Georgina Kilborn - Entry no.1 (Tolstoy/Greer)

Tolstoy’s narrative, War and Peace (1869) offers insight into the pluralistic components contributing to colossal events throughout history. Both complementing and criticizing the work of Tolstoy, is Greer’s, Tolstoy and Tahrir (2013). Both of these writings engage in larger questions of history and theorize human experience, within differing contexts. While Greer’s analysis is filled with pertinent examples, Tolstoy’s attempt to further his evaluation with the addition of narrative examples is often disruptive and detracts from his contentions.

The subject of history, as pronounced by Tolstoy, is the analysis of the “manifestation of the force of freewill in human beings” in relation to time, space and in dependence on cause (1305). And, it is history that employs the laws of reason to define freewill, proclaims Tolstoy. The laws of inevitability, according to Tolstoy, prescribe all that is known to us about human life in history and conversely, ‘freewill’ denotes the unknown aspects in history. Yet, Greer challenges the idea of law’s dictating our knowledge of mankind in history, “no law discernible to human minds can explain…the freedom of the ‘inner force’”, such an idea, he claims is an “evasion of formal coherence”. It is precisely these antagonistic dualisms such as inevitability and freewill, the State and Power, morality and physical strength, freedom and necessity and consciousness and reason, which Tolstoy employs to analyze our conception of history. He explores these inharmonious elements in order to explain the “great movements of people’ throughout history and dispute “historian’s” idealization of the role of powerful men.

While his exploration of such concepts offer insight into alternative forces, driving nations, his form can certainly be criticized for it’s digressive and repetitive examples that act to subvert the contention being presented. Further, his assertion that, “All the contradictions and obscurities in history ...are due solely to the lack of solution on …the presence of the problem of the man’s freewill” [1293] is a bold and contentious statement. He himself describes numerous other contributing factors, such as our position in time and one’s intellect as creating grounds for contradiction.

For Greer, the words of Tolstoy can be likened to the revolt that took place in Cairo in 2011. He describes the reports on the events in Cairo as dominated by the actions of ‘great men’, exactly what both he and Tolstoy agree as having the least agency in historical phenomena. Greer draws on the disjointed writings of Tolstoy, who does not refer to periods of history in a chronological order and thus, Greer jumps back and forth in his examination on the causes of the revolt in Cairo’s Tahrir square. Greer focuses on different characters and how they all come to play a role in history, in the protests of Tahrir Square. They are “moved along with the force that exceeds them”, contends Greer, resembling the assertions of Tolstoy. Accordingly, Greer concludes by imparting Tolstoy’s contentions in the context of the recent events in Eygpt. Like all historical happenings, in order to ascertain an all-encompassing outlook on the uprising, an in depth analysis of all actors involved and the “sum of [their] individual human will” are requisite. Thus, while Greer is critical of some elements of Tolstoy’s, War and Peace, so too does he recognize that historical phenomena do not develop at the command of ‘great men’, but are rather a consequence of pluralistic factors.