"Counterfactual Historians" Do Not Exist

If historians are scholars who write about history, shouldn’t scholars who employ counterfactual methods be called “counterfactual historians?”  

I’ve been struck in my recent research how often the term “counterfactual historian” appears.  

To cite a few examples:  

Philip Tetlock and Geoffrey Parker have written in Unmaking the West that “counterfactual historians…try to resurrect alternative worlds from the graveyard of dead possibilities” (p. 30).  

Mads Mordhorst in an essay, “From Counterfactual History to Counternarrative History” (2008), has noted that “counterfactual historians [should]…call…themselves ‘deterministic counterfactual historians’” (p. 8).  

Alexander Maar in “Possible Uses of Counterfactual Thought Experiments in History” (2014), has written that “counterfactual historians try to give a plausible answer to the question: what would have happened had any of…[an event’s] antecedents been different?” (p.88).  

In light of these claims, one might think that “counterfactual historians” actually exist.  

They don’t.  

The concept of anyone being a “counterfactual historian” is a misnomer for several reasons.   First, the term implies an independent stand-alone profession, distinct from “historian.”   The term thus suggests that such historians solely focus on the hypothetical to the exclusion of the “real.”  It implies that one cannot be both interested in the “what ifs” of history as well as the events that actually happened.    

In truth, the two are closely related.  There is no counterfactual history without “real” history. The former cannot exist without the latter.  For this reason, anyone interested in the “what ifs” of history is, by definition, also interested in the “real” past.    

Counterfactual history is not separate from, but supplemental to, “real” history.”  As my forthcoming book will show, it has always been a part of the historical profession (whether historians have acknowledged it or not).  The term “counterfactual historian” misleadingly effaces this truth by bracketing off as “other” something that is very much part of the norm.    

No scholar who employs the methods of counterfactual history is not, at the same time, a regular historian.  

I am interested to see whether not the term “counterfactual historian” continues to spread in present-day discourse.    

For my part, I will do my share to counteract it.