Review: Richard J. Evans, Altered Pasts (2014)

I’m planning to start writing about books I’ve read, as a starting point for writing more generally. My basic intention is not necessarily to write a review per se, but rather an explanation of why I think someone should (or perhaps shouldn’t) read a book; why I think it’s interesting or significant, and so on, rather than giving it marks out of five. So here it goes.

I came across this book while researching the concept of inevitability in historical process, via a pointer towards E. H. Carr and then a review by Owen Hatherley. It is in itself a critique of a trend in historical writing for “counterfactual” history (that is, “historical” writing about events which did not take place), which the author connects particularly with conservative historians such as Niall Ferguson. For example , some have argued that counterfactual histories allow greater understanding of events which did take place by examining those which didn’t. Evans picks apart these claims, showing that the counterfactual methodology is neither sufficient nor necessary for good historical analysis.

Evans further identifies a tendency of counterfactualists to position their work in opposition to what they see as a stifling tendency towards “determinism” (particularly associated with Marxism, or at least, with misinterpretations of Marxism). This opposition is tantamount, he suggests, to a rejection of causality altogether, if the claims are to be taken at face value. He then proceeds to show that the counterfactualists are not opposed to determinism in practice, suggesting that their opposition is in fact merely an ideological distaste for left-wing theories which minimize the importance of “great men” like Churchill; he observes a disproportionate lack of counterfactuals coming from the political left. Evans is particularly strong in critiquing counterfactuals relating to the World Wars and rise of Hitler (his own historical specialty), including a trend within the British Eurosceptic Right to use hypotheses along their lines to make ideological points about the European Union. Thus, more broadly, this book is about placing intellectual tendencies within their historical context.

After reading this, I became aware of a newly-published collection of counterfactuals relating to the Russian Revolution,¹ which I suspect reflects similar prejudices and assumptions — the assumption that a revolution could be averted by arresting or assassinating one individual, for example, or even the characterization (in the introduction) of the idea of the revolution as a product of historical forces as being “quaint”, rather than this being merely a basic belief in causality, that things mostly happen for reasons and not for no reason at all. It is this, fundamentally, that makes it an ideological claim, in my view: to suggest that it is outdated and even silly to believe that the Russian Revolution was caused by anything more than the whims of a handful of individuals is to dismiss any critique of economic and social conditions; ironically, a dismissal of any real alternative in the name of exploring imagined ones.