Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (65 page)

72
J. H. Plumb,
The Death of the Past
(London, 1969), esp. pp. 17, 77f., 97-100, 129f.

73
See esp. Michael Howard, ‘The Lessons of History’,
in idem
,
The Lessons of History
(Oxford, 1991), pp. 6-20.

74
Thomas Carlyle, ‘On History’ (1830), in Stern (ed.),
Varieties
, p. 95.

75
Fyodor Dostoevsky,
Notes from Underground
, trans. Andrew R. MacAndrew (London, 1980 edn), pp. 105-20.

76
Quoted in Stern (ed.),
Varieties
, p. 101.

77
Ibid
., p. 91. My emphasis.

78
Typical of this light-hearted mood was Maurice Evan Hare’s limerick of 1905:

79
H. A. L. Fisher,
A History of Europe
(London, 1936), p. v.

80
See J. B. Bury,
Selected Essays
, ed. H. W. V. Temperley (Cambridge, 1930), pp. 60-9.

81
G. M. Trevelyan, ‘Clio, a Muse’, in
idem
,
Clio
,
a Muse
, pp. 140-76, esp. pp. 157f.

82
A. J. P. Taylor,
The Origins of the Second World War
(2nd edn, London, 1963).

83
Quoted in Stern (ed.),
Varieties
, p. 142.

84
Dilthey stressed not only ‘the relativity of every sort of human conception about the connectedness of things’ but also the inevitably subjective construction of all historical evidence. See M. Ermarth,
Wilhelm Dilthey: The Critique of Historical Reason
(Chicago, 1978).

85
Friedrich Meinecke, ‘Causalities and Values in History’, in Stern (ed.),
Varieties
, esp. pp. 269, 273.

86
Friedrich Meinecke,
Die deutsche Katastrophe
(Wiesbaden, 1949).

87
R. G. Collingwood, ‘The Nature and Aims of a Philosophy of History (1924-5),’in
Essays in the Philosophy of History: R. G. Collingwood
, ed. W. Debbins (Austin, Texas, 1965), p. 44.

88
R. G. Collingwood, ‘Lectures on the Philosophy of History, 1926’, in
The Idea of History: With Lectures 1926-1928
, ed. J. van der Dussen (Oxford, 1993), pp. 400ff.

89
Collingwood, ‘Nature and Aims’, pp. 36f., 39f.

90
Collingwood, ‘Lectures’, pp. 390f.

91
Ibid
., pp. 363f., 412f., 420. Cf. Marwick,
Nature
, pp. 293ff.

92
Quoted in David Hackett Fischer,
Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought
(London, 1970), pp. 164f.

93
Croce, ‘“Necessity” in History’, p. 558.

94
Oakeshott,
Experience and its Modes
, pp. 128ff.

95
Michael Oakeshott,
On History and Other Essays
(Oxford, 1983), p. 71.

96
Ibid
., p. 79. My emphasis.

97
See Michael Bentley (ed.),
Public and Private Doctrine: Essays in British History Presented to Maurice Cowling
(Cambridge, 1993), esp. Bentley’s ‘Prologue’, pp. 1-13.

98
G. R. Elton,
The Practice of History
(London, 1969), esp. pp. 42, 57, 63-6.

99
See the summary in T. J. Lears, ‘The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities’,
American Historical Review
, 90 (1985), pp. 567-93.

100
Ibid
., pp. 88, 95-106, 126, 132, 164.

101
Thompson, ‘Poverty’, p. 227. See also D. Smith,
The Rise of Historical Sociology
(Cambridge, 1991), pp. 87f.

102
Carr,
What Is History
?, pp. 169f.

103
Eric Hobsbawm,
The Age of Extremes
(London, 1994).

104
Alexis de Tocqueville,
L‘Ancien Régime et la Révolution
(Paris, 1856).

105
G. Roth and W. Schluchter,
Max Weber’s Vision of History
(Berkeley, 1979).

106
Max Weber,
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
(London, 1985 edn).

107
Ibid
., pp. 91, 183.

108
Marc Bloch,
The Historian’s Craft
(Manchester, 1992).

109
Fernand Braudel,
On History
(London, 1980), p. 76.

110
‘Perfectly and absolutely true [history] cannot be; for, to be perfectly and absolutely true, it ought to record
all
the slightest particulars of the slightest transactions ... [But] if history were written thus, the Bodleian library would not contain the occurrence of a week.’ Quoted in Stern (ed.),
Varieties
, p. 76.

