An Accident of History

Abstract

We regularly ask after the limits of historical inquiry; we agonize over the right combination of psychological, sociological, and technical explanations. We struggle over how to combine the behavior of machines and practices of their users. Imagine, for a moment, that there was a nearly punctiform scientific-technological event that took place in the very recent past for which an historical understanding was so important that the full resources of the American government bore down upon it. Picture further that every private and public word spoken by the principal actors had been recorded, and that their every significant physical movement had been inscribed on tape. Count on the fact that lives were lost or jeopardized in the hundreds, and that thousands of others might be in the not so distant future. Expect that the solvency of some of the largest industries in the United States was on the line through a billion dollars in liability coverage that would ride, to no small extent, on the causal account given in that history. What form, we can ask, would this high-stakes history take? And what might an inquiry into such histories tell us about the project of — and limits to — historical inquiry more generally, as it is directed to the sphere of science and technology?