Freedom and Determinism.
An advantage that is
sometimes claimed for the approach favored by
Col-
lingwood and his modern followers
is that it does not
imply that there is any incompatibility between re-
garding an action as explicable and treating
it as a free
one. For it is argued that to explain what a historical
agent did by referring to the good, or even compelling,
reasons that he had
for doing it does not commit the
historian to maintaining that the agent's
recognition
of these reasons rendered his action inevitable. And
this
result may be contrasted with the consequence of
adopting a covering law
analysis. In the case of the
latter, it is held, an action is said to have
been explained
if and only if it has been shown to have followed
necessarily, as a law-governed effect, upon the fulfil-
ment of specific initial conditions. Thus the
covering
law theorist, insofar as he considers historical events
to be
capable of explanation, cannot avoid adopting
a deterministic position.
One reply to this has been that accounts of historical
causation often take
the form of indicating certain
necessary, as opposed to sufficient,
conditions for the
occurrence of an event, and that a covering law theo-
rist can without difficulty adapt his
analysis to accom-
modate explanation in
this sense. On this (modified)
view, his adherence to the postulate that
historical
events are explicable need not be interpreted as carry-
ing deterministic implications. But it has
also been
suggested that there is in any case no justification for
holding that the acceptance of determinism logically
excludes belief in
human freedom; even if a historian
assumes all human behavior to be
susceptible in prin-
ciple to explanation in
terms of sufficient, and not
merely necessary, conditions, he is not
thereby de-
barred from supposing that the
subjects of his enquiries
sometimes acted as free and responsible agents.
Thus
the traditional fear of determinism, which (as was seen
earlier)
often helped to inspire resistance to certain
speculative theories of
history, is based upon an illusion
that largely derives from an
illegitimate identification
of causation with such notions as those of
coercion and
external constraint: it is possibly with this argument
in
mind that the contemporary British historian, E. H.
Carr, has written that
the “logical dilemma about free
will and determinism does not
arise in real life,” human
actions being “both free
and determined” (What is
History?, p. 124). There are, however,
others—among
them Isaiah Berlin—who have found it
unconvincing
and who have felt that all attempts to analyze concepts
like freedom and moral
responsibility in such a way
as to make their employment compatible
with a thor-
oughgoing causal determinism
ultimately fail to do jus-
tice to the
implications of ordinary thought and lan-
guage. In their view, moreover, the fabrid of the
historical
studies, as we customarily know and under-
stand them, is shot through with libertarian and evalu-
ative conceptions to a degree that has not always
been
adequately appreciated. Hence those who have con-
tended that a commitment to unrestricted determinism
in human affairs would entail sweeping revisions of the
vocabulary and
categories the historian normally brings
to the interpretation of his
material have been substan-
tially right.
Though this is not of course positively to
affirm that a thoroughgoing
determinism is untenable,
it is to claim that for the most part historians
habitually
write and think as if it were untenable. And that is
a
point which, if correct, cannot be lightly brushed
aside.
