To study the laws of history we must study the common, infinitesimally small elements by which the masses of society are moved.
To study the laws of history we must study the common, infinitesimally small elements by which the masses of society are moved.
Book 11, Chapter 1
To study the laws of history we must study the common, infinitesimally small elements by which the masses of society are moved.
Summary:
In this chapter Tolstoy speculates about how to discover the laws of history. Tolstoy believes the best way to discover these laws is to study what goes on at the lowest possible level, i.e. processes which go on at the level of the individual member in society. He says that it’s not possible to understand the laws of history by understanding great men, because history is not determined by a few great men but rather by all the innumerable wills of everyone involved. Similarly, Tolstoy says, it’s not possible to understand the laws of history by studying a series of discrete events, because in fact discrete events don’t exist. (In nature, all events are connected to other events.) So, Tolstoy concludes, the best way to understand the laws of history would be to look at the processes going on at the personal level for the individual members of a society.
quote from the chapter:
To understand the laws of this continuous movement is the aim of history. But to arrive at these laws, resulting from the sum of all those human wills, man’s mind postulates arbitrary and disconnected units. The first method of history is to take an arbitrarily selected series of continuous events and examine it apart from others, though there is and can be no beginning to any event, for one event always flows uninterruptedly from another.
The second method is to consider the actions of some one man-a king or a commander-as equivalent to the sum of many individual wills; whereas the sum of individual wills is never expressed by the activity of a single historic personage.
Historical science in its endeavor to draw nearer to truth continually takes smaller and smaller units for examination. But however small the units it takes, we feel that to take any unit disconnected from others, or to assume a beginning of any phenomenon, or to say that the will of many men is expressed by the actions of any one historic personage, is in itself false.
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