Clio Fregoli - entry no.1 (Tolstoy/Tahrir)

            For this assignment, I will critically analyse Tolstoy’s Epilogue for War and Peace, in relation to the article Tolstoy and Tahrir, by Erin Greer. First, Tolstoy criticizes the idealization of great men, and offers an alternative explanation of the force that leads the movement of nations. Next, he examines notions of freedom and laws of inevitability, and how they correlate within and among individuals. Greer analyses Tolstoy’s arguments and how they can be applied to the protests in Cairo, Egypt in 2011. I argue, in agreement with Greer, that his text can appear ‘convoluted’ and lends itself to a religious interpretation.

             Primarily, Tolstoy argues that historians rely on the power of individuals to explain events, and to explain the movement of nations. Individuals that lead nations are believed to do so based on chance and genius. Tolstoy criticizes contemporary historians, giving the example Napoleon and Alexander, who he argues were not geniuses, and pursued actions that were not based on chance, but in fact were inevitable. He explains this by primarily defining power in relation to history. Power is not the force behind the movement of nations; what moves nations is the combined “activity of all the people who participate in the events” (Tolstoy, Second Epilogue, chapter 7), that is the combination of the wills of those involved.  

            Tolstoy examines the will of all individuals and concludes that every action of an individual or a collective group of men is a mix of our free will and of certain laws of inevitability. There can never be an absolute freedom, nor an absolute inevitability, and our life revolves around a relation of this free will to inevitability. In conclusion, he states that we are unconsciously dependent on laws and reason that will ultimately limit our free will in all of our actions.

            In response to Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Greer finds compelling similarities to the protests that occurred in Cairo in 2011. She explains how the protests in Cairo do not have a defined leader, and yet people have created the idea of the media as the initiator of the protests. She argues how this is similar to Tolstoy, as he states that historians are constantly idealizing and creating a leader for movements of nations. But instead, it is the accumulation of individual human wills that lead to events, just as it is this accumulation of wills that led to the protests in Cairo.

However, she argues that the alternative to this ‘great man’ approach of historians offered by Tolstoy is “rather convoluted” (Greer, Tolstoy and Tahir), and does not entirely correspond to the situation in Egypt.  His alternative suggestion is that we are free to the extent that we must believe ourselves to be free and independent, in order to properly fulfill general goals with universal purposes. And that these “general purposes remain unintelligible to us” (Greer, Tolstoy and Tahir). She argues that this leads to paradoxes and contradictions in the book that Tolstoy does not clarify.

Tolstoy has presented a sound argument, and provides a solution to an extremely complex question of what force drives the movement of nations. He is also very thorough in examining the idea of inevitability and free will. However, agreeing with Greer, his argument does appear convoluted; the idea that every action of every human being is in fact predetermined by phenomena that is inaccessible to the understandings of humans, is difficult to follow. This idea of laws of inevitability that limit our free will, lends itself to the concept of a religious “destiny”; even if we see ourselves as free and act upon our own free will, our actions are always following a greater path – one that we cannot conceive of consciously.  I think this allows the readers to interpret this greater path as one that is constructed by God. This can lead to contradictions in the book, given that earlier in the Epilogue, Tolstoy is trying to offer an explanation to events occurring in history that does not rely on Gods as the ultimate reason for these events. I therefore agree with Greer, that there are contradictions throughout his text.