Forbidden Fruit:
Counterfactuals and International Relations
Richard Ned Lebow

Paper | March 2010 | $27.95 / £19.95
Cloth | March 2010 | $60.00 / £41.95
348 pp. | 6 x 9 | 4 line illus. 14 tables.

Shopping Cart | Endorsements | Table of Contents
Chapter 1 [PDF]

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.

Richard Ned Lebow is the James O. Freedman Presidential Professor of Government at Dartmouth College and the Centennial Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His many books include A Cultural Theory of International Relations and We All Lost the Cold War (Princeton).

Endorsements:

"Forbidden Fruit is the kind of border-busting book that takes scholars to places they would otherwise never find, let alone inhabit. Some of those places are well outside our comfort zones, so be prepared to be infuriated. Then get over it. Forbidden Fruit will help you become more creative, self-aware, and careful, and in doing so it will make you a better social scientist."--Colin Elman, Maxwell School of Syracuse University

"Forbidden Fruit provides a fascinating study of the use and misuse of counterfactual analysis. Lebow demonstrates the ubiquity of counterfactual assumptions and the importance of making them carefully. He outlines clear criteria for constructing and assessing counterfactuals, and offers practical suggestions for balancing conflicting cognitive biases to improve assessments of historical pasts and probable futures. This book deserves the attention of anyone who predicts, explains, thinks, or invests."--Andrew Bennett, Georgetown University

"Lebow uses counterfactual reasoning to probe the limits of international relations theory and to push us to think more carefully about how we understand causation. He seeks to convince a field still dominated by systemic and structural theorists that more attention needs to be paid to contingency, multiple causal factors, and the interaction and confluence of factors. Lebow illustrates how overconfident and indeterminate most international relations theory actually is."--Richard Herrmann, Ohio State University

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Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments ix

PART ONE
Chapter One: Making Sense of the World 3
Chapter Two: Counterfactual Thought Experiments 29

PART TWO
Chapter Three: Franz Ferdinand Found Alive: World War I Unnecessary 69
Chapter Four: Leadership and the End of the Cold War: Did It Have to End This Way? 103
Coauthored with George W. Breslauer

PART THREE
Chapter Five: Scholars and Causation 1 137
Coauthored with Philip E. Tetlock
Chapter Six: Scholars and Causation 2 166

APPENDIX
Experiment 4, Instrument 1: Unmaking American Tragedies 196
Chapter Seven: If Mozart Had Died at Your Age: Psycho-logic versus Statistical Inference 205
Chapter Eight: Heil to the Chief: Sinclair Lewis, Philip Roth, and Fascism 222

Conclusions 259
Notes 287
Index 329

Another Princeton book by Richard Ned Lebow:

• We All Lost the Cold War.

Subject Area:

• Political Science and International Relations

Shopping Cart:

For customers in the U.S., Canada, Latin America, Asia, and Australia
Paper: $27.95 ISBN13: 978-0-691-13290-7
Cloth: $60.00 ISBN13: 978-0-691-13289-1

For customers in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and India
Paper: £19.95 ISBN13: 978-0-691-13290-7
Cloth: £41.95 ISBN13: 978-0-691-13289-1

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File created: 11/4/2009

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