Sheer Volume of Counter-Factual History Books Makes Genre Impossible to Ignore

They free history from the strait-jacket of determinism, but can be speculative and simple-minded

In a book based on a series of lectures in Jerusalem, British historian Sir Richard J. Evans “turns a critical, slightly jaundiced eye,” according to the publisher, on counterfactuals, which he defines as “alternative versions of the past in which one alteration in the timeline leads to a different outcome from the one we know actually occurred.”

The appeal of counterfactual exercises is to free history from the straitjacket of determinism and restore agency to the people, Evans acknowledged.

“Why are we so prone in the early 21st century to approaching history in this way?” he asked. "Perhaps it's because we're living in a postmodern age where the idea of progress has largely disappeared, to be replaced by uncertainty and doubt, and where linear notions of time have become blurred; or because truth and fiction no longer seem such polar opposites as they once did; or because historians now have more license to be subjective than they used to.”

Evans remains skeptical of this trend, he wrote in The (UK) Guardian. Using “what if” questions on the lead-up to the first world war, particularly in Germany and Britain, as several popular historians have done, are highly speculative and simple-minded, essentially futile and misguided, he said.

They distract from what historians and students should be doing, he contends: learning exactly why, say, WWI, did happen, “not to wish that it hadn't, or argue about whether it was ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. ”

Reviewing the book for The New Republic ("What if Counter-Factuals Never Existed? Studying History with hypotheticals"), Cass Sunstein argued that what-if scenarios aren't, as E. P. Thompson put it, "unhistorical shit," but rather an integral part of the historical enterprise: