Max Weber: Selections in Translation

‘The outbreak of the Second Punic War’, says Eduard Meyer, ‘was the consequence of a deliberate decision by Hannibal; that of the Seven Years War, of a decision by Frederick the Great; and that of the War of 1866, of a decision by Bismarck. All of them might have decided differently, and different personalities would…have decided differently; the consequence would have been that the course of history would have been different.’ In footnote 2 he adds, ‘This is neither to affirm nor to deny that in such a case the wars in question would never have occurred: that is a completely unanswerable and so an idle question.’ Leaving aside the awkward relationship between the second sentence and Meyer's previously discussed account of the relationship between ‘freedom’ and ‘necessity’ in history, what is most debatable in this passage is the view that questions to which no answer, or no certain answer, can be given are, for that reason alone, ‘idle’ questions. Things would be in a bad way even in empirical science if those deep questions to which it gives no answer were never to be raised. To be sure, we are not concerned here with such ‘Ultimate’ problems: rather, it is a case of a question which, on the one hand, has been ‘overtaken’ by events and, on the other, cannot receive a clear positive answer in the state of our actual and possible knowledge.