Jonathan Dresner's observations, "Alternate Narratives as Propaganda", about Gregg Easterbrook's alternative narrative about George Bush's pre-emptive strike on Afghanistan and Tristram Hunt's essay,"Pasting Over the Past" in The Guardian, caused me to wonder about counter-factual history. In the poverty of my imagination, I did a Google search for" counter-factual." Its top site, curiously enough, is Cheathouse, a term paper service:"Let's pretend I wrote this paper.""Cheathouse" does tell the little darlings that"Counter-factual history is very crucial to our understanding of the nature of history." Yah, right. Whether I agree with that profundity or not, you still get an"F".

More seriously, there's an assumption in both a comment by Anne Zook at Dresner's post and in Hunt's essay that counter-factual history must needs be a reactionary exercise. Although he argues that about a book by"a ragged bunch of rightwing historians," Hunt seems to believe that counterfactual history is inherently a reactionary gesture. He offers the obligatory comment by E. H. Carr that it is an"idle ‘parlour game'" and E. P. Thompson's more colorful suggestion that it is"Geschichtswissenschlopf " or"unhistorical shit."* Of his"ragged bunch," Hunt says:

The conservatives who contribute to this literature portray themselves as battling against the dominant but flawed ideologies of Marxist and Whig history. Such analyses of the past, they say, never allow for the role of accident and serendipity. Instead, the past is presented as a series of milestones in an advance towards communism or liberal democracy. It is the calling of these modern iconoclasts to reintroduce the crooked timber of humanity back into history.

"Crooked timber of humanity" are of course the words of Sir Isaiah Berlin from which our friends over at Crooked Timber take their name. Neither Berlin nor our friends at Crooked Timber are at the heart of some reactionary conspiracy. Nor, however, do they much indulge in counter-factual history. Its most prominent practitioner, on the other hand, Niall Ferguson, is decidedly conservative, if by that you mean a celebrant of capitalism and imperialism. But that, it seems to me, gets things almost exactly backwards. In my view, capitalism and imperialism -- not the unity of the proletariat or the nation/state nor the democratic wisdom of the enfranchised -- are the most radical forces in the modern world, commonly ruthlessly disruptive of human community.

Hunt concludes his essay with this warning:

..."what if" history poses just as insidious a threat to present politics as it does to a fuller understanding of the past. It is no surprise that progressives rarely involve themselves, since implicit in it is the contention that social structures and economic conditions do not matter. Man is, we are told, a creature free of almost all historical constraints, able to make decisions on his own volition. According to Andrew Roberts, we should understand that"in human affairs anything is possible".
What this means is there is both little to learn from the potentialities of history, and there is no need to address injustices because of their marginal influence on events. And without wishing to be over-determinist, it is not hard to predict the political intention of such a reactionary and historically redundant approach to the past.

Surely, however, the assumptions that we are creatures free to make decisions of our own volition, that"social structures and economic conditions" are not all determinative, and that"it might have been otherwise" are radical ones.

Update: Not that it's a big issue, but I borrowed this translation of the German from a review of Ferguson's book in the AHR. Now that I think about it, though, wouldn't"unhistorical shit" be Ungeschichtswissenschlopf? Geschichtswissenschlopf would be"historical shit," wouldn't it? I'll have to remember not to rely on the AHR for fine points of historical interpretation.
Far more significantly, in a weighty post entitled"Ha, Ha," Chun the Unavoidable and Chris Brooke debate the degrees of my error in attributing the" crooked timber" phrase to Berlin rather than to Immanuel Kant. Berlin used the" crooked timber" phrase after Kant, of course, but in translation and a context more akin to"Crooked Timber"'s and mine.