READING the advance notices which heralded this book as a vindication of human freedom against the iron laws of history, I settled down to its 548 pages with some enthusiasm. The idea is to construct a plausible world which might have happened - what might have occurred if, say, Cleopatra had been plagued by sinusitis or Cromwell by doubts.
The reason for the enthusiasm was the promise by the editor that his book offered world as it is a defence of "the notion of individual free will" against determination in history and the social sciences.
The technical name given to this kind of exercise is "counterfactual history" the construction of a credible alternative outcome in place of the hard facts which make up what actually happened. To his credit, Ferguson gives ample space in his introduction to the critics of counterfactualism, rudely characterised by historian E. P. Thompson as "geschichtswissenschlopff" - a disparaging slang, which might be translated as "historical nonsense".
Things could have happened otherwise. Does anyone today have any doubt about that? Hegel, Marx in his dot age, perhaps Darwin, all subscribed to some secular version of a divine plan moving things and people mysteriously towards a necessary truth. It is implicit in any historical explanation which accepts the contingency of past events that an alternative, or counterfactual story, can be told.
For example, when the historian Joe Lee contrasts Ireland's economic performance with that of the Scandinavian countries, he is rejecting determinism and implying - without labouring - a different story which, but for contingent events, might today confront us as the "necessary" facts of Irish history.
Ferguson presents here a number of case studies in which the authors aim to spell out the course of alternative history, with mixed results in terms of giving weight to the obvious. Andrew Roberts tells of what might have happened had Hitler invaded England in 1940, Adamson, similarly, is convincing in his story of the possible consequences of a victory of Charles I against the Scots.
Jonathan Haslam has the good taste to be sceptical about the whole enterprise of counterfactual history, but gives it a try nonetheless. What if the US did not have the atom bomb? Would there have been a Cold War if Stalin had accepted the Western understanding of "spheres of influence"? Haslam's heart is clearly not in the project of the book. He tries to make a fist of it, but ends acknowledging that "perhaps the Cold War was inevitable".
Diane Kunz clearly delights in her allotted task of debunking the leadership myth of J. F. Kennedy which, she claims, still survives the seedier revelations of his sex life. According to this myth, Camelot would have ended the Vietnam war, won the 1964 presidential election, and healed the racial divisions in the American South. "Fairy stories," says Kunz. "Historians ought to know better." Kennedy would have made no difference. (Kunz seems not to realise how lame this conclusion makes her defence of counterfactualism.)
MARK ALMOND, another historian with a gripe to settle against liberal ideas, asks "was the process of reform started by Gorbachev in 1985 really necessary?" Since the problem posed by most international relations scholars writing on the subject since then has been to explain how it was possible at all, one wonders what straw world Almond inhabits which allows him to fabricate illusory targets of attack.
There is a difference between holding to the view that history could have happened differently and the view that individuals in history could have acted differently. It is easy to show that the course of Irish history might have been other than it was quite another matter, and a more important one, to argue that, given the constraints of history, Cromwell and Carson, Parnell and De Valera, could have acted differently. This was the promise of this book, but it doesn't live up to it.
E. P. Thompson was the historian of the individual, and a fierce critic of determinism - though he is weirdly placed in that category by this book's editor. He was right, too, about "geschichtswissenschlopff". It is nonsense. Or, as he translated it, with characteristic candour, "unhistorical shit". There is not a big market for the genre, and the editor is likely to be disappointed in his hope that this contribution will revive it.