Manar Daoud Barghouti - Entry No. 1 (Tolstoy/Greer)

In Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Epilogue, he enters a discussion about a subject Tolstoy was known to be rather fond of, that is history. He argues against certain sides regarding the formation of human history, recalling of events and especially specific influential individuals, through the eyes of historians. This is mainly done since they are the ones who form the opinions concerning what is good or bad in accordance to their “limited knowledge” as he states.
For instance, the “Great men” theory, where Tolstoy takes the examples of Napoleon and Alexander I, attempting to dismiss the historian’s thought of the power of one man to be the motive for a revolution in a whole, the “genius” behind the “chance” – rather than focusing on the sum of the all the nation’s efforts in building revolutions – thus creating historical events such as that of the French revolution or the protest over throwing president Hussni Mubarak in Egypt’s Tahrir square.
This is as noticed in Greer’s article “Tolstoy and Tahrir”, where she adopts Tolstoy’s thoughts on the “great man” theory. She does this to dismiss the Western attempts of giving the Egyptian protests a leader to stand behind the glory of their cumulative action such as social media as Facebook and Twitter - which would make it simpler to explain the events taking place. According to Tolstoy these are the result of the obsession of constantly needing to analysis complex proceedings and simplify them which are the blame of the historians. He believed we must understand that something are out of capacity to understand or predict, and thus he also believed that history is composed in regard to the fact that there are no absolute laws nor are there absolute free will of individuals. However, the combination of both is what helped create (which as Greer mentioned in Tolstoy and Tahrir, talking about the collective wills of all protest) the “force” behind that change.
I agree with Tolstoy’s opinion; however I remain hesitant to how much he dismissed the influence of authority represented through “leaders” without giving much weight to the possibility of an individual to act as the motivating force for action and not necessarily an undemocratic style, influencing the direction of the will of individuals deeply.