Marxist-Leninist alternative: the main critical comments by I.D. Koval’chenko on the counterfactual propositions concept by R.W. Fogel

The article is devoted to the analysis of I.D. Koval’chenko’s critical remarks on R.W. Fogel’s concept of counterfactual propositions. Being the pioneers in the field of the cliometric approach in the 1950–1970s, these economic historians were the apologists of quantitative methods in historical science. Fogel, the author of the concept, had been the director of the program for studying the long-term development of the American economy at the National Bureau of Economic Research since the second half of the 1970s. Koval’chenko was a specialist in the field of theory and methodology of historical science. He had been the Chairman of the Commission on the Application of Mathematical Methods and Computers in Historical Research at the Department of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences since 1968.
The discussion between the two scholars unfolded in a space of international scientific meetings and personal contacts that took place in the second half of the 1970s against the background of detente in the relations between the USSR and the United States, more precisely – in its final stage. The article presents the main provisions of the concept of counterfactual propositions and gives some of Fogel’s views on historical science. The paper also introduces Koval’chenko’s criticism, its theoretical and methodological foundations, which are within the framework of the mono-methodological research practices of the philosophical doctrine of Marxism-Leninism. The central point of the discussion is the issue of the theoretical foundations of modeling historical processes – goal setting, capable of legitimizing the initial statements on which the model is based.

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