free economy, citizen militias, consensual government, separation of
politics and religion, scientific inquiry immune from theology -- would have gradually been
extinguished by very different Persian traditions. After Salamis, the polis was established well
enough that no individual setback could again arrest the Western paradigm; before Salamis,
European culture was in a vulnerable two-century infancy that represented the last time that other
-- almost completely antithetical -- cultural models might have ended its presence.
Third, the Greeks not only won, but were victorious entirely because of Athenian
leadership -- not true, for example, of the later battle of Plataea. The victory gave prestige to the
shaky twenty-seven year old democracy at Athens, and empowered the masses who rowed to
victory -- starting the cycle of entitlement and increasingly radical egalitarianism that would so
characterize the Greek fifth century. The philosophers, at least -- and in a counter-factual,
wistful mode -- believed Salamis marked the beginning of a radical split in the Western tradition,
where the older timocratic landed government, checks on popular sovereignty, ethical bridles on
economic activity and cultural expression gave way to a relentless, dynamic market capitalism
and radical democracy that would make Western culture more vibrant, grasping, and contagious
at the expense of its very morality. Plato, for example, makes Socrates say Salamis had been a
defeat, since it inaugurated the power of the mass and its appetites for constantly more freedom
and material bounty. In this reactionary view, Salamis alone led to an imperial, radically
democratic Athens which was a betrayal of the polis.
The victory of Salamis was impossible without the effort of a single remarkable person;
his achievement saved a quite vulnerable new experiment in the history of civilization -- even as
the victory altered forever the very nature of that experiment. On the tactical level, I shall
demonstrate how and why Themistocles’ generalship was unique and irreplaceable; how
contemporary Western civilization was entirely antithetical to existing paradigms of civilization
elsewhere, how it was vulnerable to conquest and eradication before Salamis, but not afterwards,
and how the Athenian mutation was neither foreordained nor even necessarily positive, but
largely the dividend of Themistocles’ efforts on a September afternoon.
Chapter 4: Europe’s Peculiar Path: European Cultures and the Unlikely Transition to Modernity
(by Jack A. Goldstone)
Periods of Classical Chinese history show great dynamism -- the Song industrial
expansion, the Ming naval expeditions, the Qing western conquests. Ottoman civilization
expanded by leaps and bounds, spreading from Turkey throughout southeastern Europe, North
Africa, and the Middle East. Yet by the twentieth century, both the Ottoman and Chinese
empires lay prostrate at the feet of the European powers, ready to collapse. How did Europe
achieve the political and military superiority to gain that commanding position? Did Europe
leap boldly ahead? Or did Chinese and Ottoman civilizations possess some internal blockage
that limited their power?
The explanation appears to be that Europe leaped ahead, but not by following a
well-marked path. Rather, Europe -- or more accurately, certain regions of Europe -- stumbled
onto what was historically a rather odd line of economic, political, and religious development.
In this odd line, the power of the state was sharply limited, but so too was the power of
traditional elites, and of traditional religious beliefs. Such limitations were the opposite of what
was occurring in the 17th and 18th centuries in France, Spain, Italy, Austria, and Prussia, where
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state-building involved ever-more powerful monarchs taming noble and regional power to build
centralizing regimes. In contrast, the decentralized and oligarchic regimes of the Netherlands
and England reduced Crown authority. Exploiting unusually favorable economic resources and
opportunities, the Netherlands and then England developed along lines totally alien to most of
Europe, as
well as to Asia, becoming the dominant powers of their eras.
