Walter Solon - Entry n. 1 (Tolstoy/Tahrir)

Among the greatest legacies we inherited from the post-enlightenment thought is its debate around the philosophy of history. Social Science’s century long debate in the 20^th century around agency and structure is indebted to a debate in the previous century. Then, the dualism was expressed as freewill versus determinism and the very existence of ultimate causes was subject of debate. Tolstoy’s passages in War and Peace argue against several types of historians, that is, those “specialists” who favored a national or personal account of causality for events, focused on the deeds of the individual leaders of powerful nations, those described as universal historians for their acknowledging of a multitude of connected people more or less involved in issues of power, and a third type, of historians of culture, who give historical importance to people not directly implicated in such issues, such as writers or women.

All of these approaches are limited, and Tolstoy advocates a total vision of history where no causality may be attributed to singular forces, only to a general sum of the forces of all individuals. Teleological attempts to find a destination for human progress are vain, and Tolstoy’s rationalism seems to me analogous to an agnostic cosmological view, according to which, the immense dimension of phenomena such as the creation of the world makes it impossible for humans to grasp them.

The terms of that debate seem actual even today, as seen in the article “Tolstoy and Tahrir”, where a Literature student proposes to read the political turmoil in Egypt in the light of Tolstoy’s telescopically novelistic narrative. At times endorsing critics who have disclaimed Tolstoy’s essayistic writings, but sometimes trying to see these as part of a complex system of dualisms and paradoxes that constitute not only Tolstoy’s novel, but of the novel as a general literary form, drawing on Bakhtin’s concept of poliphony and Lukacs’s depiction of the novel as an arena between form and content.

Greer’s attempt, in the end of his article, to perform a Tolstoyan fictitious reading of Tahrir through individual character’s trajectories is fruitful, and indicates that the importance given today to individualist, perspectivist accounts of historical events are not at all post-modern, but, as it has been states, are firmly rooted in the modern tradition since the 19^th century. It is then very clear why Tolstoy may be the foundational text to a course that aims towards a decentralized analysis of military warfare and peacemaking.