The Impossibility of Perfect Judgment — War and Peace

Seven years after the war the First Epilogue opens. European history seems calm, yet unknown forces keep moving peoples and states. Historians call post-1812 politics the reaction and judge Alexander I, Napoleon, Staël, and others as progressive or reactionary from a stern bench. The same Alexander praised for 1812 is blamed for Poland, the Holy Alliance, Arakcheev, mysticism, and later conservatism. Tolstoy asks what these reproaches mean: did not praise and blame flow from the same birth, education, and crushing weight of power? A live ruler felt responsibility for Europe with personal habits and limits, not a professor's unchanging standard of progress. Historians contradict one another and change every decade what counts as good for humanity. Even if Alexander had followed every later program of nationality, freedom, and progress, the opposition historians admire would never have existed. If human life could be ruled perfectly by hindsight reason, life itself would be destroyed.