Goldstone will argue that whether England would have a Catholic/absolutist or
Protestant/parliamentary regime was contested throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, and that
there is a large number of potential turning points -- Bloody Mary's (married to Philip of Spain)
early death, Elizabeth's long reign, her disposal of Mary Queen of Scots, the defeat of the
Armada, and the Roundheads' victory over Charles I in the English Revolution. All of these
efforts sought to stave off a Catholic/absolutist outcome in England. Goldstone will argue that
it was the very strong and ever-present threat of such an outcome that required enormous and
sustained efforts to avert it. Such contests continued even after William III's coronation, with
the Jacobite risings of 1714 and 1745. The focal point of his analysis will, however, be James
II's replacement by William III of Orange -- arguably the elimination of Catholicism’s last
chance. This event bound England to the Netherlands and bound William to respect the power of
Parliament. Had James II triumphed in solidifying his rule in England, and used an Irish
Catholic army to submerge English liberties, an eventual alliance of England, Scotland, and
France would have had the power to isolate Holland, diminish Prussia, back Austria, and perhaps
reverse the Reformation. England, instead of an independent power that led the Protestant
coalitions against Louis XIV, would have been an ally in Catholic King Louis' already strong
domination of Europe.
Would Europe then have come to dominate the world? Unlikely, in Goldstone’s view,
for the model of highly centralized and powerful monarchy was already well-advanced in
Ottoman Turkey and Ming/Qing China. While not inimical to economic growth per se, this
model stifled innovation. Had England developed into a rigid Anglican or Catholic orthodoxy,
the Quaker merchants and inventors who helped make the Industrial Revolution would never
have appeared on the stage. The likely outcome of this world would be a globe divided into
competing, but roughly equal, Chinese, Ottoman, and Christian (probably centered on France)
empires, with Mughals holding India and Japan remaining isolated. A world without the British
Empire or the Industrial Revolution would have been ours if William III had not been able to
negotiate the support of key members of England's elite and overturn James II's plans for
monarchical domination.
Chapter 5: War, Power, and the Rise of the West, 1450-1900 (by Jeremy Black)
The notion of an early-modern revolution that irreversibly transforms global politics and
leads to the situation of late 19th century dominance is established in the general (but not
specialized) literature. It can be questioned both empirically and methodologically.
Counterfactualism can be applied and should be not only by looking for alternative trajectories
(e.g., Chinese naval construction in late 18th century, Maratha defeat of British, demographic
disaster for European colonists in Latin America), but also by applying a more complex critique
to the cultural politics of conquest.
The notion of an early-modern world as a prelude to a modern Western world is an
artificial and misleading construct that exaggerates aspects of modernity in Europe, gives them a
false causal power, and underrates conservative social/cultural/intellectual patterns in the 16th
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and 17th centuries, presenting a false antithesis to the rest of the world. Conservatism was
disrupted in the 18th century by the "Enlightenment", but it was far from inevitable that the new
ideas and governmental practices of the period would do more than shore up existing structures,
as in Turkey. Indeed, the interactions of reform, change, revolution and novelty in the 18th
century were not fixed and this remained the case until the utilitarian hegemony of the mid-19th
century.
Counterfactualism needs to be directed to this cultural politics. Prior to the mid-19th
century, a desire as well as a practice of global dominance had only a limited purchase in
Europe. It is necessary to understand the cultural and racial ideas of Europeans and other
societies in order to apply counterfactual perspectives to the notion of drive for ascendancy and
the trajectory towards an appropriating psyche. The utilitarian/mercantile conception of
territorialization, of land that should and could be profitably seized even if not then settled,
develops late and was not inevitable. In short, European dominance did not have to take the
forms it did. In many respects a distinctive forms(s) did not arise until quite late, and this is
more apparent if the cultures of European descent in the New World are considered.
One counterfactual perspective will be provided by disaggregating Europe and comparing
and contrasting the Atlantic West and the Continental powers. For example, it is possible to
suggest that Continental expansion - Austria plus, especially, Russia - was not so different from
non-European empires [especially once the “mercantile” (Cossack) phase of Siberian conquest
was completed]. The Euro-Asian conquest also deviates from the maritime theme, thus offering
another sphere for counterfactual analysis. Moreover, it is possible that different political
developments within Europe would have affected the balance between maritime and Continental
expansion, including, for example: a) suppression of the Dutch Revolt; b) Jacobite success in
Britain; c) Napoleonic victory over Britain. Finally, it is necessary to consider whether
domestic developments within individual European states would have made a major difference for example, different political trajectories within France in 1560-1600 (triumph of Huguenots)
or in Britain in 1780-1800 (triumph of radicalism).
