Chương Chương 357 · 第357章

Having abandoned the conception of the ancients as to the divine

subjection of the will of a nation to some chosen man and the subjection

of that man’s will to the Deity, history cannot without contradictions

take a single step till it has chosen one of two things: either a return

to the former belief in the direct intervention of the Deity in human

affairs or a definite explanation of the meaning of the force producing

historical events and termed “power.”

A return to the first is impossible, the belief has been destroyed; and

so it is essential to explain what is meant by power.

Napoleon ordered an army to be raised and go to war. We are so

accustomed to that idea and have become so used to it that the question:

why did six hundred thousand men go to fight when Napoleon uttered

certain words, seems to us senseless. He had the power and so what he

ordered was done.

This reply is quite satisfactory if we believe that the power was given

him by God. But as soon as we do not admit that, it becomes essential to

determine what is this power of one man over others.

It cannot be the direct physical power of a strong man over a weak one—a

domination based on the application or threat of physical force, like

the power of Hercules; nor can it be based on the effect of moral force,

as in their simplicity some historians think who say that the leading

figures in history are heroes, that is, men gifted with a special

strength of soul and mind called genius. This power cannot be based on

the predominance of moral strength, for, not to mention heroes such as

Napoleon about whose moral qualities opinions differ widely, history

shows us that neither a Louis XI nor a Metternich, who ruled over

millions of people, had any particular moral qualities, but on the

contrary were generally morally weaker than any of the millions they

ruled over.

If the source of power lies neither in the physical nor in the moral

qualities of him who possesses it, it must evidently be looked for

elsewhere—in the relation to the people of the man who wields the power.

And that is how power is understood by the science of jurisprudence,

that exchange bank of history which offers to exchange history’s

understanding of power for true gold.

Power is the collective will of the people transferred, by expressed or

tacit consent, to their chosen rulers.

In the domain of jurisprudence, which consists of discussions of how a

state and power might be arranged were it possible for all that to

be arranged, it is all very clear; but when applied to history that

definition of power needs explanation.

The science of jurisprudence regards the state and power as the ancients

regarded fire—namely, as something existing absolutely. But for history,

the state and power are merely phenomena, just as for modern physics

fire is not an element but a phenomenon.

From this fundamental difference between the view held by history and

that held by jurisprudence, it follows that jurisprudence can tell

minutely how in its opinion power should be constituted and what

power—existing immutably outside time—is, but to history’s questions

about the meaning of the mutations of power in time it can answer

nothing.

If power be the collective will of the people transferred to their

ruler, was Pugachëv a representative of the will of the people? If not,

then why was Napoleon I? Why was Napoleon III a criminal when he was

taken prisoner at Boulogne, and why, later on, were those criminals whom

he arrested?

Do palace revolutions—in which sometimes only two or three people take

part—transfer the will of the people to a new ruler? In international

relations, is the will of the people also transferred to their

conqueror? Was the will of the Confederation of the Rhine transferred

to Napoleon in 1806? Was the will of the Russian people transferred

to Napoleon in 1809, when our army in alliance with the French went to

fight the Austrians?

To these questions three answers are possible:

Either to assume (1) that the will of the people is always

unconditionally transferred to the ruler or rulers they have chosen, and

that therefore every emergence of a new power, every struggle

against the power once appointed, should be absolutely regarded as an

infringement of the real power; or (2) that the will of the people

is transferred to the rulers conditionally, under definite and known

conditions, and to show that all limitations, conflicts, and even

destructions of power result from a nonobservance by the rulers of the

conditions under which their power was entrusted to them; or (3) that

the will of the people is delegated to the rulers conditionally, but

that the conditions are unknown and indefinite, and that the appearance

of several authorities, their struggles and their falls, result solely

from the greater or lesser fulfillment by the rulers of these unknown

conditions on which the will of the people is transferred from some

people to others.

And these are the three ways in which the historians do explain the

relation of the people to their rulers.

Some historians—those biographical and specialist historians already

referred to—in their simplicity failing to understand the question of

the meaning of power, seem to consider that the collective will of

the people is unconditionally transferred to historical persons, and

therefore when describing some single state they assume that particular

power to be the one absolute and real power, and that any other force

opposing this is not a power but a violation of power—mere violence.

Their theory, suitable for primitive and peaceful periods of history,

has the inconvenience—in application to complex and stormy periods in

the life of nations during which various powers arise simultaneously and

struggle with one another—that a Legitimist historian will prove

that the National Convention, the Directory, and Bonaparte were mere

infringers of the true power, while a Republican and a Bonapartist will

prove: the one that the Convention and the other that the Empire was the

real power, and that all the others were violations of power.

Evidently the explanations furnished by these historians being mutually

contradictory can only satisfy young children.

Recognizing the falsity of this view of history, another set of

historians say that power rests on a conditional delegation of the will

of the people to their rulers, and that historical leaders have power

only conditionally on carrying out the program that the will of the

people has by tacit agreement prescribed to them. But what this program

consists in these historians do not say, or if they do they continually

contradict one another.

