How close the stories are the stuff in 90s paperbacks and forum posts is one of those nice little things reminding you that humanity has always been the same
Is he really wrong ? I'm not trying to say AH is dumb or pointless but yeah it is most certainly an intellectual game of fantasy. We like to subscribe a meaning and importance to AH that doesn't really exist a lot more than we should. It's a writer's hobby that happens to use real events as a backdrop. I don't think it would accomplish much if academics had to go "well yes but what if The Americas weren't discovered until 1504 instead ?" and a lot of us (I'd say the majority really) are just people who have a above average interest and knowledge in history not college educated historians or even individuals that truly study history outside of their hobby.
I think the distinction is between 'counterfactuals are a parlour game,' and the implied' counterfactuals are
nothing but a parlour game.'
An important historiographical note is that the Carr quotation comes from his book 'What is History' which is basically a series of historiographical lectures. I don't know a tremendous amount about Carr - he is decidedly out of my field. However, from what I've read my understanding is that he was a leftish scholar of the old school - his works are very well reviewed, but have also been criticised for being fundamentally teleological. All mankind inevitably advances towards a more progressive socialist future.
That was beginning to fall out of favour even in the sixties - I don't know, but I suspect that Carr's work was partly a response to younger scholars (on both the right and left) who were questioning the intellectual foundations of his project.
Carr doesn't just dismiss 'what if', he also plays down the role of chance and accident. In other words, his project is very hostile to the idea not just of entertaining historical alternatives, but of admitting their existence.
That being said, as I noted in the review he's not wrong that alternate history is often just light entertainment. I don't think it's worth fighting that- as you say, it's not about the hobby being smart or dumb, it's about it being a hobby. Stamp collecting is a hobby. I don't deny anyone's right to enjoy it, but I would raise an eyebrow at a person who claimed that partaking in stamp collecting
necessarily was a statement of political and social activism.
The other extreme would be Niall Fergusson, who's a great believer in the use of counterfactuals to hone a historian's judgement. Speaking as a sometime historian, I agree that it can be a useful tool, but it takes a particular type of person to do what Fergusson did and publish a piece explaining that he'd revised his opinion on interwar appeasement because of his latest France game in
Making History: The Calm and the Storm.
In a more niche sense, I think the academic role of AH is to hold up a critical mirror to the often rather determinist assumptions of historians.
@Charles EP M. rather brilliantly does this in his "Chamberlain Resigns: And Other Things That Never Happened". This is a knowing parody of those "What If?" essay collections written by allegedly serious historians, who often sketch an interesting what-if and then conclude with a rushed paragraph and a bizarrely Marxian-Calvinist message of "However nothing would actually change because broader trends shut up goodbye". Charles' book brings a similar parodic stuffy historian attitude but written from the perspective of academic historians speaking from another timeline. To them, if Chamberlain
had resigned in favour of Churchill after Norway, why, this ultimately wouldn't change the ineluctable trends of the Bloody Fifties, of course. (Thus highlighting to the reader that it absolutely would have, seeing as we don't even know what the Bloody Fifties
is yet in the narrative - it's a grim series of colonial wars over decolonisation).
This is precisely it - counterfactuals are not a useful academic tool in and of themselves, they are a useful tool for checking our broader historical models. My supervisor used to have a habit of going through undergraduates' drafts and circling the word 'inevitable' in red pen every time it appears. He felt that too often it's a word we use in place of showing our thinking.
To use an example from my own work: I firmly believe that Imperial Federation was a mirage, a fantasy that never had any plausible chance to implementation in any of its many, many proposed forms.
But I also sought, in my doctorate, to show that too often scholars have taken its obvious failure for granted rather than taking it seriously as something that appeared to be a plausible (and desirable) future
at the time, at least to certain groups of people. Because if you take it seriously - if you say, let us treat this as something that could actually be worked towards - than the actions and words of people in the 1880s-1900s can take on new light.
The other role is to check whether our assumptions about the causes of events hold up - so I've mentioned in passing that one of the lazy assumptions that makes my eyes roll is when people assume that if the Perry Expedition hadn't been launched Japan would have continued in isolation until the twentieth century. No. That's object blindness, assuming that nothing in the world is real until America acts upon it. Remove Perry and look at everything else that was already happening, and it's hard to see how you put off the major changes for another full decade let alone longer.
Granted, that might have been quite a consequential decade!
Jeremy Black brings up that, while after the fact counterfactuals like, "What if Hitler invaded Great Britain?" or "What if Spain entered the Second World War on the side of the Axis?" are far-fetched to us now because they didn't happen, for policy makers 1939-1945 these were very inportant questions that were discussed and had direct impacts on decisions made at the highest levels.
Yes.
To use an example dear to this site's heart - we all know that Sealion had no chance of success, but that was not a fact known to British high command in 1940. Alan Brooke's diaries are very clear that every time there was a gap of a day or two in the bombing, he was nervous that the Luftwaffe was taking a moment to regroup before launching the invasion.
We have to walk the line between writing in the knowledge of what we know to be possible - there was never going to be a successful invasion - and the epistemic humility that lets us truly understand how people at the time responded to events.