Second Epilogue, key concept note 13

Second Epilogue, key concept note 13

Great men don’t determine history, but any time we work closely with others our free will’s influence is diminished, although we often don’t realize this has happened.

Summary:

In an essay entitled “A Few Words Apropos of the Book War and Peace ,” published in the magazine Russian Archive in 1868, (which is included as an Appendix in the Vintage Classics translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky), Tolstoy noted that working jointly with others necessarily entails a diminution of the impact of free will on our actions. This ties in closely with Tolstoy’s definition of power, as essentially what happens whenever someone gets to tell someone else what to do. When we work alone, he says, our free will has a bigger influence than when we work with others. People don’t even realize this is happening. You may be working closely with a group and not even know the impact of your free will is reduced. Still, though, the events of history are not determined by “great men”, apparently because history is so much bigger than what one person could manage.

Quote from the P&V translation:

“in describing the historical events of 1805,1807, and especially of 1812, in which this law of predetermination stands out most prominently, I could not ascribe importance to the activity of those people who fancied they were governing events, but who introduced less free human activity into them than all the other participants in the events. The activity of those people was interesting to me only as an illustration of that law of predetermination which, in my conviction, governs history, and of that psychological law which makes a person who commits the most unfree act adjust in his imagination a whole series of retrospective conjectures aimed at proving his freedom to himself.”

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