These domestic changes would have affected the cultural suppositions that molded the
use and choices of power. Thus, an understanding of Europe as fluid in its development can be
seen as crucial to any counterfactual analysis of her expansion.
Chapter 6: Was World War I Inevitable? (by Richard Ned Lebow)
Various claims, most of them structural, have been made for the inevitability of the First
World War. If the assassination of the Archduke had not set it off, the argument goes, some
other pretext would sooner or later have come alone, and Austria would have exploited it to
attack Serbia. An Austrian invasion of Serbia would have drawn Russian into the conflict and,
by extension, Germany, France and Britain. This scenario is based on an interconnected chain
of “ifs,” all of which must come to pass to produce something like a general European war.
Austrian leaders must believe the only way they can preserve their security is by crushing Serbia;
they must have an appropriate casus belli; they must be unconstrained domestically; Germany
must promise to support them if Russia intervenes; Russia must not only intervene but mobilize
its army against Germany as well; Germany must be committed to an offensive war plan that
requires an invasion of Belgium and France from the outset of hostilities. A world war requires
additional assumptions: the fighting on the Western front must be stalemated for several years,
and Germany, in desperation, must turn its submarines loose against all shipping bound from
Britain. Were all these events foreordained?
Lebow will examine only the first of these questions: the extent to which a European
war was inevitable. Its escalation into a world war is another question, and an equally
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significant one. The First World War was a major watershed, and arguably the most important
political-military event of the twentieth century. It marked the high water point of European
influence in the world, but also undermined that influence by leaving victor and vanquished alike
economically exhausted, deeply in debt, lacking in self-confidence and consumed by internal
conflict. The “Great War” also set the stage for a second and far deadlier struggle that for the
next half century would reduce Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and most of the smaller
countries of Europe to the status of dependencies. None of these developments would
necessarily have come to pass if Austria -- or Austria and Germany -- had fought a limited war in
the East against Serbia -- or Serbia and Russia, or if Germany had fought a defensives war in the
West, or had won the war in the West before Britain and later, the United States, could intervene.
Lebow’s argument proceeds in stages. He examines each of the steps in the causal chain
leading to a European war, and ask how contingent they were. For those steps that appear
highly likely or even determined (e.g., Germany’s commitment in 1914 to an offensive military
strategy), He asks what, if anything, could have made them less likely or determined. In some
cases, this requires only a minimal rewrite of history (e.g., different German leaders); in others; it
demands major and unlikely changes in ideology, domestic politics, state structures or the
international system. Finally, he examines the problem of pretext, and argues that not all
pretexts are alike, and that war could have been postponed for five years if the appropriate
pretext had come along. By then, many important structural factors could have changed,
significantly affecting other powers’ responses to Austrian plans to destroy Serbia. World War I
might have been averted.
Lebow’s analysis offers a counterpoint to Paul Schroeder’s argument in the previous
chapter. It does not refute that argument, but offers reasons for why he finds it unconvincing.
More importantly, it seeks to identify the levels of analysis and points in time at which changes
in critical beliefs, plans, leaders and decisions were possible. By doing so, he hopes to provide
some limited insight into the more general problem of historical contingency.
Chapter 7: The Role of Viral Plagues in Altering the Landscape of History (by Michael B.A.
Oldstone)
Viral plagues have molded history. Like warfare, they have decimated populations,
toppled civilizations, closed down governments, changed rulers and governmental leaders.
Unlike warfare, viruses are not prohibited or contained by treaty or border. Those either
purposely previously exposed to viruses and made immune to re-introduction of the infectious
agent or having co-evolved with the agent and selected over time by possessing genes resistant to
the virus bear an impenetrable armor that provides a distinctive, competitive and selective
advantage over others not conditioned or naturally selected.
This chapter will highlight the interrelationship between the host and his/her environment
in association with the microbe. The focus will be on changes that lead the host to enhanced
susceptibility or resistance combined with mutation and selection of viruses leading to enhanced
virulence that resulted in the dominance of one society over another, of one army over another,
or of changes in geopolitical thought that changed society, governmental policies and economics.
