AH and the Great Man Theory

[OHC]

Apparently UnHerd is starting a counterfactual series. I am not expecting anything great from them, but their introductory article implicitly brings up an element of AH I've considered a few times. The author claims that counterfactuals are disdained by serious historians because they are "prone to deterministic explanations" and don't account for the role of decisive individual action. Good AH supposedly needs a dose of the Great Man Theory to work.

Personally, I think the author's theories about history are just as "ideologically trammeled" as the historians he dismisses, and a lot less rigorous. The example he gives of "one person" kicking off the current pandemic by "eating a bowl of bat soup or dropping a test tube in a laboratory" (hmm) doesn't make much sense to me: maybe one person brought the virus across the species barrier, but new zoonotic diseases have been appearing frequently as wildlife habitat is destroyed and people come into more contact with rare animals, and global travel increases the velocity with which a disease can spread. If that "one person" had acted differently maybe the pandemic wouldn't have happened this year, but it's very likely something like it would have taken place at some point. It's something that any serious, wide-ranging AH of the early twenty-first century should deal with.

But I think there is a kernel of truth there: if COVID jumped the species barrier next year instead of this year, there would be differences. Obviously, hundreds of thousands of individuals would not have lost their lives to the disease, immeasurably changing the lives of those around them, and there are long-term consequences on the societal scale, too. Just off the top of my head, the Black Lives Matter protests this summer might have been a lot smaller and less intense if there hadn't been a sudden economic downturn and an immense demonstration of our political leadership's callousness towards every citizen.

Sure, there can be "good" AH that embraces the Great Man Theory and disregard historiography - good AH just requires good writing. Plausible AH, on the other hand, the kind that can actually be useful as a thought-provoking counterfactual exercise, requires writers to find a POD on a human scale - one of the moments where an individual actually does have agency over history - and use the butterfly effect to extrapolate from there. We have to be careful not to dismiss structural factors in history before the consequences of the POD have time to actually affect social, political, economic, environmental trends.

I don't know, maybe this is all obvious stuff. Let me know if I'm rambling.

 

[Gary Oswald]

I tend to go both ways on this.

I'm a big believer in marxist history and I do think a lot of broader trends simply can't be averted without huge changes.

But it's difficult to read too much about the history of monarchies and other dictatorships and not realise how much the characters of the people in power made influential decisions that would have been entirely different had they just been of a different character. The idea that obviously the social and political trends dictate that this happen because anything well would be stupid quickly runs aground against all the people who did fucking stupid things. A lot of the choices that seem in retrospect as obviously the only correct thing to do when considering the overall situation were fiercely criticised at the time. I do think there are an awful lot of places where the choices of individuals changed things on a huge scale. And I think we often underestimate how much things happening can then normalise that as the way things are for the next generation. Trends go both ways and sometimes those huge societal changes you need to change a nation can emerge naturally from the decisions of one man.

 

[Redolegna]

We're living through a period which shows that people can choose (or be) stupid in their policy decisions. And not the kind of little slip-ups or their otherwise somewhat adequate competency not being up to the task of a massive and paradigm-changing crisis, but the kind where people with some seriously fucked-up psychological background decide lying, gaslighting and denying their lying eyes is the way forward. And since some of them are leaders of massive countries and set the mood music for members of their own parties all the way down, this has massive effect on the world.

 

[Artaxerxes]

History is the outcome of social and economic events and trends but history is made by the right person at the right time doing something.

Ghengis and Caesar come to mind, replace them with anyone else from the time period and events happen differently.

So yeah, you need to understand both theories.

 

[Artaxerxes]

I tend to go both ways on this.

I'm a big believer in marxist history and I do think a lot of broader trends simply can't be averted without huge changes.

But it's difficult to read too much about the history of monarchies and other dictatorships and not realise how much the characters of the people in power made influential decisions that would have been entirely different had they just been of a different character. The idea that obviously the social and political trends dictate that this happen because anything well would be stupid quickly runs aground against all the people who did fucking stupid things. A lot of the choices that seem in retrospect as obviously the only correct thing to do when considering the overall situation were fiercely criticised at the time. I do think there are an awful lot of places where the choices of individuals changed things on a huge scale. And I think we often underestimate how much things happening can then normalise that as the way things are for the next generation. Trends go both ways and sometimes those huge societal changes you need to change a nation can emerge naturally from the decisions of one man.

“How an English king defaulting on his loans led to the Medici family and the renaissance”

 

[Charles EP M.]

