Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (7 page)

Yet it is simply not clear why it should be desirable to reduce the role of free will ‘to the infinitesimal’ when historical actors are actually conscious of it, for the sake of deterministic laws which the historian cannot truly apprehend without near-infinite knowledge. Ultimately, Tolstoy’s attempt to formulate a convincing deterministic theory of history is a heroic failure.

Only one man can really be said to have succeeded where he (and many others) failed. Here - now that its day is apparently done - we can at least set Marx’s philosophy of history in its proper context: as the most compelling among many brands of determinism. It was an improbably neat synthesis of Hegelian idealism and Ricardian political economy: a dialectical historical process, but flowing from material conflicts rather than spiritual contradictions, so that (as in
The German Ideology
) ‘the real processes of production’ supplanted ‘thought thinking itself’ as ‘the basis of all history’. Proudhon had tried it; Marx perfected it, ‘correcting’ Hegel by jettisoning the notion of state-sponsored harmony between the classes and battering Proudhon out of contention in
The Poverty of Philosophy
.
⁶⁴
‘The history of all hitherto existing societies‘’, proclaimed the Communist Manifesto of 1848 in one of the most enduring catch-phrases of the nineteenth century, ‘is the history of class struggles.’ Simple, and catchy.

Marx took more from Hegel than just the dialectic; he also imbibed his contempt for free will: ‘Men make their own history but they do not know that they are making it.’ ‘In historical struggles, one must distinguish ... the phrases and fancies of parties from their real ... interests, their conception of themselves from the reality.’ ‘In the social production of their means of production, human beings enter into definite and necessary relations which are independent of their will.’ ‘Are men free to choose this or that form of society for themselves? By no means.’ But behind Hegel there is just visible the shade of Calvin, and still older prophets. For in Marx’s doctrine, certain individuals - the members of the immiserated and alienated proletariat - formed a new Elect, destined to overthrow capitalism and inherit the earth. In a prophecy of detectably biblical provenance, it was foretold in
Capital
:

Admittedly, Marx and Engels were not always as dogmatic as the majority of their later interpreters. Indeed, the failure of their more apocalyptic political predictions to be realised obliged them on occasion to temper the determinism of their best-known works. Marx himself acknowledged that ‘acceleration and retardation’ of the ‘general trend of development’ could be influenced by ‘“accidental” which include the “chance” character of ... individuals’.
⁶⁶
Engels too had to admit that ‘history often proceeds by jumps and zigzags’ which could lead, inconveniently, to ‘much interruption of the chain of thought’.
⁶⁷
In his later correspondence, he sought (vainly, as it proved) to qualify the idea of a simple causal relationship between economic ‘base’ and social ‘superstructure’.

Precisely this kind of problem perplexed the Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov. Indeed, his essay ‘The Role of the Individual in History’ ends up making a far stronger case against Marxist socio-economic determinism than for it, despite Plekhanov’s efforts to extricate himself from a welter of more or less persuasive examples of the decisive role played by individuals. If Louis XV had been a man of a different character, acknowledges Plekhanov, the territory of France could have been enlarged (after the War of the Austrian Succession) and as a result her economic and political development might have taken a different course. If Madame Pompadour had enjoyed less influence over Louis, the poor generalship of Soubise might not have been tolerated, and the war might have been waged more effectively at sea. If General Buturlin had attacked Frederick the Great at Streigau in August 1761 - just months before the death of the Empress Elisabeth - he might have routed him. And what if Mirabeau had lived, or Robespierre had died in an accident? What if Bonaparte had been killed in one of his early campaigns? Plekhanov’s attempt to jam all these awkward contingencies and counterfactuals back into the straitjacket of Marxist determinism is, to say the least, tortuous:

Thus ‘the character of an individual is a “factor” in social development only where, when, and to the extent that social relations permit it to be such’. ‘Every man of talent who becomes a
social force
, is the product of
social relations
.’ Plekhanov even anticipates Bury’s later argument that historical accidents are the products of collisions between chains of deterministic causation; but he draws far more deterministic conclusions from it: ‘No matter how intricately the petty, psychological and physiological causes may have been interwoven, they would not under any circumstances have eliminated the great social needs that gave rise to the French Revolution.’ Even if Mirabeau had lived longer, Robespierre had died earlier and Bonaparte had been struck down by a bullet,

Quite how ‘the development of productive forces and the mutual relations between men in the socio-economic process of production’ could have counteracted the effect of an Austro-Russian victory over Frederick the Great, Plekhanov does not say. Nor does he consider the possible ramifications of the one counterfactual outcome he does suggest in the case of a Napoleonless France: ‘Louis-Philippe would, perhaps, have ascended the throne of his dearly beloved kinsmen not in 1830 but in 1820.’ Would that really have been, as he implies, so inconsequential?

