Collin Poirot - Entry No. 1 (Tolstoy/Greer)

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.