Chapter 8: Between Alexander and Mohammed (by Timothy Barnes)
‘History that never happened’ is a beguiling and seductive theme: if only the world had
become what we should like it to be instead of what it actually is! Yet every historian who is
not a committed historical determinist ought to speculate from time to time and ask what
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significant choices could have been different. In Late Antiquity, the clearest example of a
crucial historical turning-point where human choice was exercised and profoundly affected the
course of events is the Battle of Adrianople in 378: the eastern emperor Valens could (and
should) have waited for the arrival of his western colleague, who was approaching with a
sizeable army. Had he done so, it is hard to see how their combined armies could have failed to
defeat the Goths decisively.
The essay that Barnes envisages for Alternative Histories will attempt to identify the
most important historical conjunctures relevant to the rise of Christianity where choice was
possible and where a choice other than the one which was in fact made would have produced
very different consequences and a different historical development. (His list will coincide very
little with that proposed by Alexander Demandt.)
Barnes will start from the Battle of Zama, whose importance is purely symbolic. Had
Hannibal defeated Scipio, then another Roman army and another and another would have
invaded Africa until Carthage capitulated. He has so far identified three crucial points at which
the future was open: (1) Roman supremacy in the Mediterranean, which was already firmly
established by 146 B.C. or earlier, could have developed into a territorial empire of a very
different stamp; (2) Monarchy was inevitable, since the structure and institutions of the Roman
Empire would have had a rather different political system and organization if Julius Caesar had
not been assassinated, and if he had lived long enough to marry Cleopatra, acknowledge his son
by her and install him as his legitimate heir. (3) Pontius Pilatus, a tactless and incompetent
governor, could easily have refused to try Jesus or to execute him. What Barnes has not yet
identified is/are the decisive point(s) in the rise of Christianity. He starts from the assumption
that he has proved in his previous writings that the conversion of Constantine in 312 was not the
‘erratic block which diverted the stream of history’ that Norman Baynes imagined. But he has
not yet pinpointed to his own satisfaction the decisive moment(s) in the period between 30 (if
that was the year of the crucifixion) and 312.
After 312, in contrast, the decisive points are easy to identify. They are (1) the Battle of
Adrianople, (2) the Council of Chalcedon in 451, where, for the first time, an emperor
successfully imposed a particular credal formula on an unwilling church, and (3) the overthrow
of the emperor Maurice in 602, which led to a prefiguring of the later Muslim conquests in the
shape of a Persian occupation of Syria, the Holy Land and Egypt and Persian raids which utterly
devastated Asia Minor.
Chapter 9: Islamic Europe (by Ira Lapidus)
This chapter will examine the implications of an Arab-Muslim conquest of Europe in the
eighth and ninth centuries, and of a Turkish-Muslim Conquest of Europe in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. The point of the paper will not be to examine the implications of military
events, but to explore the question of what impact would Muslim conquests in either era have
had on the potential for the development of bureaucratic, capitalist, technological societies in
Europe.
For the Arab conquests of the eighth and ninth centuries Lapidus imagines two scenarios.
One involves not only Arab Muslim conquest but the importation of the whole institutional and
social framework of Middle Eastern societies and their implantation in Europe. This is a likely
outcome given the experience of the Arab conquests in Spain. This discussion will focus on the
institutional and social features of Middle Eastern Muslim societies and will show that Islamic
type societies, even in European geographical and economic conditions, would inhibit the
formation of bureaucratic, capitalist, technological societies.
The second scenario would explore the possibility that the Islamic religion was
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established in Europe, but that it developed, in response to European conditions, as an
independent regional variant of Islam. This has precedents in Islamic Africa and Indonesia.
Here Lapidus expects to show that Islam as a religion, of itself, would not inhibit the formation
of capitalist societies, but would function like Christianity, to permit and even favor the
subsequent evolution of Europe along the lines we now know. In short, Lapidus hopes to
demonstrate that the social institutional framework is more important than religion in charting
the historical development of the several Middle Eastern Mediterranean societies.
