October 28, 2007
Historical Contingency Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:00 AM EST Alexander Burns posted on “Contingency and Political History,” considering the case of Senator Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash in October 2002, and he speculates that had Wellstone not died in that crash, he’d very possibly be neck-in-neck with Hillary Clinton in the race for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. By this theory, Wellstone would be rewarded by the Democratic electorate for his vote against authorizing the use of force in Iraq. Mr. Burns goes on to name a few other politicians whose deaths in plane crashes seems to have altered, generally in a smallish way, American political history—a man who might have kept the Republican John Danforth out of the Senate in 1976, another who would have similarly obstructed the senatorial ambitions of the Republican John Warner in 1978. I have no reason to doubt either the probability of those outcomes, had those candidates not died, or Mr. Burn’s assurance that recent American political history is marked by a fair number of deaths in crashes. If anything, these accidental deaths do not seem to me to be dramatic enough to sufficiently underscore Mr. Burns’s larger point, that contingency bulks larger in political history than we like to think. Another way to make that point is to consider not premature deaths but deaths for a time improbably avoided. Winston Churchill, for example, was hit by a taxi in 1931, in New York City, and badly hurt. UPI wrote his obituary that night but had to periodically update the draft for another third of a century. Had Churchill died that day, it has sometimes been asserted that he would now be remembered only as the cranky opponent of Indian independence. My hunch is that this whimsy too confidently dismisses the possibility that had Churchill died that day, India might now be a province of the Third Reich, the Japanese empire, or the Soviet Union, in which case Churchill’s crankiness about Ghandi’s character would not now be memorable. Then there is Hitler, who was repeatedly exposed to enemy fire on the Western Front, where he was both wounded and gassed. Had Hitler died on the Western Front, or a couple of years later in the Beer Hall Putsch, or in any of the failed assassination attempts, it seems safe to say that history would be unimaginably different. Hitler beat the odds again and again, almost certainly a fantastic piece of bad luck for the rest of us. One could go on with examples of this kind, although at considerable risk of anticlimax. It occurs to me that that this sort of reflection probably isn’t as stimulating as would have fairly recently been the case. My hunch is that more and more people in the West have a lively sense of the role of contingency in history, an awareness that may be behind the boom in alternate history. It was not always such. In the summer of 1969, a month or so before departing for college, I was part of a left reading group, invited by a girl a year or two older, on whom I had a desperate crush and for whom I was prepared to do anything, as the following may suggest: The first book we read was the once-famous The Role of the Individual in History, by Georgi Plekhanov, first published in 1898. In 1969 Plekhanov seemed at least mildly heretical, even a bit thrilling, because Great Man theories of history were not yet the subject of systematic derision by our schoolteachers. Most of us believed in Great Men, probably because all of our parents had several times voted for someone they thought a Great Man, and in a few cases had served in armies or navies commanded by people they had taken for such. Plekhanov didn’t believe in Great Men, and he was determined to smash any idea to the contrary, which he did with a vigor that in the summer of 1969 startled me. His polemics against the idea of great men shaping history still had something to push against, a sort of popular Carlylean conviction that Great Men were a real portion of historical explanation. Nowadays, Plekhanov is, I’ll bet, a name unknown not only to my students but to most of my colleagues, but in one sense his thought has triumphed, at least in the schools. Outside the schools, I think a sense of historical contingency is on the rise.
|