111
Braudel,
On History
, p. 51; Smith,
Historical Sociology
, pp. 104f. On the German roots of this geographical or ecological determinism, see Roth and Schluchter,
Weber’s
Vision, pp. 169f. Montesquieu had of course thought in similar terms.

112
Smith, Historical Sociology, p. 114.

113
Fernand Braudel,
The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II
, trans. S. Reynolds (London, 1972, 1973). The three-tiered model evidently owed something to Meinecke; in the case of Lucien Febvre’s three variables in historical causation - contingency, necessity and idea - the debt was more obvious.

114
Ibid
., vol. II, p. 901.

115
Braudel,
On History
, pp. 27f.

116
Quoted in Roth and Schluchter,
Weber’s Vision
, p. 176.

117
Quoted in Smith,
Historical Sociology
, p. 111.

118
Ibid
., p. 120.

119
Braudel,
On History
, p. 12.

120
Ibid
., p. 72.

121
Bloch,
Historian’s Craft
, p. xxi.

122
Ibid
., p. 162.

123
The historical sociologist Alexander Gerschenkron applied this model not only to Germany but to other European countries.

124
David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley,
The Peculiarities of German History
(Oxford, 1984).

125
A German historian would not dare ask what would have happened to German history if Hitler had not come to power, a question addressed in Henry A. Turner,
Geissel des Jahrhunderts: Hitler und seine Hinterlassenschaft
(Berlin, 1989).

126
Lawrence Stone,
The Causes of the English Revolution
(London, 1986), p. 58.

127
Paul Kennedy,
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000
(London, 1989), esp. pp. xvi, xxiv-xxv.

128
I. Wallerstein,
The Modern World System
, 3 vols (New York/ London, 1974-89); Michael Mann,
The Sources of Social Power
, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1986); Raymond Grew and David D. Bien (eds),
Crises of Political Development and the United States
(Princeton, 1978); Roberto Unger,
Plasticity into Power: Comparative-Historical Studies on the Institutional Conditions of Economic and Military Success
(Cambridge, 1987).

129
Alexander Woodcock and Monte Davis,
Catastrophe Theory: A Revolutionary Way of Understanding How Things Change
(London, 1991), esp. pp. 120-46. The highlight of this book is a three-dimensional graph purporting to depict the decline and fall of the Roman empire (p. 138). A more valuable attempt is made to relate modern views of natural selection to cultural development by W. G. Runciman,
A Treatise on Social Theory. II: Substantive Social Theory
(Cambridge, 1989), esp. p. 449.

130
For a good example of a loosely Freudian approach see Klaus Theweleit,
Male Fantasies
, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1987, 1989).

131
Though it is conceivable that a game-theorist Marxist could do the same with classes.

132
N. Z. Davis, ‘The Possibilities of the Past’, in T. K. Rabb and R. I. Rotberg (eds),
The New History: The 1980s and Beyond
(Princeton, 1982), pp. 267-77.

133
C. Geertz,
Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology
(London, 1993).

134
W. J. Bouwsma, ‘From the History of Ideas to the History of Meaning’, in Rabb and Rotberg (eds),
New History
, pp. 279-93.

135
See G. Levi, ‘Microhistory’, in P. Burke (ed.),
New Perspectives on Historical Writing
(Cambridge, 1991), pp. 93-113.

136
See most recently and ambitiously Simon Schama,
Landscape and Memory
(London, 1995).

137
K. Thomas,
Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Belief in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England
(London, 1971).

