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By Root 3414 0

and trade, crafts, gardening, or anything you like. But why the intellectual activity of people is presented by historians of culture as the cause or expression of the whole historical movement is hard to understand. Only the following considerations could lead historians to such a conclusion: (1) that history is written by scholars, and therefore it is natural and pleasant for them to think that the activity of their estate is the basis for the movement of all mankind, just as it is natural and pleasant for merchants, farmers, and soldiers to think so (this does not get expressed only because merchants and soldiers do not write history), and (2) that spiritual activity, education, civilization, culture, the idea are all vague, indefinite concepts, under the banner of which it is quite convenient to use words that have a still less clear meaning and therefore can easily be plugged into any theory.

But, not to speak of the inner merit of histories of this sort (perhaps they are even needed by someone or for something), the histories of culture, which all general histories are beginning to come down to more and more, are remarkable in that, while thoroughly and seriously analyzing various religious, philosophical, and political teachings as causes of events, each time they have only to describe an actual historical event—for example, the campaign of the year twelve—they describe it involuntarily as a product of power, saying outright that this campaign is the product of Napoleon’s will. In speaking this way, the historians of culture involuntarily contradict themselves, or prove that the new force they have invented does not express historical events, and that the sole means of understanding history is that power which they supposedly do not recognize.

III

A locomotive is moving. Someone asks: why does it move? A muzhik says: the devil moves it. Another man says the locomotive moves because its wheels turn. A third asserts that the cause of the movement is the smoke blown away by the wind.

The muzhik is irrefutable. In order to refute him, someone would have to prove to him that there is no devil, or another muzhik would have to explain to him that it is not the devil but a German who moves the locomotive. Only then, by way of contradiction, will they see that they are both wrong. But the one who says that the cause is the turning of the wheels refutes himself, because, if he enters upon the terrain of analysis, he must keep going: he must explain the cause of the turning of the wheels. And until he arrives at the ultimate cause of the locomotive’s movement, the steam compressed in the boiler, he will have no right to stop in his search for the cause. The one who explained the movement of the locomotive by the smoke blown back, noticing that the explanation by the wheels did not furnish the cause, took the first symptom that came along and, in his turn, passed it on as the cause.

The only concept that can explain the movement of the locomotive is the concept of a force equal to its visible movement.

The only concept by means of which the movement of peoples can be explained is the concept of a force equal to the whole movement of the peoples.

Yet under this concept different historians understand completely different forces, none of them equal to the visible movement. Some see it as a force immediately inherent in heroes—like the muzhik who sees the devil in a locomotive; others as a force produced by certain other forces—like the turning of the wheels; still others as an intellectual influence—like the blown-away smoke.

As long as histories of separate persons are written—be they Caesars, Alexanders, or Luthers and Voltaires—and not the history of all the people, all without a single exception, who participate in an event, it is absolutely impossible to describe the movement of mankind without the concept of a force that makes people direct their activity towards a single goal. And the only such concept known to historians is power.

This concept is the one handle by means of which the material of history can be