Simon T. Kaye

This month, I got a paper published in a journal called History & Theory (the ampersand is important). It’s been a long wait – a round of revisions, some serious collaborative editing to make it consumable in America, plus the usual long stretches of peer-review and publication.

It’s about counterfactualism. Here’s the abstract as it appears in the journal and on the Wiley Interscience website, where it’s hosted for all (who have an Athens account) to see.

Counterfactualism is a useful process for historians as a thought-experiment because it offers grounds to challenge an unfortunate contemporary historical mindset of assumed, deterministic certainty. This article suggests that the methodological value of counterfactualism may be understood in terms of the three categories of common ahistorical errors that it may help to prevent: the assumptions of indispensability, causality, and inevitability. To support this claim, I survey a series of key counterfactual works and reflections on counterfactualism, arguing that the practice of counterfactualism evolved as both cause and product of an evolving popular assumption of the plasticity of history and the importance of human agency within it. For these reasons, counterfactualism is of particular importance both historically and politically. I conclude that it is time for a methodological re-assessment of the uses of such thought-experiments in history, particularly in light of counterfactualism’s developmental relatedness to cultural, technological, and analytical modernity.

As I mentioned on my facebook page, this is an article that includes Star Trek, Leibniz, Back to the Future, Plato, John Stuart Mill and Lost.

In other words, I’m very pleased, even if I am just going over it again and again now and spotting all kinds of problems, mistakes and missed opportunities. Worst parts are where something simply hasn’t translated so well into that terrifying niche-language, American Academese.

Now according to this nice contract with Blackwell, I can’t put it up on my website for another year, and even then I shouldn’t use the official PDF. But if you’d like to read it and don’t have an Athens account, drop me a line (to my usual address) and I’ll tell you how to get hold of it.