In scenario three, the Turkish Ottoman conquest of Europe in the sixteenth century,
Lapidus will argue that even at that late date, the imposition of the Middle Eastern pattern would
have been a chilling factor in the evolution of European societies.
The counterfactual approach, then, will be the basis of a comparative analysis of
European and Middle Eastern societies to identify some of the factors critical to their different
historical trajectories.
Chapter 10: Could China Have Done What Europe Did? (by Arthur Waldron)
Waldron will look at a counterfactual scenario that yields a strong Chinese state early on
that could perhaps have preempted the European miracle.
The Southern Song (eleventh century) fought border wars with the Tanguts, the Liao, and
the Jin before being overwhelmed by the Mongols. Recent scholarship (Paul Forage -- Florida
Atlantic University) suggests that the dynasty was rather successful when fighting a defensive
war as its best generals urged, but doomed itself when it set out on the offensive -- as uninformed
fire-breathing politicians in the capital demanded and ultimately forced. Therefore, one can
plausibly hypothesize a Southern Song dynasty, based at Hangzhou, holding out against the
Mongols into the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries -- as Europe did -- until the danger was past.
Scholars agree that the Southern Song was the most sophisticated Chinese dynasty
economically; it witnessed technological progress on many fronts, saw rising commerce, a
sophisticated financial system, great gains in education, philosophy, and so forth. Waldron will
argue that all of these might have been reinforced by the pressure of a threatening but
manageable military force on the northern frontier.
The result would have been a turn, in China’s long-term developmental trajectory away
from the empire patterns imposed by conquerors (the Mongols and the Manchus), toward a true
nation-state and a strong and sophisticated one having a high culture. Furthermore, a successful
Song nation state would plausibly have been a seafaring power given that the northern frontier
would have been closed and the search for resources and allies would have been directed to the
south.
Such conditions would have been conducive to intensive rather than extensive economic
growth and to an even more genuine industrial revolution than historians (Naito Konan and
others) have already discerned in the period. Given all this, it is not difficult to imagine a
Chinese state that consolidates trading stations around Southeast Asia and even perhaps
“discovers” America.
Chapter 11: Aztecs Defeat Cortés (by Ross Hassig)
This chapter examines the Spanish conquest of Mexico, first presenting a short analysis
of the events and causes of the Conquest, and then considering how each pivotal factor could
have been plausibly (and likely) thwarted to yield an alternative outcome. Hassig’s emphasis is
not on altering basic conditions at the time of the Conquest, such as the relative sophistication of
Spanish arms, the degree of political support enjoyed by the rulers of cities allied to the Aztecs,
49
such as Tetzcoco, or the political stability of enemy polities, such as Tlaxcallan. Such
alterations would likely have led all sides to make far different, and earlier, choices than those
that resulted in the events of the Conquest as we know them, with the result that the various lines
of causal reasoning would potentially diverge from historical events so much and so quickly as
to render the exercise of considering alterative paths largely futile.
Hassig’s focus, instead, will largely be on choices made by the participants that would
have altered the outcomes as close to the events in question as possible so not to admit an
unwieldy number of inherently speculative causal alternatives and their mushrooming progeny.
The likeliest turning point came on June 30, 1521, in the Tlacopan causeway battle during which
many Spaniards were killed and 68 were taken captive and subsequently sacrificed. Cortés was
wounded and captured too but was freed by Cristóbal de Olea, at the cost of the latter’s life.
Had he failed, Cortés would have been killed, his Indian allies would have left, as they actually
did, but would not have returned as the Spanish unity that Cortés maintained by twice hanging
dissidents and repeatedly cajoling others would no longer have been maintained, and even the
stalwarts would have been forced to withdraw to the coast and retreat to Cuba. As it seems
clear that the Conquest could very easily have gone the other way, this chapter also considers
various alternatives by which the Aztecs may have thwarted a Spanish attempt at re-conquest on
a long-term basis, as well as Spanish strategies to renew their efforts at conquest and the
likelihood of their succeeding.
