Turning points, bottlenecks, and the fallacies of counterfactual history

Abstract

Arguments for historical turning points are sometimes put forward as a principled argument against causal determinism of the course of world history; sometimes as clever curiosities and flights of imagination. I will attempt to show that the logic of turning-point arguments does not disprove historical causality but, on the contrary, depends on belief in causality. Sometimes, this is only an implicit belief in the clichés of folk historiography; occasionally, a serious sociology is explicitly invoked. In either case, there is a tendency to misperceive how historical causality works through broadly-based processes that are not easily stopped or drastically diverted by particular events. © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.