Each historian, according to his view of what constitutes a nation’s

progress, looks for these conditions in the greatness, wealth, freedom,

or enlightenment of citizens of France or some other country. But not

to mention the historians’ contradictions as to the nature of this

program—or even admitting that some one general program of these

conditions exists—the facts of history almost always contradict that

theory. If the conditions under which power is entrusted consist in the

wealth, freedom, and enlightenment of the people, how is it that Louis

XIV and Iván the Terrible end their reigns tranquilly, while Louis XVI

and Charles I are executed by their people? To this question historians

reply that Louis XIV’s activity, contrary to the program, reacted on

Louis XVI. But why did it not react on Louis XIV or on Louis XV—why

should it react just on Louis XVI? And what is the time limit for such

reactions? To these questions there are and can be no answers. Equally

little does this view explain why for several centuries the collective

will is not withdrawn from certain rulers and their heirs, and

then suddenly during a period of fifty years is transferred to the

Convention, to the Directory, to Napoleon, to Alexander, to Louis XVIII,

to Napoleon again, to Charles X, to Louis Philippe, to a Republican

government, and to Napoleon III. When explaining these rapid transfers

of the people’s will from one individual to another, especially in view

of international relations, conquests, and alliances, the historians are

obliged to admit that some of these transfers are not normal delegations

of the people’s will but are accidents dependent on cunning, on

mistakes, on craft, or on the weakness of a diplomatist, a ruler, or a

party leader. So that the greater part of the events of history—civil

wars, revolutions, and conquests—are presented by these historians

not as the results of free transferences of the people’s will, but as

results of the ill-directed will of one or more individuals, that is,

once again, as usurpations of power. And so these historians also see

and admit historical events which are exceptions to the theory.

These historians resemble a botanist who, having noticed that some

plants grow from seeds producing two cotyledons, should insist that all

that grows does so by sprouting into two leaves, and that the palm, the

mushroom, and even the oak, which blossom into full growth and no longer

resemble two leaves, are deviations from the theory.

Historians of the third class assume that the will of the people

is transferred to historic personages conditionally, but that the

conditions are unknown to us. They say that historical personages have

power only because they fulfill the will of the people which has been

delegated to them.

But in that case, if the force that moves nations lies not in the

historic leaders but in the nations themselves, what significance have

those leaders?

The leaders, these historians tell us, express the will of the people:

the activity of the leaders represents the activity of the people.

But in that case the question arises whether all the activity of the

leaders serves as an expression of the people’s will or only some part

of it. If the whole activity of the leaders serves as the expression of

the people’s will, as some historians suppose, then all the details

of the court scandals contained in the biographies of a Napoleon or

a Catherine serve to express the life of the nation, which is evident

nonsense; but if it is only some particular side of the activity of an

historical leader which serves to express the people’s life, as other

so-called “philosophical” historians believe, then to determine which

side of the activity of a leader expresses the nation’s life, we have

first of all to know in what the nation’s life consists.

Met by this difficulty historians of that class devise some most

obscure, impalpable, and general abstraction which can cover all

conceivable occurrences, and declare this abstraction to be the aim of

humanity’s movement. The most usual generalizations adopted by almost

all the historians are: freedom, equality, enlightenment, progress,

civilization, and culture. Postulating some generalization as the goal

of the movement of humanity, the historians study the men of whom the

greatest number of monuments have remained: kings, ministers, generals,

authors, reformers, popes, and journalists, to the extent to which in

their opinion these persons have promoted or hindered that abstraction.

But as it is in no way proved that the aim of humanity does consist in

freedom, equality, enlightenment, or civilization, and as the connection

of the people with the rulers and enlighteners of humanity is only based

on the arbitrary assumption that the collective will of the people is

always transferred to the men whom we have noticed, it happens that the

activity of the millions who migrate, burn houses, abandon agriculture,

and destroy one another never is expressed in the account of the

activity of some dozen people who did not burn houses, practice

agriculture, or slay their fellow creatures.

History proves this at every turn. Is the ferment of the peoples of

the west at the end of the eighteenth century and their drive eastward

explained by the activity of Louis XIV, XV, and XVI, their mistresses

and ministers, and by the lives of Napoleon, Rousseau, Diderot,

Beaumarchais, and others?

Is the movement of the Russian people eastward to Kazán and Siberia

expressed by details of the morbid character of Iván the Terrible and by

his correspondence with Kúrbski?

Is the movement of the peoples at the time of the Crusades explained by

the life and activity of the Godfreys and the Louis-es and their ladies?

For us that movement of the peoples from west to east, without

leaders, with a crowd of vagrants, and with Peter the Hermit, remains

incomprehensible. And yet more incomprehensible is the cessation of that

movement when a rational and sacred aim for the Crusade—the deliverance

of Jerusalem—had been clearly defined by historic leaders. Popes, kings,

and knights incited the peoples to free the Holy Land; but the people

did not go, for the unknown cause which had previously impelled them to

go no longer existed. The history of the Godfreys and the Minnesingers

can evidently not cover the life of the peoples. And the history of the

Godfreys and the Minnesingers has remained the history of Godfreys

and Minnesingers, but the history of the life of the peoples and their

impulses has remained unknown.

Still less does the history of authors and reformers explain to us the

life of the peoples.

The history of culture explains to us the impulses and conditions of

life and thought of a writer or a reformer. We learn that Luther had

a hot temper and said such and such things; we learn that Rousseau was

suspicious and wrote such and such books; but we do not learn why after

the Reformation the peoples massacred one another, nor why during the

French Revolution they guillotined one another.

If we unite both these kinds of history, as is done by the newest

historians, we shall have the history of monarchs and writers, but not

the history of the life of the peoples.