1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910780863903321

Autore

Lebow Richard Ned

Titolo

Forbidden Fruit : Counterfactuals and International Relations / / Richard Ned Lebow

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Princeton, NJ : , : Princeton University Press, , [2010]

©2010

ISBN

1-282-45814-0

1-282-93627-1

9786612936272

9786612458149

1-4008-3512-7

Edizione

[Course Book]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (345 p.)

Disciplina

327.1072

Soggetti

Cold War

Counterfactuals (Logic)

Imaginary histories

International relations - Research

International relations -- Research

World politics - Research

World politics -- Research

Law, Politics & Government

International Relations

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- PART ONE -- CHAPTER ONE. Making Sense of the World -- CHAPTER TWO. Counterfactual Thought Experiments -- PART TWO -- Chapter Three. Franz Ferdinand Found Alive: World War I Unnecessary -- Chapter Four. Leadership and the End of the Cold War: Did It Have to End This Way? -- PART THREE -- CHAPTER FIVE. Scholars and Causation 1 -- CHAPTER SIX. Scholars and Causation 2 -- CHAPTER EIGHT. Heil to the Chief: Sinclair Lewis, Philip Roth, and Fascism -- Conclusions -- Notes -- Index



Sommario/riassunto

Could World War I have been averted if Franz Ferdinand and his wife hadn't been murdered by Serbian nationalists in 1914? What if Ronald Reagan had been killed by Hinckley's bullet? Would the Cold War have ended as it did? In Forbidden Fruit, Richard Ned Lebow develops protocols for conducting robust counterfactual thought experiments and uses them to probe the causes and contingency of transformative international developments like World War I and the end of the Cold War. He uses experiments, surveys, and a short story to explore why policymakers, historians, and international relations scholars are so resistant to the contingency and indeterminism inherent in open-ended, nonlinear systems. Most controversially, Lebow argues that the difference between counterfactual and so-called factual arguments is misleading, as both can be evidence-rich and logically persuasive. A must-read for social scientists, Forbidden Fruit also examines the binary between fact and fiction and the use of counterfactuals in fictional works like Philip Roth's The Plot Against America to understand complex causation and its implications for who we are and what we think makes the social world work.