In his Epilogue to War
and Peace, Leo Tolstoy critically engages the predominant method of reading
historical events. Tolstoy begins by calling into question the role of “chance”
as a factor in shaping history. For Tolstoy, there can be no such thing as chance
because everything that has ever happened has been bound and determined by its
spatial and temporal relationship with the things around it. In this sense,
chance and “luck” cannot possibly exist, because they imply that some aspect of
a situation was not predetermined to unfold in a specific manner. This
indeterminacy is impermissible for Tolstoy; everything that has ever happened
in history happened in the only way that it possibly could have, due to the
fact that it was predetermined by an infinite and unknowable chain of causal
determinism.
What is most interesting here is that Tolstoy is not
completely eliminating human agency. In the Tolstoyan model, humans still have
will power, and it is precisely this inalienable human will that is the force behind
historical events. I say inalienable here as a way of highlighting the fact
that Tolstoy’s notion of power is not something that can be transferred from
one individual to another. In my view, this is what distinguishes Tolstoy from
Hobbes or other social contract theorists; the power of an army or the power of
a state is not held in the individual guiding or directing that collective
unit, but is retained in each individual member of the collective body. This is
what Erin Greer is referring to when she mentions Tolstoy’s boat analogy. The
bark is always a dynamic, fluctuating, frenzied unit – the general or emperor
standing on top of the bark doesn’t exert control over it precisely because it
is never a concretized or unitary power—it is never controllable. A nation is not a unitary agent of action directed by
a single individual, but always remains an irreducible ‘swarm’ of individual
human beings all willing disparately.
At this point, Tolstoy has criticized the big man theory of
history, and has offered his own critical historiography in its place. From
there Tolstoy turns to the next logical question: if history is the aggregation
of individual human experiences, wills, and actions—all of which are
spatio-temporally determined by infinite and unknowable chains of causality—is
there a specific spirit or purpose driving or guiding this historical
progression? In other words, if the model of history that says “historical
events are directly caused by the wills of specific people” is overly
reductive, is it more accurate to say that “historical events are caused by a
universal unconscious drive towards the maximization of a specific thing
(enlightenment, freedom, equality, etc…)?” I’m still not certain whether
Tolstoy believes in an ultimate cause (telos), or whether he believes that
history is unfolding according to an infinite assemblage of proximate causes
that do not converge around any specific purpose or end-state. Either way, what
is clear from the text is Tolstoy’s argument that the causal relationships that
determine the unfolding of history are infinitely complex, and are unknowable
to humans. For this reason, any generalized attempt to explain or identify “the
force that moves people,” whether it be the power of a charismatic leader or
the force of a compelling idea, is doomed to failure.
If Tolstoy is correct in his approach to history—and I
believe he might be—then the only way to really get a sense of why something happened is to look at the
specific factors that determined the wills of the individual humans involved.
In my opinion, the second half of Greer’s essay is a Tolstoyan
historiographical approach to the Tahrir demonstrations. She focuses on the
specific web of relationships and factors that determined specific people to
act in the way that they did. She resists the reductivist approach of
attributing Tahrir to social media, but she also refrains from explaining the
events as merely the latest manifestation of human society’s unconscious drive
towards some ultimate goal. In this way, Greer maintains both of the essential
elements of Tolstoy’s approach to history: she comments on the inevitability of
Tahrir, and of the way it was predetermined by the events that went before,
while simultaneously emphasizing the event’s fragmentary essence—everyone
involved in the Tahrir demonstration was driven there by different
factors.
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