Yet just as doubts had begun to assail the Marxists, a breakthrough in an unrelated field of science provided a vital new source of validation for their model of social change. Darwin’s revolutionary statement of the theory of natural selection was immediately seized upon by Engels as fresh evidence for the theory of class conflict
⁶⁹
- though it was not long before the same claims were being made by theorists of racial conflict, who crudely misinterpreted and distorted Darwin’s complex (and at times contradictory) message. Writers like Thomas Henry Huxley and Ernst Haeckel took the earlier racial theories of Gobineau and modernised them with a simplified model of natural selection in which competition between individual creatures became a crude struggle between races. Such notions became the common currency of much political debate at the turn of the century. In the absence of the sort of party-political discipline which kept socialist intellectual development under some kind of control, ‘Social Darwinism’ rapidly took on a host of different forms: the pseudo-scientific work of eugenic theorists; the overconfident imperialism of the English historian E. A. Freeman; the Weimar pessimism of Spengler; and ultimately, of course, the violent, anti-Semitic fantasies of Hitler, which combined racialism and socialism in what was to prove the most explosive ideology of the twentieth century. But what linked them was their deterministic (in some cases, apocalyptic) thrust, and indifference to the notion of individual free will. Given this apparent convergence of Marx and Darwin - despite their starkly different intellectual origins - it is hardly surprising that belief in the possibility of deterministic laws of history was so widespread during and after their lifetimes.

To be sure, not everyone in the nineteenth century embraced determinism. Indeed, the work of Ranke and his followers revealed that historians could draw very different lessons from the world of science. Ranke was suspicious of the way in which previous historians and philosophers had sought to pluck universal historical laws out of the air (or at best out of books by other historians and philosophers). It was his belief that only through properly scientific
methods
- meticulous and exhaustive research in the archives - could one hope to arrive at any understanding of the universal in history. This was the reason for his early pledge to write history ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’ (‘as it actually was’) and his repeated stress on the uniqueness of past events and epochs. ‘Historicism’ - the movement which Ranke is often credited with having founded - was about understanding particular phenomena in their proper context. Yet this did not mean a complete rejection of determinism; for in a number of important respects Ranke remained beholden to Hegelian philosophy. The methodological direction might have been reversed - from the particular to the universal, rather than the other way round - but the nature and function of the universal in Ranke’s work remained unmistakably Hegelian, as was his exaltation of the Prussian state. Above all, the idea that the historian should be concerned to describe the past as it actually was (or perhaps as it ‘essentially’ was) implicitly ruled out any serious reflection as to how it
might
have been. Ranke, like Hegel, held to the assumption that history was the working out of some kind of spiritual plan. He may not have had Hegel’s certainty as to the nature of that plan; but that there was a plan he did not doubt, with the self-realisation of the Prussian state as its end point.

Even those historians who imported Ranke’s methodology to England without its Hegelian subtext could base their work on an analogous teleology. In place of Prussia, Stubbs took as his theme that English constitutional evolution towards perfection which is traditionally associated with the less scholarly Macaulay.
⁷⁰
That other great English Rankean, Acton, applied a similar conception to the history of Europe as a whole. Like the French positivists, the liberal historians of the turn of the century were proud of the way their scientific methods not only revealed practical political ‘lessons’, but also exemplified that generalised process of ‘improvement’ which had so enchanted Lecky before them. Indeed, Acton saw historical study itself as one of the engines of Europe’s emergence from medieval darkness - a point he expressed in strikingly Germanic language: ‘The
universal spirit
of investigation and discovery ... did not cease to operate and withstood the recurring efforts of reaction until ... it at length prevailed. This ... gradual passage ... from subordination to independence, is a phenomenon of primary import to us, because historical science has been one of its instruments.’
⁷¹
Thus the historian was not only concerned to describe the inevitable triumph of progress; in doing so, he was actually contributing to it. Hints of this kind of optimism can still be detected in more recent liberal historians like Sir John Plumb
⁷²
and Sir Michael Howard.
⁷³

Of course, such progressive optimism, whether idealist or materialist in inspiration, did not go unchallenged. In a powerful and justly famous passage of his essay ‘On History’, Thomas Carlyle had declared:

A still more extreme expression of this anti-scientific view came from Carlyle’s Russian counterpart, Dostoevsky. In
Notes from Underground
, Dostoevsky fired a broadside of unequalled force against rationalist determinism, heaping scorn on the economists’ assumption that man acted out of self-interest, on Buckle’s theory of civilisation, on Tolstoy’s laws of history: