ABSTRACT
ONE OF THE PARADOXES OF HISTORIOGRAPHY is that while historiansrepeatedly engage with causal reasoning and causal relationships, few consciously offer causal explanations. As Thomas Haskell observes, ‘historians are not shy about assigning responsibility or imputing the causal status upon which responsibility rests’. Indeed, they ‘routinely bestow praise and assign blame; they talk incessantly about change and presume that acts have consequences; they tell stories showing how one thing leads to another, how things came into being and go out of being’. Yet despite this ‘deep preoccupation with relations between particular causes and effects’, professional historians ‘seldom display any interest in causation per se’.1 While this disinterest may raise questions about the need for a detailed exploration of causation in history, I believe three factors make such an examination prudent. First, the temporal sequencing of events in narrative presentations implies causation (see Chapter 4), but whether these relationships are truly causal requires further inspection. Second, some strands of constructionism advocate causation as the ultimate paradigm of historical proof, although this remains very much a minority position in the discipline. For its disciples, causation constitutes a science with a methodological and explanatory structure similar to, albeit less precise than, the natural sciences. While I am not aware of any sport historians adopting this position, the fact that it is grounded in systematic comparison opens the door to a potentially rich method, and one that warrants at least some investigation.2 Third, notions of causation, irrespective of whether they are incorporated into a history implicitly or explicitly, situate practitioners in the debate over whether agents or structures are the prime determinants of social outcomes. Broadly speaking, reconstructionist-leaning historians emphasise individuals, groups and organisations as causal agents who act in pursuit of their goals. Constructionists, in contradistinction, focus on the social and collective worlds of customs and laws which they hold rule, shape, order and structure (in other words, cause) social outcomes. Even though the agency-structure debate, which dominated social history in the 1970s and 1980s, has
receded over the last decade, it maintains a presence in the discipline and merits consideration.3
