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.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 29 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.