Historians often err by treating chance or genius as causal forces in nature. Historical events, have specific real-world causes, but frequently the historian can’t possibly know them all. Still, it’s wrong to these tiny real-world causes as merely chance or genius.
First Epilogue Chapter 2
Tolstoy explains another piece of his philosophy of history – that historians often err by treating chance or genius as causal forces in nature. Historical events, he says, must have specific real-world causes, although frequently these causes are many and the historian can’t possibly know them all. Nonetheless, it’s incorrect to write off millions of tiny real-world causes as merely chance or genius.
Summary:
Frequently historians attribute historical events to something called the great man theory of history. They say, for example, that the War of 1812 was caused by Napoleon, and that he was able to due this because of personal greatness. However, sometimes things happen historians can’t possibly explain using their great man theory. When this happens, Tolstoy says, historians too often fall back on vague, conceptual causal forces like chance or genius. So, for example, a historian might say that the Russian invasion at first succeeded because Napoleon was a great man, and then failed because his luck changed. Tolstoy says this is wrong. He says there is no such thing as a free-floating conceptual force in nature like chance shaping history. Everything that happens in the real world has real world causes – although there may be millions of these causes, far more than a historian can know about. A good way to think about this might be the example of boarding a bus. If I board a bus, the easiest way for me to explain why this group of people is together at that time is to say they are there by chance, as if this particular group of people is together on this particular bus at this particular time just due to chance. Obviously, though, that’s not how it works! In reality, each person who is on the bus that day is there because of some actual causal chain of events which led that person to board that bus at that time. (For example, maybe I was on that bus that day because I forgot to check the radiator fluid on my car two weeks ago and it overheated and I am waiting for it to get repaired and my friend was going to give me a ride to work but her kid got sick and she couldn’t take me and then I overslept, and etc., etc. etc.) But there is always going to be some chain of specific real world causal events that caused each person to be on that bus that day. To call it chance, is merely a convenient shorthand, good enough for most everyday purposes but not good enough for the serious historian. She needs to understand why things happened as they did, and to say it was mere chance just isnt good enough. It obscures true causes and thus limits the historian’s ability to understand and analyze the data, and thus to really understand history.
quote from the chapter:
Only by renouncing our claim to discern a purpose immediately intelligible to us, and admitting the ultimate purpose to be beyond our ken, may we discern the sequence of experiences in the lives of historic characters and perceive the cause of the effect they produce (incommensurable with ordinary human capabilities), and then the words chance and genius become superfluous.
We need only confess that we do not know the purpose of the European convulsions and that we know only the facts—that is, the murders, first in France, then in Italy, in Africa, in Prussia, in Austria, in Spain, and in Russia—and that the movements from the west to the east and from the east to the west form the essence and purpose of these events, and not only shall we have no need to see exceptional ability and genius in Napoleon and Alexander, but we shall be unable to consider them to be anything but like other men, and we shall not be obliged to have recourse to chance for an explanation of those small events which made these people what they were, but it will be clear that all those small events were inevitable.
Click here to read full text of this chapter.
Please help improve this shared document by posting your suggested corrections, clarifications, and changes below. Thank you!