The Forces That Move History — War and Peace

A locomotive is moving. Someone asks what moves it. A peasant says the devil. Another man says the locomotive moves because its wheels go round. A third asserts that the cause lies in the smoke which the wind carries away. The peasant is irrefutable. To refute him someone would have to prove there is no devil, or another peasant would have to explain that it is not the devil but a German. Only then, as a result of contradiction, will they see that both are wrong. The man who says the wheels are the cause refutes himself, for having begun to analyse he ought to go on until he reaches the pressure of steam in the boiler. The man who explains by the smoke has noticed that the wheels do not suffice and has taken the first sign that occurs to him.

The only conception that can explain the movement of the locomotive is a force commensurate with the movement observed. The only conception that can explain the movement of the peoples is some force commensurate with the whole movement of the peoples. Yet historians take forces of different kinds, all incommensurate with what is observed. Some see a force inherent in heroes, as the peasant sees the devil; others a force resulting from several other forces, like the wheels; others an intellectual influence, like the smoke blown away. So long as histories are written of separate individuals, whether Caesars, Alexanders, Luthers, or Voltaires, and not of all who take part in an event, it is impossible to describe the movement of humanity without a force compelling men toward a certain end. The only such conception known to historians is power. Anyone who breaks that handle off, as Buckle did, without finding another method, merely deprives himself of the one possible way of dealing with the material.

Up to now the science of history is like money in circulation, paper and coin. Biographies and special national histories are like paper money. They can circulate without harm, even advantageously, as long as no one asks what security is behind them. You need only forget to ask how the will of heroes produces events, and such histories as Thiers' may even possess a tinge of poetry. Doubts arise either because too much paper is made or because someone in his simplicity inquires by what force Napoleon did this, and wants to exchange the paper for the gold of actual comprehension. Universal historians and historians of culture are like people who, recognizing the defects of paper money, substitute metal that has not the specific gravity of gold. It may jingle. It will do no more. Paper may deceive the ignorant; nobody is deceived by tokens of base metal. As gold is gold only if it is serviceable not merely for exchange but for use, so universal historians will be valuable only when they can reply to history's essential question: what is power? They give contradictory replies, or evade it. Like counters of imitation gold, they serve as currency for purposes of their own, only in universities and among readers with a taste for what they call serious reading.