Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

he suddenly ran away from Moscow, and then the Emperor

Alexander, aided by the advice of Stein and others, united Europe

to raise an army against the disturber of her pe;1ce. All Napoleon's

allies suddenly became his enemies; and this army marched against

Napoleon, who had gathered new forces. The allies conquered

Napoleon, entered Paris, forced Napoleon to renounce the throne,

and sent him to the island of Elba, without, however, depriving him

of the title of Emperor, and showing him all respect, in spite of the

fact that five years before and a year after, everyone considered him

a brigand and beyond the law. Thereupon Louis XVIII, who

until then had been an object of mere ridicule to both Frenchmen

and the allies, began to reign. As for Napoleon, after shedding tears

before the Old Guard, he gave up his throne, and went into exile.

Then astute statesmen and diplomats, in particular Talleyrand, who

had managed to sit down before anyone else in the famous armchair1 and thereby to extend the frontiers of France, talked in Vienna, and by means of such talk made peoples happy or unhappy.

Suddenly the diplomats and monarchs almost came to blows. They

were almost ready to order their troops once again to kill each other;

but at this moment Napoleon arrived in France with a battalion,

and the French, who hated him, all immediately submitted to him.

But this annoyed the allied monarchs very much and they again

went to war with the French. And the genius Napoleon was

defeated and taken to the island of St Helena, having suddenly been

discovered to be an outlaw. Whereupon the exile, parted from his

dear ones and his beloved France, died a slow death on a rock, and

bequeathed his great deeds to posterity. As for Europe, a reaction

occurred there, and all the princes began to treat their peoples badly

once again.

Tolstoy continues:

1 Empire chain of a certain shape are to this day called 'Talleyrand armchain' in Russia.

T H E H E D G E H O G A N D T H E FOX

. . . the new history is like a deaf man replying to questions which

nobody puts to him . . . the primary question . . . is, what power is

it that moves the destinies of peoples? . . . History seems to presuppose that this power can be taken for granted, and is familiar to everyone, but, in spite of every wish to admit that this power is

familiar to us, anyone who has read a great many historical works

cannot help doubting whether this power, which different historians

understand in different ways, is in fact so completely familiar to

everyone.

He goes on to say that political historians who write in this way

explain nothing; they merely attribute events to the 'power' which

important individuals are said to exercise on others, but do not tell us

what the term 'power' means: and yet this is the heart of the problem.

The problem of historical movement is directly connected with the

'power' exercised by some men over others: but what is 'power'?

How does one acquire it? Can it be transferred by one man to another?

Surely it is not merely physical strength that is meant? Nor moral

strength? Did Napoleon possess either of these?

General, as opposed to national, historians seem to Tolstoy merely to

extend this category without elucidating it: instead of one country or

nation, many are introduced, but the spectacle of the interplay of

mysterious 'forces' makes it no clearer why some men or nations

obey others, why wars are made, victories won, why innocent men

who believe that murder is wicked kill one another with enthusiasm

and pride, and are glorified for so doing; why great movements of

human masses occur, sometimes from east to west, sometimes the

other way. Tolstoy is particularly irritated by references to the

dominant influence of great men or of ideas. Great men, we are told,

are typical of the movements of their age: hence study of their

characters 'explains' such movements. Do the characters of Diderot

or Beaumarchais 'explain' the advance of the west upon the east? Do

the letters of Ivan the Terrible to Prince Kurbsky 'explain' Russian

expansion westward? But historians of culture do no better, for they

merely add as an extra factor something called the 'force' of ideas or

of books, although we still have no notion of what is meant by words

like 'force'. But why should Napoleon, or Mme de Stael or Baron

Stein or Tsar Alexander, or all of these, plus the Contrat social,

'cause' Frenchmen to behead or to drown each other? Why is this

called an 'explanation'? As for the importance which historians of

culture attach to ideas, doubtless all men are liable to exaggerate the

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importance o f their own wares: ideas are the commodity i n which

intellectuals deal - to a cobbler there's nothing like leather-the professors merely tend to magnify their personal activities into the central

'force' that rules the world. Tolstoy adds that an even deeper darkness

is cast upon this subject by political theorists, moralists, metaphysicians.