Chapter 12: The British Conquest of India and the Swing to the East (by Edward Ingram)
The chapter will focus on geopolitics to test Geoffrey Parker¹s assumption that the
periphery takes precedence over the metropolis in the ascendancy of the West. In particular, the
chapter will reassess Parker¹s claim that trade accompanies and depends on power and that the
British conquest of India in the late eighteenth century provided the military means by which the
West was able to penetrate East and South-East Asia. The counterfactual will propose two
alternative histories, both of them starting from the proposition that the Marathas, rather than the
British, won the hard fought battle of Assaye in 1803.
The first alternative history works backwards against the clock, explaining three
developments in eighteenth century India that would have had to have happened differently, if
the Marathas were to have won at Assaye rather than have lost. For if the British lost at Assaye,
they probably had not won their traditionally more important victory at Plassey during the Seven
Years War. The developments are: the use of Western technology by the Indian states, the nature
of the states-system into which the Mughal Empire was transformed, and the balance of power
within the British empire between the metropolis and the periphery.
The second alternative history works forwards from Assaye to propose three
counterfactual lines of development in the nineteenth century: that a multi-polar states-system
survived in India; that the sequence of mutinies in the army of the new British Indian state
culminated in a mid-century rebellion that led to evacuation rather than consolidation; and that
although withdrawal from India forestalled the creation of the first industrialized world power,
nonetheless it may not have changed the structural relationship between the industrialized and
pre-industrial worlds. The developments may merely confirm the challenge to Parker from P.
J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, who emphasize the importance of the metropolis over the periphery
and finance over trade and military power. They give precedence, in the long term, to the West¹s
sustained swing to the West in the Western Hemisphere over the supposed late-eighteenth
century swing to the East.
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Chapter 13: King Kong and Cold Fusion: Entities That Never Were But Could Have Been (by
Joel Mokyr)
Compare a visit to the Field Museum of Natural History or the Lincoln Zoo with a
viewing of “Star Wars.” Both experiences lead us to view strange creatures, quite differently
morphologically from our immediate environment. The difference is that the former displays
life forms that actually exist or existed, the other purely imagined. Are life forms that never
existed therefore impossible in the sense that they could never have existed, or are these life
forms that might have existed, but the fortuitous road of evolution led elsewhere? Mark Ridley
(1985, p. 56-57) has noted that non-existent forms of life may be absent either because there was
negative selection or because the necessary mutations never appeared. The difference, as Ridley
points out, is due either to selection or to constraints. Selection means that they appeared but
were selected against. But if they did not appear, is that because they could not have because
they violated some constraint, like an insect the size of a cat or because the mutation simply
never occurred although it could have?
What about techniques that never were? In the world of technological selection,
non-observed techniques in any given period could be either totally impossible, possible but
never occurred to anyone, occurred to somebody but were beyond practical reach, were within
practical reach but rejected for some reason and so on. What we actually observe is a tiny sliver
of what could have been. And what could have been is a tiny sliver of what could be dreamed
of but could not be. Needless to say, some of these selection mechanisms appear to be rather
trivial logical exercises, yet they highlight the fact that understanding what we observe begins
with asking why there are things we do not observe. Selection, therefore, is critical, and to
understand why the path of history went one way rather than another we need to realize what
kind of selection mechanisms existed.
To understand how selection affects technology, Mokyr adapts a variation on what
Dennett (1995, ch.5) has proposed as the difference between the possible and the actual.
Consider the universe of techniques. The largest meta-set is that of imaginable techniques.
This includes all techniques that could conceivably be concocted by the human mind. The
dimensions of the set are huge but in the final analysis it is constrained by the limitations of the
imagination. Smaller and wholly contained in this set is the set of techniques ever imagined
until time t. This, too, is an expanding set, since new science fiction novels and starry-eyed
engineering students dream up new techniques every day. Another subset of the imaginable
techniques is the set of possible techniques, that is, those that are not contradicted by the laws of
nature. This set is not quite the same as the set believed to be possible at the time t. Today we
believe that travel at speeds exceeding the speed of light and animal breeding through the
passing of acquired characteristics are not possible. Yet we cannot be ontologically sure that
they are not. The union of the sets that were ever imagined until time t, possible to the best of
our knowledge, and believed to be possible at that time is the set of potential techniques at time t.
