A bit of a meta question, but one that came up recently during a discussion I was having with my girlfriend recently about Lenin. I was trying to argue that he was not as much better than Stalin as many portray him to be, and that if he had not died so early the Soviet Union would have continued on relatively similar lines.
She said that while that might be true, one is not really “doing history” by considering counterfactuals. History in her view (having studied it) consists more in considering what did happen than what could have.
We agreed to disagree, but I can’t stop thinking about this. Surely in order to understand the causes of historical events, you need to consider counterfactuals? One can argue, for example, that Gavrillo Princip started the First World War by shooting the archduke, but one can counter that by saying that even if he didn’t something similar would have likely happened anyway.
This is perhaps a misconception on my part, but I thought it best to ask here, so I can be corrected if it is one. I understand for example that “historical what-if’s” are banned, here, maybe supporting the alternative position to mine.
It can be a tricky line to walk. As others have pointed out, all counterfactuals are inherently speculative. If we allow that history might have been derailed by contingency, it follows that any alternative histories could also be derailed by contingencies about which we, by definition, know nothing. The very practice of counterfactual history is therefore self-defeating in any grounded, analytical sense. I've had a couple of discussions with people who enjoy alternative history writing about my area of expertise, and they often end up disappointed in that I'm not really able to either debunk or confirm the plausibility of their narratives.
At the same time though, most historical analysis is also inherently speculative to some extent. The purpose of most historical research is not to establish a set of facts, or a single narrative of events, but to put forward explanations of the past. Two well-trained and reasonable historians can, from the same body of evidence, come to significantly different conclusions based on method, selection and emphasis. This isn't a fault with historical research practices, but rather reflects a reality that most of us have come to accept: that there is no perfect, 'correct' way to represent the past in the present. All we can do is try to be convincing in substantiating our claims: attempt to show our (potentially skeptical) audience that our explanation of the past is plausible and takes into account the evidence about the subject which we have available. It is this requirement to support one's interpretations with evidence which, I think, separates mainstream historical analysis from counterfactuals rather than 'speculation' per se.
An elephant in the room here is that AskHistorian's favourite imperial apologist, Niall Ferguson, has been a controversial proponent of counterfactual analysis during his career. Would we, as a discipline, be more open to this kind of approach had Ferguson not used it? Could he have ushered in a methodological revolution had he not turned out to be a bit of a dick? Alas, we can never truly know the answer to this important historical 'what-if'.