Ferguson 1999

Ferguson, Niall, ed. Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals. New York: Basic Books, 1999.

Introduction: Virtual History: Towards a 'chaotic' theory of the past, by Niall Ferguson, 1-90

counterfactual imagining often disparaged by historians; fiction writers pursue such alternative histories but are "irredeemably fictional" which "tends to diminish the plausibility of the historical setting" (7)

two kinds of counterfactuals used by historians: "those which are essentially the products of imagination but (generally) lack an empirical basis; and thsoe desigend to test hypotheses by (supposedly) empirical means, which eschew imagination in favor of computation" (18)

recounting of earlier forms of deterministic philosophies of history and objections to them

recent turn to narrative history; Geertz, etc -- unsatisfying

• :"To write history according to the conventions of anovel or play is therefore to impose a new kind of determinism on the past: the teleology of the traditional narrative form." (67)

Borges, Musil; garden of forking paths

entropy, disorder