War And Peace

If the source of power lies not in the physical or moral qualities of the possessor, it is obvious that the source of this power must be found outside the particular person – in the relationship which the possessor enjoys with the masses.

That is precisely how power is seen by the science of jurisprudence, the historical bank of exchange that undertakes to exchange historical power-tokens for pure gold.

Power is the collective will of the masses transferred to rulers selected by open or tacit consent.

In the realm of jurisprudence, which is based on arguments about how a state and power should be constructed if only they could be constructed, this is as clear as crystal, but when applied to actual history this definition of power calls for further elucidation.

Jurisprudence treats the state and power as the ancients treated fire, seeing them as absolute entities, whereas for history the state and power are merely phenomena, just as for modern physics fire is a phenomenon rather than an element.

Because of this fundamental difference in attitude between history and jurisprudence the latter can hold forth in great detail about power, how in the lawyers’ opinion it should be organized, and even what it is, this absolute entity with its timeless existence, but jurisprudence has no answers to historical questions about power as it exists and develops over time itself.

If power is the transfer of collective will to rulers, was Pugachov a representative of the will of the masses? If not, why was Napoleon I considered to be one? Why was Napoleon III a criminal when he was seized at Boulogne,⁵ whereas afterwards it was the people seized by him who turned out to be the criminals?

In a palace coup, which might involve only two or three people, do we observe the will of the masses being transferred to a new person? In international affairs is the will of the popular masses transferred to their conqueror? In 1808 was the will of the Conference of the Rhine transferred to Napoleon? Was the will of the mass of the Russian people transferred to Napoleon in 1809 when our army allied itself with the French and went to war with Austria?

The possible answers are threefold:

(1) The will of the masses is always transferred unconditionally to a chosen ruler or rulers, which means that every upsurge of new power, all resistance to transferred power, must be regarded as an infringement of real power; or

(2) The will of the masses is transferred to rulers on known and specific conditions, which means that every time power is curtailed, resisted or even abolished this must be due to non-observance by the rulers of the conditions on which power was transferred to them; or

(3) The will of the masses is transferred to rulers conditionally, but on conditions that are unknown and unspecific, which means that when many different authorities arise, clash and decline, this must be due to the greater or lesser extent to which the rulers have been observing the unknown conditions by which the will of the masses is transferred from one group to another.

This is the historians’ threefold explanation of the relationship between the masses and their rulers.

Some historians – the specialist biographers referred to above, naive enough not to understand questions about the meaning of power – seem to accept that the collective will of the masses is transferred to historical leaders unconditionally, and therefore, when these historians come to describe any such authority, they assume it to be the only authority, absolute and real, so that any other force that opposes this real authority is no authority at all, but an infringement of authority amounting to violence.

The theory works well enough for primitive people in peace-time, but when applied to complex and turbulent periods in national life, with different authorities arising simultaneously and fighting each other, it runs into trouble: legitimist historians will argue that the National Convention, the Directory and Bonaparte amounted to nothing more than infringements of real authority, whereas Republicans and Bonapartists will argue that the Republic or perhaps the Empire was the real authority, and everything else an infringement. It soon becomes clear that the explanations offered by these historians, which cancel each other out, are good for children of tender years but nobody else.

Another type of historian, seeing the error of this view of history, will tell us that authority rests on the conditional transfer of collective will from the masses to their rulers, and that historical leaders possess power only on condition that they fulfil a certain programme which by tacit consent the will of the people has set for them. But these historians fail to tell us what this programme consists of, or if they do they constantly contradict one another.