The author claims that counterfactuals are disdained by serious historians because they are "prone to deterministic explanations" and don't account for the role of decisive individual action.

I thought it was the other way around with serious historians?

 

[Gary Oswald]

I thought it was the other way around with serious historians?

The claims that Peter Franklin, the article writer in question, is making are the following

A) Counter factuals are good actually
B) Historians disdain Counter Factuals
C) This is because Historians are largely prone to deterministic explanations, i.e., this happened and so it was inevitable
D) The main types of historians studying broader trends are either whiggist or marxist and as such both are deterministic
E) They are however all wrong as the truth is history isn't deterministic and individual choices can have changed things
F) Marxist historians are ideologically blinded to not realise this and so disdain counter factuals
G) This is because Counter factuals require the Great Man Theory to work
H) This is fine because the Great Man Theory is good actually

I will leave it to the audience to decide which of those points are true, which are arguable and which are nonsense.

 

[Charles EP M.]

Well I'm very dubious abouut Point A)

 

[Jasen777]

A person in the right position and time can make a big difference, yes. But my understanding of The Great Man Theory is that it attributes too much to the man himself and his genius, that they were born with attributes that would make them a great man. But had Caesar been born a slave we likely would never had heard of him. Someone just as talented could have been born in Papua New Guinea at the same time and made (historically speaking) almost no impact.

 

[Alexander Rooksmoor]

Some historians have not disdained counter-factuals. On one side you can see Richard Evans savaging AH in his 2013 book, but on the other I always highlight Tetlock, Lebow & Parker's sterling book on this, now freely available from the University of Michigan and Eric Hobsbawm who I heard lecture on this issue which featured in his 1998 book, 'About History'. Hobsbawm was an ardent Marxist historian, but even he accepted the importance of certain decisions by powerful individuals in society/on the battlefield. They do set parameters on the use of counter-factuals, for example Hobsbawm would only accept ones based on people making different decisions with the information they had at the time. He would accept Napoleon making the decision to advance earlier at the Battle of Waterloo, but would not accept a scenario based on drier weather over the days of the Waterloo campaign.

An important aspect which brings us back to Alison Brooks's principles, is even if different decisions led to a victory at one battle, it would need a lot of other changes for that to lead to a victory in a war. Even if Napoleon had won at Waterloo and taken Brussels, it is likely that by the end of 1815 he would have been in a very similar position to how he was in our world. Yes, there would have been a different history but soon it would have been 'corrected'. I have found it hard in my writing career to pick out individuals whose removal would have led to significant differences down history. Napoleon and Bismarck are perhaps two examples. Churchill is less of an example than is often made out to be the case. The thing is, for writers of alternate history analysis, let alone fiction, it is much easier to draw in a wider range of readers by tampering with someone they know well. Societal changes, like for example, the views of Spanish churchmen of the 15th/16th Century who argued it was wrong to subjugate indigenous peoples and make them slaves, could have had an immense impact on how European states dealt with the rest of the world, but drawing readers into that kind of story would be a challenge; in fact many would dismiss such writings of the time as fiction themselves. Perhaps the only societally different changes that have gained much popular traction are ones around a more significant Black Death. People know it was bad and could have been worse. Trying to pitch a book in which it was less severe or did not happen at all and overcrowding in Europe became a bigger issue, wages falling and serfs becoming fully slaves would attract less attention.

The great man theory works but only in small doses and in connection with the 'superstructure' approach, rather than in isolation. If Napoleon ended up a government official in Genoese Corsica, then millions more people, would be alive in Europe today and the laws of many countries would be far more diverse, perhaps even the measurements they use would be different. Bonapartism as a concept would have been replaced by the name of some other dictator. Thus, taking out the 'great man' still needs a range of cultural, legal and social changes to occur in order for us to really see the implications of the alteration we are considering. Added to that, there are very few 'great men' that it works for, so in many more cases more feasible alternatives come from societal shifts which may need centuries to have a significant impact. However, they are far from 'sexy' in terms of drawing readers' attentions.

 

[Alexander Rooksmoor]

I thought it was the other way around with serious historians?

For some. I think a lot use the method for testing which factors were important/essential as too often people assume certain factors were, but you can remove/substitute them without disrupting what happened. It is interesting how often standard history books slip into counter-factual analysis without explicitly saying they are doing it, perhaps because the historians are afraid of being called out for indulging in what is too often dismissed as a 'parlour game', an attitude perhaps waning until Evans revived it so vigorously in 2013.