Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History by Richard J. Evans (Brandeis University Press)

As everyone knows, the supreme court ruled six–three for Al Gore in the great dispute over the Florida recount in 2000. As everyone also knows, Gore emerged as the ultimate victor in that recount, and with his poetic and moving inauguration address he managed to unify a badly divided nation. For a long period, the Gore years continued the peace and prosperity established under President Clinton, punctuated by the successful prevention of an apparent terrorist plot in 2001, by the enactment of health care reform in 2003 (mocked by critics as GoreCare), and by aggressive steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, culminating in the historic Copenhagen Protocol, ratified by the U.S. Senate in 2005.

It was not until the nation’s financial collapse, beginning in 2007, that Gore’s presidency started to unravel. Senator John McCain, a longtime critic of Gore’s “failure to respect free markets,” succeeded in convincing the American public that the collapse was partly a product of the Democratic Party’s “regulatory overreach,” and he was able to trounce Senator Joseph Biden in the 2008 election. Now in his second term, McCain has presided over a successful recovery (with unemployment levels down to 8 percent from their high of 13 percent in 2010). But his own legislative agenda, including repeal of GoreCare and immigration reform, has been stymied by what McCain calls the “do-nothing Senate,” which has a slim Democratic majority. Many insiders think that the Democratic nominee in 2016 will be Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar. According to University of Chicago law professor Barack Obama, a specialist on election law, “Klobuchar is perfectly positioned to win her party’s nomination—and to triumph in the general election as well. She’s audacious.”

What if Jesus had never been crucified? Can we imagine a world without Christianity? Suppose that Germany won World War II. What would Europe and the United States be like now? Imagine that Kennedy had not been assassinated. Would the Vietnam war have been avoided? Would the 1960s have been fundamentally different? Would Reagan have become president? Would the Soviet Union still exist?

Speculative writers love to explore counterfactual history. Science fiction novels dominate the territory, and perhaps the whole area can be treated as science fiction, but in literature we can find a number of counterfactualists who do not fit easily in that category, including the Roman historian Livy, Nathaniel Hawthorne, G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Vita Sackville- West, and Philip Roth. An anthology that was published in 1931 included an essay by Winston Churchill called “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg,” which imagines a world in which the Confederacy had won the Civil War. (Mackinlay Kantor wrote a once-famous novel on the same subject.) Philip K. Dick’s masterpiece, The Man in the High Castle, from 1962, describes a world in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt was assassinated and Japan, Italy, and Germany won World War II. (In Dick’s narrative, people are even reading a counterfactual novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, in which the Germans and Japanese lost the war.) Robert Harris’s Fatherland (1992) has a similar theme, which has become a favorite, even an obsession, of counterfactual novelists.

Counterfactual history has intrigued and confounded philosophers, social scientists, and some distinguished historians as well. Psychologists focus on “hindsight bias”—the judgment that whatever happened was bound to happen. An appreciation of hindsight bias naturally leads to an investigation of counterfactuals. But many historians are deeply skeptical, seeing the whole enterprise as childish and silly, a kind of parlor game. After all, the Supreme Court ruled for Bush rather than Gore; Jesus was crucified; Germany lost World War II; Kennedy was assassinated. What is the point in asking about how things would have turned out otherwise? Who can possibly know, or care? E. P. Thompson described “counterfactual fictions” as “Geschichtswissenschlopff, unhistorical shit.” Michael Oakeshott, who rarely agreed with Thompson, on this point had the same view, declaring that the “question in history is never what must, or what might have taken place, but solely what the evidence obliges us to conclude did take place.”