The Problem with Historical Explanations — War and Peace

What force moves the nations? Biographical historians and historians of separate nations understand it as a power inherent in heroes and rulers. Events occur solely by the will of a Napoleon or an Alexander. Those answers satisfy only so long as there is but one historian to each event. As soon as historians of different nationalities describe the same event, the replies lose all meaning, for this force is understood not only differently but in contradictory ways. One says Napoleon's power produced it, another Alexander's. Thiers, a Bonapartist, says Napoleon's power was based on virtue and genius. Lanfrey, a Republican, says it was trickery and deception. By mutually destroying one another's positions, they destroy the understanding of the force that produces events.

Writers of universal history seem to recognize the error. They treat power not as inherent in heroes but as the resultant of many variously directed forces. Yet in most cases they still employ power as a force that itself produces events. An historic character is first the product of his time, then his power is itself a cause. Gervinus and Schlosser at one time prove Napoleon a product of the Revolution and the ideas of 1789, and at another say the campaign of 1812 was simply the product of Napoleon's misdirected will, and that those same ideas were arrested by his caprice. The contradiction is not accidental. After entering analysis the universal historians stop halfway. To find component forces equal to a resultant, the sum of the components must equal the resultant. This condition is never observed. Gervinus decomposes Alexander's power into Stein, Metternich, Madame de Staël, Talleyrand, Fichte, Chateaubriand. The sum of their interactions does not equal millions of Frenchmen submitting to the Bourbons. So the historian falls back on the unexplained force he had denied. Peasants, having no clear idea of the cause of rain, say according to whether they want rain or fine weather that the wind has blown the clouds away or brought them up.

A third class, historians of culture, take the force to be mental activity. If events may be explained by persons treating one another in such and such ways, why not by people writing such and such books? Despite their endeavours, only by a great stretch can one admit a connection between intellectual activity and the movement of peoples, and in no case that it controls actions: the cruel murders of the French Revolution resulting from the doctrine of equality, the wars resulting from the preaching of love. How a book, The Social Contract, made Frenchmen drown one another cannot be understood without a causal nexus. History is written by learned men, so it is natural for them to think their class supplies the basis of humanity's movement, as it would be natural for traders and soldiers if they wrote history. Spiritual activity, enlightenment, culture, ideas are indistinct conceptions under whose banner almost any word can be introduced. And when these historians have to describe an actual event such as 1812, they involuntarily say it resulted from Napoleon's will, contradicting the new force they have devised.