Richard Evans Dismisses Counterfactual History (Again)

Richard Evans is a marvelously accomplished historian, with all kinds of achievements to his name.  So why does he continue to misrepresent the value of counterfactual history?  

In a new interview, he repeats his insistence – elaborated upon at length in his book, Altered Pasts (2013) – that “counterfactual [hi]story has almost no use for serious historiography. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy reading books from this genre or watching something like movies. But a different storyline than the real one is nothing more than wishful thinking based on a kind of magic trick.”  

My lengthy rebuttal to this time-honored, but sorely mistaken, view (one that Evans unfortunately shares with countless other scholars) is still in progress; in my ongoing work on The History of Counterfactualism in the Western World from Antiquity to the Present, I’ve only just now made it to the year 1914 (chapter 8) and have a few more chapters to go.  

But to provide a sense of my forthcoming argument, I wonder how Evans or any other historian would respond to the overwhelming evidence that hundreds of major western thinkers (historians, philosophers, theologians, social scientists, novelists, and others) have used “what ifs” as indispensable analytical and rhetorical tools in their work (both consciously and unconsciously) and that studying how they have done so is, in fact, the essence of “serious historiography.”   

The list of thinkers begins with the ancient Sumerians and Egyptians and then winds through (among MANY -- did I say MANY? -- others): Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Sallust, Livy, Plutarch, Tacitus, Eusebius, Origen, Augustine, Orosius, Procopius, Gregory of Tours, Charlemagne, William of Malmsbury, Bede, Bruno of Merseburg, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Abelard, Aquinas, Scotus, Froissart, Petrarch, Valla, Salutati, Villani, Bruni, Vasari, Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Luther, Gustavus Adolphus, Columbus, Cortès, Lopez de Gomara, Ralegh, Montaigne, Pascal, Pufendorf, Leibniz, Bayle, Hardouin, Descartes, Spinoza, Newton, Bacon, Bolingbroke, Hume, Gibbon, Priestley, Montesquieu, Turgot, Raynal, Voltaire, Rousseau, Condorcet, Herder, Michaelis, Frederick II, Marat, Saint-Just, Robespierre, Hutchinson, Ramsay, Paine, Washington, Jefferson, Warren, Weems, Burke, Royou, Napoleon, De Staël, Chateaubriand, De Maistre, Mackintosh, Macaulay, Froude, Hallam, Stubbs, Quinet, Mignet, Thiers, Guizot, Michelet, Ranke, Giesebrecht, Ficker, Sybel, Treitschke, Droysen, Disraeli, Carlyle, Buckle, Burkhardt, Mill, Weber, Nietzsche, Croce, Trevelyan, Toynbee, Bury, Beard, Hook, Taylor, Berlin, Carr, Hobsbawm, Trevor-Roper – and perhaps a few more.  

I hope by the conclusion of my analysis, there won’t be a debate about WHETHER, but rather HOW, counterfactual history is important.