War And Peace

This concept is the only way of getting a handle on history as presently expounded, and anyone who broke off this handle, as Buckle did, without finding some other technique for dealing with historical material, would only be depriving himself of the last possible way of dealing with it. The necessity for this concept of power as an explanation of historical phenomena is supremely well illustrated by the writers of universal and cultural history themselves; having ostensibly repudiated the concept of power, they keep returning to it at every step, and they are bound to do so.

So far the study of history as part of the human spirit of inquiry has been like money in circulation, notes and coins. Biographies and national histories are like paper money. They can pass and circulate, doing their job without harming anyone and fulfilling a useful function, as long as no one questions the guarantee behind them. And as long as no one questions precisely how the will of heroes is supposed to direct events, historical works by Thiers and his ilk will retain a certain interest and educational value, not to mention the odd touch of poetry. But just as doubts about the validity of banknotes can arise, either when too many go into circulation because they are so easy to make, or because of a sudden rush to covert them into gold, in the same way doubts about the real value of this type of historical work will arise either when too many of them are written, or when some naive person asks the simple question, ‘Precisely what force was it that made it possible for Napoleon to do that?’ – in other words, when someone wishes to change a working note for the pure gold of a valid concept.

The writers of universal and cultural history are like men who feel let down by paper money and decide to stop making notes and make hard coins instead, using a metal of lower density than gold. Their coins would certainly turn out to be ‘hard’, but that’s all they would be. Ignorant people might be taken in by a paper note, but nobody is going to be deceived by a hard coin made of low-value metal. Just as gold remains gold only as long as it can be used for something as well as exchanged, so the universal historians will be golden only when they can answer the crucial question of history, ‘What is power?’ Universal historians give contradictory answers, and as for cultural historians, they evade the issue and give answers to completely different questions. Imitation gold tokens can be used, but only within a community that has agreed to accept them as gold, or in one where no one knows the properties of gold; in the same way, the universal and cultural historians who, for reasons best known to themselves, keep running away from the crucial questions of humanity, are still accepted as hard coinage in our universities and by a wide readership with a taste for what they like to call ‘serious reading’.

CHAPTER 4

Having repudiated the ancient view of the people’s will being subjected to a chosen person by divine inspiration, and through him subjected to the Deity, history cannot take a step without running into contradictions. It has to choose between two alternatives: either a return to the old belief in the Deity’s direct intervention in human affairs, or a definitive explanation of the force called ‘power’ that is responsible for historical events.

Any return to the old way of thinking is out of the question, the old beliefs having been shattered, which means that an explanation must be found for the meaning of power.

Napoleon gave the order for an army to be raised and go to war. This idea is so familiar, we have grown so used to it, that the question why six hundred thousand men go off to do battle just because Napoleon has said a few words seems to have no meaning. He had the power, so his orders were carried out.

This answer is perfectly satisfactory if we believe that power was given to him by God. But the moment we decide not to accept this, it becomes necessary to define the significance of this power, the power of one man over others.

This power cannot be the straightforward power deriving from the physical superiority of a strong creature over a weak one, a superiority based on the application or threat of physical force – like the power of Hercules. Nor can it be based on the moral superiority, as several simple-minded historians seem to think, since they keep setting certain historical figures up as heroes, men imbued with a special quality of mind and spirit which goes by the name of genius. This power cannot be based on moral superiority, because, even if we forget about historical heroes like Napoleon, opinions of whose moral stature differ widely, history shows that none of your Louis XIs or Metternichs, who governed men in millions, showed any special propensity for spiritual strength; quite the reverse, in most cases they were morally weaker than every last one of the millions they governed.