War And Peace

Every historian will have his own view of what constitutes the goal of a people in movement, and will therefore imagine the conditions to be greatness, wealth, freedom or enlightenment for the citizens of France or some other country. But if we overlook the contradictions between historians concerning the nature of these conditions, and even allow for the possibility of one overall set of conditions applicable to everybody, the facts of history almost always contradict this theory.

If the conditions determining any transfer of power amount to wealth, freedom and enlightenment for the people, how is it that monarchs like Louis XIV and Ivan the Terrible lived out their reigns in peace and quiet, while monarchs like Louis XVI and Charles I were executed by their people? To this question these historians reply that the effects of things done by Louis XIV in violation of his programme were visited upon Louis XVI. But why not Louis XIV and Louis XV? Why did they have to be visited specifically on Louis XVI? And is there any time limit on this kind of visitation? To questions like these there are no answers, and there never can be. Equally inexplicable in terms of this view of history is the reason why collective popular will can remain century after century in the hands of rulers and their heirs, and then all at once during a fifty-year period transfer itself to a Convention, a Directory, a Napoleon, an Alexander, a Louis XVIII, back to another Napoleon, a Charles X, a Louis Philippe, a Republican government and then to a Napoleon III. To explain these rapid transferences of popular will from one individual to another, especially in the broader context of international affairs, conquests and alliances, these historians are forced to admit that at least some of these developments do not amount to a proper transfer of popular will, they are chance events dependent on cleverness, error, double-dealing or weakness on the part of some diplomat, monarch or party leader. So, most historical phenomena – civil wars, revolutions, conquests – are, according to these historians, not the results of popular will freely transferred but the results of misdirected will on the part of one or more persons, which means, once again, infringements of authority. So it is that even this type of historian comes to regard historical events as exceptions to his theory.

These historians are like a botanist who observes that some plants develop with a double seed-leaf and therefore insists that every growing thing grows only by dividing into two leaves, with the result that palm-trees and mushrooms and even fully grown oak-trees with a canopy of foliage nothing like the original double seed-leaf have to be regarded as exceptions to his theory. There is a third type of historian who agrees that the will of the masses is transferred to historical leaders conditionally, but without us knowing what the conditions are. He will claim that historical leaders retain power only because they are carrying out the transferred will of the masses.

But in that case, if the force that moves nations lies not in their historical leaders but in the people themselves, what is the role of the leaders?

Historical leaders are, according to these historians, living embodiments of popular will, and the activity of historical leaders represents the activity of the masses.

But that gives rise to another question: does all the activity of historical leaders represent the will of the masses, or only one particular aspect of it? If all the activities of historical leaders amount to an expression of the popular will, as some believe, then the entire biographies of people like Napoleon and Catherine the Great, with all the bits and pieces of court scandal, amount to expressions of the peoples’ lives, which is obviously nonsensical, but if only one aspect of a historical leader’s activity amounts to an expression of the peoples’ lives, as other self-styled philosophical historians believe, then in order to determine which aspect of a leader’s activity is the one that expresses the life of a people, we need to know at the outset what constitutes the life of the people.