by Eric Rauchway

I'm going to disagree, a little, with my distinguished colleague David Bell: I think it's not the anti-counterfactualism of social science that's the reason for the parlous state of military history. First, counterfactualism belongs properly to the social sciences. A theory of causation says a cause is some x without which some y would not have occurred. That's a counterfactual argument--"without x, no y" means thinking seriously through what "without x" means. My friend Bill Summerhill explains this is why he loves regression analysis--it's got counterfactual assumptions built in--but Bill may be, if you'll excuse the metaphor, an outlier. Even so, economic historians (like Niall Ferguson) enjoy the more traditional counterfactuals for similar reasons: if you're going to argue that British involvement in World War I was an error, i.e., the cause of many Bad Things, you owe it to yourself and your readers to explain what would have happened otherwise. Second, History-Department History (HDH) has, it's true, included less military history lately. But HDH also includes less economic history lately, less political history lately, less diplomatic history lately. And I don't think this is because of what those fields are (narrative, contingency-driven) but because of what they are not: HDH has included a lot more history inflected by certain kinds of social theory. You can do military history inflected by social theory, but generally, most people don't. Finally, you can do very good social-sciency military history, especially using data like SIPRI's and the Correlates of War. Bloggy addendum: Speaking of Niall Ferguson, I talk about the special relationship, of which Niall is one of the better products, here.