War And Peace

History seems to assume that such power is universally acknowledged and can be taken for granted. But any reader, however willing to accept this power as universally acknowledged, once he has ploughed through the many historical works available, is bound to have doubts and wonder whether this power, which is interpreted in so many different ways by the historians themselves, really does enjoy universal acknowledgement.

CHAPTER 2

What kind of force is it that moves nations?

Historians specializing in biography and historians dealing with single nations understand this force as power vested in heroes and sovereigns. The way they put it, all events are due exclusively to the will of Napoleon, or Alexander, or the particular personality the individual historian happens to be writing about. The answers produced by this type of historian to any question concerning the force that moves events are perfectly adequate, but only so long as there is only one historian for any one event. The moment historians of different nationalities and attitudes begin to describe the same event, the answers produced lose all kind of sense, because the same force is interpreted by them not just differently, but often in exactly the opposite way. One historian claims that an event was caused by the power of Napoleon, another says no, it was caused by the power of Alexander, a third attributes it to the power of some third person. And in any case, this type of historian contradicts all the others even in the basic explanation of the very force on which the particular person’s influence is founded. Thiers,² a Bonapartist, says that Napoleon’s power rested on virtue and genius; Lanfrey,³ a Republican, says it rested on duplicity and deception of the people. So it is that this type of historian, so keen to undermine everybody else’s position, manages to undermine the very concept of a force behind events, and runs away from all the essential questions of history.

General historians, dealing as they do with all nations, appear to acknowledge that specialist historians are wrong in what they say about the forces behind events. They do not recognize any such force as a power vested in heroes and sovereigns; they regard it as the result of many different forces working in conjunction. In describing a war or the subjugation of a people, the writer of general history looks for causes not in the power of any single person, but in some kind of interaction between the many persons involved.

According to this view it would seem that, since the power that resides in historical figures is the product of many different forces, it can hardly be regarded as sufficient in itself to making things happen. Nevertheless writers of general history do in the great majority of cases retain the concept of power that is sufficient in itself to make events happen and assume a causal relationship with them. The way these historians write, at one moment a historical figure is the product of his time, and his power is nothing but the product of various forces, but at the next, his power is a special force which makes things happen. Take Gervinus and Schlosser,⁴ for instance (though there are others like them): at one point they argue that Napoleon is a product of the French Revolution and the ideas of 1789, and so on, but elsewhere they state plainly that the campaign of 1812 and other events not to their liking are simply products of Napoleon’s misdirected will, and the actual ideas of 1789 were stopped in their tracks by Napoleon’s eccentric behaviour. So ideas associated with the Revolution and the spirit of the age – these were what produced Napoleon’s power. But at the same time it was Napoleon’s power that snuffed out ideas associated with the Revolution and the spirit of the age.

This curious inconsistency is no chance event. We come across the like of it at every end and turn; in fact everything written by these general historians consists of an inevitable stream of inconsistencies like this one. And it is all due to the fact that the historians have only gone half-way down the road of analysis.

For component forces to equate with a composite or resultant force, the sum of the components must equal the resultant. This condition is never observed by general writers, and this is why they can explain resultant forces only by making allowances for some deficiency in the contributory forces and also an extra, unexplained force affecting the resultant.