War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [773]
If the source of power lies neither in the physical nor in the moral qualities of the person who possesses it, then it is obvious that the source of this power must be found outside this person—in those relations to the masses in which the person who possesses power finds himself.
That is exactly how power is understood by jurisprudence, that money changer of history, which promises to exchange the historical understanding of power for pure gold.
Power is the sum total of the wills of the masses, transferred by express or tacit agreement to rulers chosen by the masses.
In the domain of jurisprudence, which consists of arguments about how the state and power must be organized, if all that can be organized, this is all very clear, but when applied to history, this definition of power calls for elucidation.
Jurisprudence considers the state and power as the ancients considered fire—as something absolutely existent. But for history, the state and power are only phenomena, just as for present-day physics fire is not an element but a phenomenon.
From this fundamental difference between the views of history and of jurisprudence comes the fact that jurisprudence can speak in detail of how, in its opinion, power must be organized and what power is, existing immutably outside time; but to historical questions about the meaning of power as it changes in time it can give no answer.
If power is the transfer of the sum total of wills to a ruler, then is Pugachev a representative of the wills of the masses? If he is not, then why is Napoleon I? Why was Napoleon III a criminal when he was caught in Boulogne,2 while later the criminals were the ones he caught?
During palace revolutions, in which two or three men sometimes take part, is the will of the masses also transferred to a new person? In international relations, is the will of the popular masses transferred to their conqueror? Was the will of the Confederation of the Rhine transferred to Napoleon in 1808?3 Was the will of the mass of the Russian people transferred to Napoleon in 1809, when our troops in alliance with the French went to make war on Austria?
These questions can be answered in three ways:
Either (1) by recognizing that the will of the masses is always unconditionally handed over to a ruler or rulers whom they have chosen, and that therefore any rise of a new power, any struggle against the power once handed over, should be considered only as a violation of the real power.
Or (2) by recognizing that the will of the masses is transferred to a ruler conditionally, under definite and known conditions, and by showing that all constraints, clashes, and even destructions of power come from the non-observation by the rulers of the conditions under which power was transferred to them.
Or (3) by recognizing that the will of the masses is transferred to a ruler conditionally, but under unknown, undefined conditions, and that the rise of many powers, their struggle, and their fall come only from the greater or lesser degree to which the rulers fulfill those unknown conditions under which the wills of the masses are transferred from some persons to others.
And these are the three ways in which historians explain the relations of the masses to the rulers.
Some historians, not understanding, in the simplicity of their hearts, the question of the meaning of power, those same specialized and biographical historians of whom we have spoken above, seem to recognize that the sum total of the wills of the masses is transferred