The Problem of Power — War and Peace

Having abandoned the ancients' conception of a nation's will subjected to a chosen man and that man's will to the Deity, history cannot take a step without contradiction until it chooses: either a return to direct divine intervention, or a definite explanation of the force termed power. A return is impossible; the belief has been destroyed. So it is essential to explain what is meant by power. Napoleon ordered an army to be raised and go to war. We are so used to the idea that the question why six hundred thousand men went to fight when he uttered certain words seems senseless. He had the power. That reply is satisfactory if we believe the power was given by God. As soon as we do not admit that, we must determine what this power of one man over others is. It cannot be the physical power of Hercules, nor moral force called genius. Louis XI and Metternich, who ruled millions, were generally morally weaker than any of the millions they ruled. The source must be looked for in the relation to the people of the man who wields the power. Jurisprudence, that exchange bank of history, offers a definition: power is the collective will of the people transferred, by expressed or tacit consent, to their chosen rulers. For arranging a state in discussion, it is all very clear. Applied to history, it needs explanation. Jurisprudence regards the state as the ancients regarded fire, as something existing absolutely. For history, state and power are phenomena.

Was Pugachev a representative of the will of the people? If not, why was Napoleon I? Why was Napoleon III a criminal when taken at Boulogne, and why later were those he arrested? Do palace revolutions of two or three people transfer the people's will? Was the will of the Confederation of the Rhine transferred to Napoleon in 1806? Was the will of the Russian people transferred to him in 1809, when our army in alliance with the French went to fight the Austrians? Three answers are possible: the will is always unconditionally transferred, so every struggle against appointed power is an infringement; or it is transferred under definite known conditions, and conflicts result from nonobservance; or it is delegated under unknown conditions, and struggles result from greater or lesser fulfilment of those unknowns. Biographical historians take the first and, in stormy periods, a Legitimist, a Republican, and a Bonapartist each prove a different body the real power. Their mutually contradictory explanations can only satisfy young children.

The second set say leaders have power only on carrying out a programme the people have tacitly prescribed. What that programme consists in they do not say, or they contradict one another: greatness, wealth, freedom, enlightenment. If those are the conditions, how do Louis XIV and Ivan the Terrible end their reigns tranquilly while Louis XVI and Charles I are executed? Historians reply that Louis XIV's activity reacted on Louis XVI. Why not on Louis XIV or XV? What is the time limit? There are no answers. Still less does the view explain why for centuries the collective will stays with certain heirs, then in fifty years flies to the Convention, the Directory, Napoleon, Alexander, Louis XVIII, Napoleon again, Charles X, Louis Philippe, a Republic, Napoleon III. The greater part of civil wars, revolutions, and conquests they present as accidents of cunning, as usurpations, exceptions to the theory. They resemble a botanist who, noticing some plants grow from two cotyledons, insists that the palm, the mushroom, and the oak are deviations. The third class say conditions are unknown and leaders express the people's will. Then either all the court scandals of a Napoleon or a Catherine express the nation's life, which is nonsense, or only some side of a leader's activity does, and we must first know in what the nation's life consists. So they devise an abstraction, freedom, equality, enlightenment, progress, and study the dozen people of whom monuments remain. The activity of the millions who migrate, burn houses, and destroy one another is never expressed. Luther had a hot temper. Rousseau was suspicious. We still do not learn why after the Reformation the peoples massacred one another, nor why during the French Revolution they guillotined one another.