Wholly contained in that set is the set of feasible techniques which are not only possible and
believed to be so, but also within the technological capabilities of the time. Within the feasible
set lies the realizable set. Feasible techniques may not be realizable because of political
constraints, social taboos, or the physical absence of a crucial ingredient (say, enriched
plutonium). A subset of the realizable techniques is the set of rational techniques. These
techniques dominate other techniques in their ability to satisfy whatever objective function we
impose. There would be a different set of rational techniques if we imposed a different social
welfare function. It makes no sense to select techniques elsewhere. Finally, there is a set of
optimal techniques which is that segment of the rational set that is best suited to any given
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environment.
This simple setup allows us to think more of why certain techniques never came into
existence. We can safely leave to the techniques that are not imaginable or never imagined,
since they cannot be imagined by this writer either. But among the potential techniques,
selection is crucial. Why are there techniques that technically could have been produced by a
particular society but never were? That is, why did the Chinese not invent hot air ballooning or
steam power or antibiotics? Why did pre-Columbian Amerindians not invent wheels or
gunpowder? Why did the Romans not invent eyeglasses or navigational instruments?
Developmental constraints, as biologists call them, clearly played a role. But technology is not
evolutionary biology, and it is just as important (or perhaps more so) to realize the differences
between Darwinian reasoning in living species, and the concepts of cultural evolution. In other
words, there may be similar reasons why King Kong and cold fusion never existed and in all
probability never will. But the reasons why seemingly beneficial innovations did not catch on
or why entities went extinct differs a great deal between the world of living beings and that of
working techniques.
It is not hard to imagine that certain inventions, had they been made or adopted in
societies and times they were not would indeed have changed history. Yet before launching the
counterfactuals, we need to keep a few ideas straight. First, evolution is in Paul David’s
definition a path-dependent process in the sense that the outcome depends on the history.
Selection occurs on existing variation, but such variation is itself contingent on previous
selections. Hence history can be seen as a constrained stochastic process. In such general
Darwinian processes, counterfactuals make perfect sense. Second, it is myopic in the sense that
at any time, the future path-dependent implications of a choice cannot and are not taken into
account. This means that societies can find themselves locked-in into ex post undesirable
outcomes unless they can be reversed. Third, technological information, unlike genetic
information, can be transferred from species to species and from society to society. It may thus
have made less difference in the long run who made the invention, provided technology transfer
can take place. Asian societies did not invent firearms, yet they adopted them successfully.
Timing matters of course, and how much it does so is itself historically contingent. Fourth, pure
bifurcation points at which a truly random choice irreversibly determined the fate of all future
generations were probably rare but not unthinkable. In distinguishing between what was, what
could have been but was not, and what could not have been, there is a fine interaction between
deterministic social and economic forces and those of historical contingency.
The problem is that, science fiction aside, we cannot really analyze carefully
technological paths that were never taken. Is a universal antiviral agent in the feasible set?
Batteries that will run a car for as long as a tank of gasoline? Travel at speeds that could make
human voyages outside the solar system feasible? The best we can do is to look at techniques
that actually emerged but were not actually selected or with techniques that eventually emerged
but could have come about earlier and elsewhere. Could we have done almost as well with
analog computers as we did with digital computers, with lighter that air dirigibles as we did with
fixed-wing craft? Could the Chinese have invented the Bessemer process and the Turks the
printing press?
In his chapter, Mokyr will investigate these matters, using the concepts and ideas
developed at greater length elsewhere. Mokyr will also discuss: (a) the rise of European
technological superiority in the 18th century; (b) briefly discuss the absence of certain
breakthroughs in non-European societies as the result of differences in technological selection
criteria which, as he indicated, above, make much of the difference in the techniques that in the
end become the foundation of the economic performance of societies.