138
P. Abrams, ‘History, Sociology, Historical Sociology,’
Past and Present
, 87 (1980), pp. 3-16. See also P. Burke, ‘The History of Events and the Revival of Narrative’, in
idem
(ed.),
New Perspectives
, pp. 233-48.

139
Louis O. Mink, ‘The Autonomy of Historical Understanding’, in Dray (ed.),
Philosophical Analysis
, pp. 182, 189.

140
Hayden White, ‘The Historical Text as Literary Artefact’, in R. H. Canary and H. Kozicki (eds),
The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding
. See also Frederic Jameson,
The Political Consciousness: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act
(London, 1981); Paul Ricoeur,
Time and Narrative
, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (London, 1984-8).

141
J. Barzun,
Clio and the Doctors: Psycho-History, Quanto-History and History
(Chicago, 1974). Another traditionalist, Gertrude Himmelfarb, has recently rather confused the conservative argument by lumping together quantitative methods of the new economic history and the subjective methods of psycho-history: see G. Himmelfarb,
The New History and the Old: Critical Essays and Reappraissals
(Cambridge, Mass., 1987).

142
Barzun,
Clio
., pp. 101, 123, 152f.

143
N. Z. Davis, ‘On the Lame,’
American Historical Review
, 93 (1988), pp. 572-603.

144
See for example G. M. Spiegel, ‘History, Historicism and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages’,
Speculum
, 65 (1990), pp. 59-86.

145
See J. W. Scott, ‘History in Crisis? The Others’ Side of the Story’,
American Historical Review
, 94 (1989), pp. 680-92; P. Joyce, ‘History and Postmodernism’,
Past and Present
, 133 (1991), pp. 204-9. For a Marxist critique, see D. Harvey,
The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change
(Oxford, 1989).

146
W. B. Gallie, ‘Explanations in History and the Genetic Sciences’, in Gardiner (ed.),
Theories of History
, pp. 389f.

147
Michael Scriven, ‘Truisms as Grounds for Historical Explanations’, in Gardiner (ed.),
Theories of History
, pp. 470f.

148
Martin Amis,
Time’s Arrow or The Nature of the Offence
(London, 1992).

149
R. F. Foster,
The Story of Ireland: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the University of Oxford on 1 December 1994
(Oxford, 1995), p. 31.

150
Musil,
Man without Qualities
, vol. II, pp. 65-8.

151
Ibid
., pp. 69-71.

152
Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, in
idem
,
Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings
, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (Harmondsworth, 1970), pp. 50ff.

153
Borges, ‘lön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, in
ibid
., p. 37.

154
Borges, ‘The Lottery in Babylon’, in
ibid
., pp. 59ff.

155
Stéphane Mallarmé,
Igitur
.
Divagations. Un coup de dés,
ed. Yves Bonnefoy (Paris, 1976).

156
L. Untermeyer (ed.),
The Road Not Taken: A Selection of Robert Frost’s Poems
(New York, 1951), pp. 270f.

157
Scriven, ‘ruisms as Grounds for Historical Explanations’, pp. 470f.

158
Hacking,
Taming of Chance
.

159
Stephen Hawking,
A Brief History of Time
(London, 1988), pp. 53ff.

160
Ian Stewart,
Does God Play Dice? The New Mathematics of Chaos
(London, 1990), p. 293.

161
Hawking,
Time
, pp. 123f.

162
Ibid
., p. 137.

163
Michio Kaku,
Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey through the 10th Dimension
(Oxford, 1995), pp. 234ff. Of course, it is conceivable that a successful time traveller would find his consciousness of being a time traveller wiped out in transit.

164
Richard Dawkins,
The Selfish Gene
(2nd edn, Oxford, 1989), pp. 267, 271.

165
Ibid
., pp.4, 8, 15ff., 24f., 38f., 45. Hence also our instinct to defend the lives of other survival machines in proportion to the number of genes they share with us and their age and future fertility relative to ours. In Dawkins’s model, even birth control is a matter of maximising the number of surviving offspring and hence giving the parental genes the best chance of survival.

166
Stephen Jay Gould,
Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
(London, 1989), esp. pp. 47f.