“I am not speaking of randomness, but of the central principle of all history—contingency. A historical explanation does not rest on direct deductions from laws of nature, but on an unpredictable sequence of antecedent states, where any major change in any step of the sequence would have altered the final result. This final result is therefore dependent, or contingent, upon everything that came before—the unerasable and determining signature of history.”
-Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life
Gould was primarily concerned with natural history, of course- he was writing about the mind-blowingly weird fossils of the Burgess Shale and their consequences for evolutionary theory and history. He chose his words very, very carefully, however- he didn’t say contingency was the central principle of natural history, he said it was the central principle of all history. Historical contingency in biology has a pretty well established opponent and bed-mate in convergence. Even the most ardent supporters of one acknowledge that the other plays an important role as well.
In more traditional historical studies contingency faces a very different set of opponents. The first, and most immediately obvious, is the material dialectic. It seems like it could be easy to include the Hegelian dialectic as an opponent of historical contingency if you tried hard enough, but I won’t be attempting either- the Hegelian because I don’t understand it well enough, the material dialectic because I don’t want to try and win a prize for writing the one billionth refutation of Communist historical theory. Let’s skip the question of what other opponents of historical contingency are out there for a second, though.
If you accept that contingency is the central principle of history (even if you don’t, just play along for the duration), historical interpretation becomes a process of choosing what events and processes- let’s call them historical factors- are important to understanding the progression of history, and how significant each historical factor is compared to one another. The actual methods of choosing vary widely and are highly ideologically shaded. An analysis of history through a contingent lens is a case-by-case process carried out through exhaustive work. This is in opposition to one consisting of top-down blanket statements, since that defeats the idea of a contingent historical interpretation at an internal level. The philosopher Karl Popper distinguished these two types of historical thought into piecemeal and holistic categories. Piecemeal would be the case-by-case situations we’ve been discussing. Holistic interpretations use sweeping generalizations and come to conclusions that are almost deterministic, like the material dialectic’s path of history that it lays out. Another example is a fascist populist movement’s leader laying out their terrifying pronouncements of the inevitable collapse of civilization should they not be in charge. The holistic ideas of history… well, Popper thought they were damned stupid, to phrase it more bluntly than he did. He was not a fan of communism or any utopian political theory.
Popper was referring more towards future predictions and social engineering than to historical theory, so there’s an amount of mental stretching and simplifying involved in applying these categories to historical analysis. Still, his categories still work well for our purposes. Holistic interpretations of histories tend to take the events and processes involved and use them as pieces of evidence proving the broader thrust of their claims. Rigorous historical interpretations, whether holistic or contingent, will involve a large amount of work. (Ideally.) Contingent interpretations, though, are a lot more time consuming, and lack the easy answers so often present in holistic interpretations.
So we’ve at least provisionally accepted historical contingency as a guiding principle and we’re determined to make a go interpreting it using piecemeal interpretive tools rather than holistic ones. Assuming we don’t blatantly disregard well documented historical facts in service of ideology, we’re good to go, right? (Obvious rhetorical question is rhetorical.)
It’s precisely at this point that the holistic interpretations of history begin to creep back in. These holistic interpretations nominally appear to present themselves as contingent ones. During the process, though, they attempt the construction of a direct lineage of historical factors of prime significance. Prime significance, in this case, indicates that all other historical factors are either derived from, subservient to, or overwhelmed by them. Any factors that seem to disrupt the lineage are labeled as freak outliers, misinterpretations of data or records, trivialities, or a combination thereof. These lineage interpretations also magnify trivial events that fit well into the lineage into much more important factors than they actually were.
Before we go any further discussing lineage interpretations of history I need to point out that they appear in all shades of the political spectrum. Post-colonial feminism and Eurocentric Reactionary ideologies both crop them up with great frequency.
What’s to really distinguish lineage interpretations from piecemeal contingent interpretations, though? Well, first off, the piecemeal interpretations do not attempt to establish a single chain of contingency, or attempt to overlay and drown out an obviously hugely important chain of contingency with many smaller ones. I can say pretty definitively that the many chains of contingency running through European history are of greater significance to world history than the chains of contingency belonging to Easter Island, even though there are valuable lessons to be learned from the collapse of Easter Island’s civilization. If I were to start saying that the European chain of contingency was the only one that mattered, though, and to start making claims that it’s overwhelmed every other chain of contingency it crossed, I’d have a Eurocentric lineage interpretation. If I were to start trying to throw numerous other chains of contingency from all around the world over the European chains in order to reduce the significance of that chain’s links (the historical factors), I’d get a (bad) post-colonial interpretation. Note with the latter that despite the fact that it uses multiple chains of contingency from around the world, it’s still using only the core ideas of post-colonialism as its lineage.
It’s certainly possible to have truly contingent post-colonial or Eurocentric interpretations of history. The most critical difference between piecemeal contingent and lineage interpretations of history is actually attempting to interpret history through a contingent lens- while lineage interpretations will end up using many of the tools of the contingent view of history, they ultimately approach it in order to achieve the same conclusions as the holistic interpretations they shade into on the side. And while lineage and piecemeal interpretations do shade into each other in the middle, that fundamental attempt to understand history without resorting to sweeping deterministic principles is what really differentiates them. It's a fine line, but one well worth walking.
Part 2 of this series is now up.
Bibliography:
Life in a Medieval Castle, by Joseph and Frances Gies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westphalian_sovereignty
Wonderful Life, by Stephen Jay Gould
A version of this post was originally published on my old blog. I retain all rights to both versions.