In an invitation to reflexive sociology, Pierre Bourdieu noted that “the more brutal form of censorship” is to distort “competition by prevent-ing people who want to enter into the game from doing so—by turning down meritorious applications for fellowships” (1992, 190). My goal in this chapter is to bring some light on how the denial of support and its opposite, the award-ing of grants and fellowships, gradually, but inexorably alter the history of so-cial sciences. More specifically, and more modestly, I explore two typical and crucial questions encountered by scholars interested in the effects of grant making: whether donors’ policies alter the research agendas of prospective recipients and what would have happened to a research program, depart-ment, or research center if a certain grant had not been awarded. To shed some light on these questions, I resort to counterfactuals, which are essential to establishing causality and, in addition, a useful tool to make explicit actual possibilities that are not realized.