War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [772]
Up to now, in relation to the question of mankind, historical science has been like circulating money—paper and coin. Biographies and histories of separate peoples are like paper money. They pass and circulate, fulfilling their purpose, without harming anyone and even being useful, until the question arises of what backs them up. We need only forget the question of how the will of heroes produces events, and the histories of Thiers will be interesting, instructive, and besides that will acquire a tinge of poetry. But just as doubt of the actual value of paper money will arise, either because, as it is so easy to make, a great deal of it will be made, or because people will want to exchange it for gold—in just the same way doubt arises about the actual meaning of histories of this sort, either because too many of them appear, or because someone in the simplicity of his heart will ask: by what force did Napoleon do that?—that is, will want to exchange paper currency for the pure gold of actual understanding.
General historians and historians of culture are like people who, having recognized the inconvenience of paper money, decide instead to make coins out of a metal that lacks the density of gold. And the money will indeed come out having the clink of coin, but only the clink. Paper money might still deceive the unknowing, whereas a coin that clinks but has no value will deceive no one. As gold is only gold when it can be used not for exchange alone, but also for real things, so, too, general historians will only be gold when they are able to answer the essential question of history: what is power? The general historians answer this question contradictorily, and the historians of culture push it aside altogether, answering something else. And as tokens that resemble gold can only be used among a group of people who agree to take them for gold, and among those who do not know the properties of gold, so, too, general historians and historians of culture, without answering the essential questions of mankind, for some sort of purposes of their own, serve as current money for the universities and the mass of readers—lovers of serious books, as they put it.
IV
Having renounced the view of the ancients on the divine submission of the will of the people to a chosen one and on the submission of that will to a divinity, history cannot take a single step without contradiction unless it chooses one of two things: either to return to the former faith in the direct participation of the divinity in the affairs of mankind, or to explain definitely the meaning of that force productive of historical events which is known as power.
To return to the first is impossible: belief has been destroyed, and therefore it is necessary to explain the meaning of power.
Napoleon gave orders to gather troops and go to war. We are so accustomed to this notion, we have grown so used to this view, that the question of why six hundred thousand men go to war when Napoleon says such-and-such words seems senseless to us. He had power, and therefore what he ordered was done.
This answer is perfectly satisfactory, if we believe that power was given to him from God. But as soon as we do not acknowledge that, it becomes necessary to define what this power of one man over others is.
This power cannot be the direct power of physical domination of a strong being over a weak, a domination based on the application or threat of the application of physical force, like the power of Hercules; nor can it be based on the domination of moral force, as some historians think in the simplicity