Historians debate what explains historical change: material conditions, ideas, individual decisions, technological innovation, environmental factors, or contingent accidents. Different historiographical schools emphasize different causal mechanisms. Understanding these debates clarifies that 'explanation' in history is not a matter of identifying THE cause but rather of narrating how multiple factors combined to produce particular outcomes in specific contexts.
From your prerequisite on historical causation theory, you already know that historians distinguish different types of causes — immediate triggers, underlying conditions, long-run structural forces — and that the question "what caused X?" always implies a choice about what level of analysis to privilege. This topic takes that foundation and asks a deeper question: what would it even mean to *explain* historical change? Different schools of historical thought have given radically different answers, and understanding their disagreements helps you think more precisely about what your own explanatory claims are actually doing.
Materialist explanation grounds historical change in economic structures, class relations, and the control of productive resources. For Marxist historians, changes in the mode of production — how societies organize labor and ownership — drive everything else: political forms, legal systems, ideologies, and cultural practices are expressions of underlying material conditions. The strength of this approach is that it identifies long-run structural forces that shape the range of possible outcomes; its weakness is that it can underweight the autonomy of ideas and the contingency of particular decisions. The French Revolution doesn't become inevitable just because the social conditions for it existed — you also need specific actors making specific choices at specific moments.
Idealist explanation inverts the priority: ideas, beliefs, and cultural frameworks drive change. The Cambridge School of intellectual history (which you may encounter as a related topic) insists that understanding historical actors requires reconstructing the concepts available to them and how they used those concepts in argument. Max Weber's thesis that the Protestant ethic shaped the spirit of capitalism is a famous idealist claim: he argued that a specific set of religious beliefs — about calling, predestination, and worldly success as a sign of divine favor — created a distinctive orientation toward work and accumulation that made northern European capitalism distinctively dynamic. The critique is that ideas don't change themselves; you still need to explain why certain ideas win out over others in particular historical moments.
Contingency is the third great explanatory category, and in some ways the most unsettling. Contingent explanation holds that historical outcomes depend on specific, unpredictable events and decisions that could have gone otherwise — and that constructing retrospective necessity is a form of distortion. If Archduke Franz Ferdinand's motorcade had not taken a wrong turn in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, the assassination might not have succeeded. Does that mean World War I "might not have happened"? Contingency theorists take this possibility seriously; structuralists insist that if not this trigger, some other would have ignited the same underlying pressures. The debate is unresolvable, but recognizing it forces precision: you must distinguish between saying "the conditions were ripe" and "the outcome was inevitable." Causal pluralism — the position that most historical events require multiple types of explanation at different levels — is the methodological resolution most historians live with in practice, even when their rhetoric favors one explanatory mode.
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