Certainly not the saddest for historians, according to Geoffrey Hawthorn's wonderfully playful and intelligent book: rather, the most instructive. Hawthorn is intrigued by the philosophical standing of counter-factuals - hypothetical 'other worlds' - and their usefulness for historians and social scientists. Some historians resist the legitimacy of invoking counter-factual stories. They stringently insist that we can research and speculate only about what we believe actually occurred; anything else is merely fanciful. Call them factualists.

LRB 13 February 1992 | PDF Download