Causality,Chaos Theory,and the End of the Weimar Republic: A Commentary On Henry Turner’s Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power

This article seeks to integrate the roles of structure and human agency in a theory of historical causation, using the fall of the Weimar Republic and in particular Henry Turner's book Hitler's Thirty Days to Power as a case study. Drawing on analogies from chaos theory, it argues that crisis situations in history exhibit sensitive dependence on local conditions, which are always changing. This undermines the distinction between causes and conditions (including counterfactual conditions). It urges instead a distinction between empowering and constraining causes of specific human actions as a more fruitful model. The paper also discusses more briefly two other analogies to chaos theory: 1) similarity across differences in scale as applicable to different levels of individual (psychological) and collective events, which are seen as homologous; 2) a model of branching as applicable to the totality of causes of a given event.