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Chapter 14: The West is More Resilient Than That (by Barry Strauss)
In this chapter, Strauss will challenge two components of the counterfactual thesis
advanced by Hanson. The first debate will focus on whether the Greeks could have won the war
even if the Persians had won the battle at Salamis. Strauss will argue that they could have and
offers an illustrative scenario: The day after Salamis the Athenian remnant would have
regrouped and sailed off to Sicily, there to refound Athens. Eventually, Athens would spearhead
a drive to defeat the Sicilian Expedition sent by the Persian satrapy of Hellas. After the total
destruction of the Persian fleet in the Great Harbor of Syracuse and the annihilation of the land
army at the Assinarus, Athens would mount a successful reconquista of the Greek homeland. In
other words, 480 BC was not the others' last chance. It was already too late for Persia to squelch
the Greeks.
The second debate concerns the long-term consequences for Western civilization of a
Persian victory. Strauss will argue first that those consequences would have been much less
significant than we might think. The argument goes as follows: Its victory at Salamis opened the
road westward for Persia. In due time, Persia conquered the Mediterranean, making Persian not
Latin the lingua franca of the region. Byzantium and Rome served as Persia's regional capitals.
In the short run, the result was an utterly different world from the one we know. In the long run,
the more things changed the more they stayed the same. The empire eventually broke up, but not
before Christianity emerged as the state religion of the pax persica. In the West, German
successor states replaced the empire. They were marked by an ideology of freedom, as Tacitus's
German tribes were. They took their laws from the Near-Eastern-style codes that characterized
the Persian Empire. Their government was no more autocratic than the Germanic successor-state
kingdoms of our early medieval West were. Their philosophic vocabulary was borrowed from
ancient Greek philosophy which, minus democracy, was not terribly different from the Greek
philosophy we know (the Persian victory at Salamis would have changed Greek civilization
without destroying it). They developed feudalism, the conflict of church vs. state, the absence of
a strong central government . . . in short, they looked a lot like the western kingdoms of our High
Middle Ages. Eventually they go on to look a lot like the Western European states of the early
modern and modern world. This presupposes that much of the Western heritage today (e.g.
constitutionalism, rights, individualism, separation of church and state, capitalism) is rooted not
so much in classical antiquity as in the middle ages. In the end, Salamis did not decide so much.
Chapter 15: Could World War I Have Been Averted? Only by Radically Altering History (by
Paul W. Schroeder)
This essay, unlike many others, will concentrate not on what conditions led to the rise of
the West to world leadership and whether and how the outcome might have been different, but
on a question critical to deciding whether the decline of the West, or at least Europe, from world
leadership could have been avoided or postponed: the question of the avoidability or inevitability
of World War I. Schroeder will argue first, as to theory and method, for the priority and greater
usefulness of seeking the concealed counterfactual assumptions within actual reigning
interpretations of major developments in history and analyzing these on the basis of historical
evidence to determine whether they are tenable or not — a method which he contends serves best
both for the analysis and critique of standard interpretations and a way of determining whether
and to what extent counterfactual versions of history are possible and useful.
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The way in which Schroeder will apply this method to the origins of World War I, and
the argument developed from it, is far too complex and proceeds through too many steps to
summarize here. Suffice it to say, it leads to conclusions sharply divergent from the standard
interpretations of the origins of the war (i.e., that Austria and Germany were responsible in the
sense that they deliberately chose to provoke a local war and risk a general war for particular
ambitions and goals at a time when other peaceful courses for achieving their reasonable goals
were open to them). It argues instead that the real causes of the war lay in a self-destructive
international system with a perverse incentives structure which had over a previous generation
consistently rewarded conduct destructive of peace and stability and penalized conduct
supportive of them, and that therefore World War I must be regarded as unavoidable. That is,
no convincing counterfactual scenario incorporating the main facts and trends of prewar
international politics while making only easily imagined variations in them can be conceived by
which the actual course of events leading to a systemic breakdown into general war would have
been substantially altered, barring a (wholly improbable) sudden and simultaneous conversion of
all the major actors from one system of rules, norms, and incentives in international politics to
another. In short, one cannot play the blame game because the game itself was to blame.
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ENDNOTES
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