Historical Determinism

What do you all think of this particular brand of historical interpretation?

I ask this because recently I was reading the book "What If?" and one of the historians was discussing what would have happened had Hitler been killed in the First World War.  He presented the opinion of some historians, but not himself he was doing it for the sake of discussion, that in Weimar Germany some demagogue like Hitler would have arisen no matter what by spouting much the same rhetoric.

I would tend to disagree with this.  I don't think one can ignore the effect that individuals do have on history.  In Weimar Germany specifically, I don't think anyone else could have come close to attaining the level of mass support that Hitler forged.  I also don't think that the Mongols would have been a great power without the brilliant leadership of Genghis Khan, one can certainly not argue that the almost complete conquest of Asia by the Mongols was written!

For these and other reasons I would consider myself one of the people who disagrees with historical determinism to a large extent and believes that individuals do play a large part in shaping history and the world.

I think one shouldn�t confuse two things: Firstly would there have been some form of nationalist and authoritarian regime in Germany in the 20/30s without Hitler, and secondly would there have been a WW2 or Holocaust without him.

At the end of the 20s, as Germany was in a deep and devastating economic crisis, the country seemed to have the historical choice between Stalinist Communism and some form of Fascism. Hitler and the Nazis were at the beginning only one of the contenders on the far right, with numerous parties and demagogues contesting leadership (Alfred Hugenberg and the DNVP, for example).

With Industry, military and the all powerful bureaucracy backing right-wing movements, Germany would inevitably become a nationalist dictatorship, even under a leader other than Hitler. The same development of course, with different backgrounds, occurred in other European countries at the same time, Italy,Spain,Austria, Hungary etc.

The second question is not that easy to answer, but as much Nazism is now solely identified with Hitler, one should not forget that he was practically only the figurehead of  a collective leadership of the NSDAP, that was an extraordinary and poisonous mix of individuals with rather different talents ( in the worst possible sense). I think, the comet like rise of the NSDAP at the end of the 20s should rather be credited to Goebbels than Hitler, for example.

Anyway, I believe, that without the Nazis, but with another nationalist party in power, there wouldn�t have been such an aggressive foreign policy that led to WW2, or the radical anti-Semitism that led to the atrocities of the holocaust.

Responsible for the crimes of the Nazis is not Hitler alone, without the support and collaboration of a huge number of willing Germans, even Hitler at the height of his powers couldn�t have enforced the destructive policies of the NSDAP. At best, he was a catalyst that set a terrible development in motion and freed the potential for inhumanity of individuals that existed anyway

IMHO things are somewhere in the middle.

You see, in some particular fields there is a strong case for h.d.

For instance, pls. consider the history of science. The fact that many theories and inventions were claimed by different people or teams that reached approx. the same results in a short range of time is proof of it.

Same for social, political, economical changes � individuals are negligible on these aspects.

On the contrary, I agree that certain larger-than-life historical characters greatly influenced the period when they lived.

As to the first example, one should notice that in the 1920-�40 many fascist-like regimes emerged in Europe and in the world, and I believe it�s likely they were a sort of quasi-deterministic answer to a certain historical condition. I say "quasi-deterministic" because I think that more than determinism we should consider a higher or lower likeliness for a certain event to happen, or for a certain "gifted" person to reach his (her) ambitions, providing such a person exists in that certain time and place

So, if Hitler were killed in WWI, anyone�s guess is good � mine is that probably Germany would have had a dictator nevertheless, but maybe one not so fanatic and crazy to massacre Jews and others, start a world war, etc. Maybe Hitler�s replacement would have had a lower profile and died in his bed, like the Spanish Franco.

Just to play devil's lawyer, one should argue that is not impossible by principle, but because we did not (yet) develop a technique to do it.

On this regard I remember the SCI-FI literary cycle of "the Foundation" by late Isaac Asimov, where is imagined that one scientist eventually mange to develop a mathematical method to foresee historical events.

However, it's interesting to notice that, even in that fictional scenario, a super-individual (a mutant called "the Mule") eventually emerges and cause the previsions to fail.

Well, in those novels the author supposed it was possible to develop a probabilistic approach to have a likely idea of future socio-political evolution at certain conditions (for instance, the pool should be no less than a billion of individuals, possibly more).

Something similar to weather forecasts (with the same non-certainty), but applied to big groups of people . . . and the novelist included the possibility to change the future.

In fact, the very core of the whole story was the effort to shrink a middle-age-like time period in the (fictional) galactic future history.