I was struck by this passage about historians' love of contingency in this essay by @jbf1755 in @TheAtlantic. I have something to say about this idea of contingency... theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
Historians often invoke contingency to imply that nothing is inevitable. Things could have gone one way or another. The concept goes hand-in-hand with agency, that all things are possible. Except that all things are not possible...
As Marx famously wrote in the 18th Brumaire, "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please..." The historians' task is to explain why things happened as they did. That isn't our only task, but it is an important one...
It's notable, then, that contingency has another, almost opposite meaning. To say that something is contingent is also to say that it depends on something else. For example, one could argue that the success of the American Revolution was contingent on aid from France...
I think this latter meaning of contingency - what does the course of history depend on? - is more important for historians than the idea of contingency-as-indeterminacy, and it is where all the juicy arguments about history are to be found. Ok, end of esoteric rant.
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.