into play to decide the issue between the alternatives, and they may weigh more heavily than the element of personality.
Wherever we are in a position to assert, as we shall assert below,[1] that an event-making man has had a decisive influence on a historical period, we are not abandoning the belief in causal connection or embracing a belief in absolute contingency. What we are asserting is that in such situations the great man is a relatively independent historical influence—independent of the conditions that determine the alternatives—and that on these occasions the influence of all other relevant factors is of subordinate weight in enabling us to understand or predict which one of the possible alternatives will be actualized. In such situations we also should be able to say, and to present the grounds for saying, that if the great man had not existed, the course of events in essential respects would in all likelihood have taken a different turn. Those who deny this estimate of the role of the great man in the situation would have to present grounds for the statement that the course of events in essential respects would in all likelihood have taken the same turn. In either case, the fact that we offer grounds for believing what the historical record would be like, if some person had not existed, or if some event had not transpired, indicates that in the realm of history, as in the realm of nature, pure contingency does not hold sway. Contingent events in history are of tremendous importance, but the evidence of their importance is possible only because not all events are contingent.
The whole answer to our inquiry depends upon the legitimacy of our asking and answering—as indeed every competent historian does ask and answer—what would have happened if this event had not happened or that man had not lived or this alternative had not been taken. Strangely enough, however, there seems to be a deep-seated reluctance to taking “if” questions in history seriously.[2] They are often dismissed as “purely
- ↑ See Chapter Ten.
- ↑ Usually rigorous detetminists rule “if” questions out as meaningless while extreme indeterminists admit they are meaningful but futile. For example, the French legal philosopher, Tourtoulon, in his discussion of “Possibilities in History,” writes: “It is absolutely futile to ask oneself what the world would have become if some particular hypothetical event had been realized, or if some particular real event had not been realized.” The reason he offers is that anything might have happened because of the universal sway of chance. Cf. Philosophy in the Development of Law, Eng. trans., New York, 1922, p. 631. For a contrasting view, cf. M. R. Cohen, “Causation and Its Application to History,” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 3, pp. 12 ff.