The celebrated notion of the social contract, for example, which

some liberals peddle, speaks of the 'vesting' of the wills, i.e. the power,

of many men in one individual or group of individuals; but what kind

of act is this 'vesting'? It may have a legal or ethical significance, it may

be relevant to what should be considered as permitted or forbidden, to

the world of rights and duties, or of the good and the bad, but as a

factual explanation of how a sovereign accumulates enough 'power'as if it were a commodity-which enables him to effect this or that result, it means nothing. It declares that the conferring of power

makes powerful; but this tautology is too unilluminating. What is

'power' and what is 'conferring'? And who confers it and how is

such conferring done?1 The process seems very different from whatever it is that is discussed by the physical sciences. Conferring is an act, but an unintelligible one; conferring power, acquiring it, using it,

is not at all like eating or drinking or thinking or walking. We remain

in the dark: obscurum per obscurius.

After demolishing the jurists and moralists and political philosophers-among them his beloved Rousseau-Tolstoy applies himself to demolishing the liberal theory of history according to which

everything may turn upon what may seem an insignificant accident.

Hence the pages in which he obstinately tries to prove that Napoleon

knew as little of what actually went on during the battle of Borodino

as the lowliest of his soldiers; and that therefore his cold on the eve

of it, of which so much was made by the historians, could have made

no appreciable difference. With great force he argues that only those

orders or decisions issued by the commanders now seem particularly

crucial (and are concentrated upon by historians), which happened

to coincide with what later actually occurred; whereas a great many

1 OneofTolstoy's Russian critics, M. M. Rubinshtein, referred to on p. 27,

note z, says that every science employs some unanalysed concepts, to explain

which is the business of other sciences; and that 'power' happens to be the

unexplained central concept of history. But Tolstoy's point is that no other

science can 'explain' it, since it is, as used by historians, a meaningless term,

not a concept but nothing at all- t:7ox 11inili.

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other exactly similar, perfectly good orders and decisions, which

seemed no less crucial and vital to those who were issuing them at

the time, are forgotten because, having been foiled by unfavourable

turns of events, they were not, because they could not be, carried out,

and for this reason now seem historically unimportant. After disposing

of the heroic theory of history, Tolstoy turns with even greater

savagery upon scientific sociology, which claims to have discovered

laws of history, but cannot possibly have found any, because the

number of causes upon which events turn is too great for human

knowledge or calculation. We know too few facts, and we select them

at random and in accordance with our subjective inclinations. No

doubt if we were omniscient we might be able, like Laplace's ideal

observer, to plot the course of every drop of which the stream of

history consists, but we are, of course, pathetically ignorant, and the

areas of our knowledge are incredibly small compared to what is

uncharted and (Tolstoy vehemently insists on this) unchartable.

Freedom of the will is an illusion which cannot be shaken off, but,

as great philosophers have said, it is an illusion nevertheless, and it

derives solely from ignorance of true causes. The more we know

about the circumstances of an act, the farther away from us the act

is in time, the more difficult it is to think away its consequences; the

more solidly embedded a fact is in the actual world in which we

live, the less we can imagine how things might have turned out if

something different had happened. For by now it seems inevitable:

to think otherwise would upset too much of our world order. The

more closely we relate an act to its context, the less free the actor

seems to be, the less responsible for his act, and the less disposed we

are to hold him accountable or blameworthy. The fact that we shall

never identify all the causes, relate all human acts to the circumstances which condition them, does not imply that they are free, only that we shall never know how they are necessitated.

Tolstoy's central thesis-in some respects not unlike the theory of

the inevitable 'self-deception' of the bourgeoisie held by his contemporary Karl Marx, save that what Marx reserves for a class, Tolstoy sees in almost all mankind-is that there is a natural law

whereby the lives of human beings no less than that of nature are

determined; but that men, unable to face this inexorable process, seek

to represent it as a succession of free choices, to fix responsibility for

what occurs upon persons endowed by them with heroic virtues or

heroic vices, and called by them 'great men'. What are great men�

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They are ordinary human beings who are ignorant and vain enough

to accept responsibility for the life of society, individuals who would

rather take the blame for all the cruelties, injustices, disasters justified

in their name, than recognise their own insignificance and impotence

in the cosmic .Row which pursues its course irrespective of their wills

and ideals. This is the central point of those passages (in which

Tolstoy excelled) in which the actual course of events is described,

side by side with the absurd, egocentric explanations which persons

blown up with the sense of their own importance necessarily .give

to them; as well as of the wonderful descriptions of moments of

illumination in which the truth about the human condition dawns