We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
The value of counterfactual historical analysis
Counterfactual historical analysis is regarded across multiple disciplines as a powerful tool for evaluating popular accounts of major events in history, or for testing different theories scholars offer to resolve questions about causation – but it only works if it is done well. Lebow (2006: 4) describes counterfactuals as
past conditionals or, more colloquially, “what if” statements about the past. They alter some aspect of the past (e.g., doing away with a person or event, changing a critical decision or outcome, inserting an event or development that never happened, or making it take place sooner or later than it did), to set the stage for a “what might have been” argument … They entail small, plausible changes in reality that do not violate our understanding of what was technologically, culturally, temporally or otherwise possible.
The method has been used by prominent scholars to weigh competing explanations for world wars, the end of the Cold War, the escalation of contemporary international crises and many other transformative events in world history. “Good counterfactual thought experiments,” Lebow (2000: 555) reminds us, “differ little from ‘factual’ modes of historical reconstruction [and] are an essential ingredient of scholarship. They help determine the research questions we deem important and the answers we find to them. They are necessary to evaluate the political, economic, and moral benefits of real-world outcomes. These evaluations in turn help drive future research.” Contrary to popular assumptions, there is no significant (or theoretically relevant) distinction between factual and counterfactual reasoning; both dimensions of any explanation must be processed for a credible theory to emerge. Whenever we isolate what we believe to be an important cause of some act or event, the validity of that claim demands simultaneous exposure to some counterfactual proof that, in the absence of these conditions, the event would not have occurred. As Lebow (2000: 556) explains:
Any sharp distinction between factuals and counterfactuals rests on questionable ontological claims. Many of the scholars who dismiss counterfactual arguments do so because they do not believe they are based on facts … Even when evidence is meager or absent, the difference between counterfactual and “factual” history may still be marginal. Documents are rarely “smoking guns” that allow researchers to establish motives or causes beyond a reasonable doubt. Actors only occasionally leave evidence about their motives, and historians rarely accept such testimony at face value. More often historians infer motives from what they know about actors’ personalities and goals, their past behavior and the constraints under which they operated.
Testing counterfactuals is essentially what we do as social scientists – we change a variable and track its relative impact on outcomes in our search for necessary and/or sufficient causes. Consequently, each contribution to the literature on the Iraq war is based on both ‘factual’ and ‘counterfactual’ claims. For example, every book supporting the Bush-neocon-war theory (almost all of them) requires that we accept as ‘fact’ the Gore-peace counterfactual – both parts of the argument (as with any causal claim) are inseparable, because you can’t accept the validity of one (neoconism) without simultaneously requiring the validity of the other (Gore-peace).
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
