People means choices

If History is always about people, and about human nature, then it means that it is always about choices too: choices taken and choices not taken.

That means we have to identify those choices and explain them. As with my piece on People, let me again choose two examples to illustrate my point. For the first, I will focus on the choices of leaders. For the second, the choice of “ordinary” people (people are never really “ordinary”).

For leaders, I will use, as an example, the choices of two leaders who might well be part of your studies at both IGCSE and IB Diploma level: Chamberlain and Hitler. For these two leaders made very different choices. For Chamberlain chose to avoid war for as long as he could whereas Hitler chose to risk war. For we “ordinary” people, let’s stay in the 1930s and ask why did so many people choose to vote for Hitler?

As historians we have three tasks: to explain choices, to examine the effects of those choices and to consider whether they were right or wrong. In this piece, I want to focus only on the first of those tasks; explaining the choices.

Whether for leaders or for the masses, we need to consider the context in which choices are made: What had gone before? Where they living in “good” times: a strong economy, social cohesion, political stability, a time of peace; or not? What were the hopes and fears of the age? For the leaders, we also need to consider the pros and cons that they will have weighed up before making their decisions. I am not offering an exhaustive list but some of the things they might consider would be how far their decision would go towards meeting their declared goals, serving the needs of their people, maintaining their own position in power, and whether alternative choices were much worse. For the masses we need to consider the fact that we are dealing with very different types of people: male and female, young and old, rich and poor, and so on. Whilst for both leaders and masses we need to remember that there is both a rational side to our nature and an emotional side: Which was dominant in the decision-making process? Or did the two merge together? More of this last factor in my next piece, but you can see we have a lot to think about! And you should remember that people always had choices.