Chance and necessity in history: E.H. Carr and Leon Trotsky compared

'It was E.H. Carr who dismissed counterfactual history or the 'might-have-been' school of history as a 'parlour game' in What is History? Carr's rejection of counterfactual history was a response to Isaiah Berlin's criticism of those who believed in the 'vast impersonal forces' of history rather than giving priority to the role of the individual and the accidental. For Berlin, Carr was following i…