his beloved France, and leaving all his fine deeds for the benefit of posterity. Meanwhile back on the European mainland reaction set in, and all the sovereigns turned again to playing havoc with their own people.'
You shouldn't run away with the idea that this is just a joke, a caricature of historical description. Quite the reverse, it is the mildest possible depiction of the kind of contradictory and irrelevant answers provided by history as a whole, from collected memoirs and histories of nation states to generalized accounts of history, and also that modern genre known as contemporary cultural history.
What is so weird and ridiculous about these answers is that modern history is like a deaf man answering questions no one has asked.
If the aim of history is to describe the movement of humanity and nations, the first question that needs an answer for anything else to become intelligible is this: what kind of force is it that moves nations? Modern history will respond by patiently relating that Napoleon was a great genius, that Louis XIV was too arrogant, or maybe that certain writers wrote certain books.
All of this may well be true, and humanity stands ready to acknowledge it, except that humanity is actually asking a different question. It would all be very fascinating if we still recognized a divine power, self-sustaining and immutable, guiding nations through the agency of your Napoleons, Louis and writers, but we no longer acknowledge any such power, and so, before we can start talking about Napoleons, Louis and great writers, we have to demonstrate some kind of connection between those persons and the movements of nations. If some other power is substituted for divine will, we have to explain what it consists of, since this power is the very focus of all historical interest.
History seems to assume that such power is universally acknowledged and can be taken for granted. But any reader, however willing to accept this power as universally acknowledged, once he has ploughed through the many historical works available, is bound to have doubts and wonder whether this power, which is interpreted in so many different ways by the historians themselves, really does enjoy universal acknowledgement.
CHAPTER 2
What kind of force is it that moves nations?
Historians specializing in biography and historians dealing with single nations understand this force as power vested in heroes and sovereigns. The way they put it, all events are due exclusively to the will of Napoleon, or Alexander, or the particular personality the individual historian happens to be writing about. The answers produced by this type of historian to any question concerning the force that moves events are perfectly adequate, but only so long as there is only one historian for any one event. The moment historians of different nationalities and attitudes begin to describe the same event, the answers produced lose all kind of sense, because the same force is interpreted by them not just differently, but often in exactly the opposite way. One historian claims that an event was caused by the power of Napoleon, another says no, it was caused by the power of Alexander, a third attributes it to the power of some third person. And in any case, this type of historian contradicts all the others even in the basic explanation of the very force on which the particular person's influence is founded. Thiers,2 a Bonapartist, says that Napoleon's power rested on virtue and genius; Lanfrey,3 a Republican, says it rested on duplicity and deception of the people. So it is that this type of historian, so keen to undermine everybody else's position, manages to undermine the very concept of a force behind events, and runs away from all the essential questions of history.
General historians, dealing as they do with all nations, appear to acknowledge that specialist historians are wrong in what they say about the forces behind events. They do not recognize any such force as a power vested in heroes and sovereigns; they regard it as the result of many different forces working in conjunction. In describing a war or the subjugation of a people, the writer of general history looks for causes not in the power of any single person, but in some kind of interaction between the many persons involved.
According to this view it would seem that, since the power that resides in historical figures is the product of many different forces, it can hardly be regarded as sufficient in itself to making things happen. Nevertheless writers of general history do in the great majority of cases retain the concept of power that is sufficient in itself to make events happen and assume a causal relationship with them. The way these historians write, at one moment a historical figure is the product of his time, and his power is nothing but the product of various forces, but at the next, his power is a special force which makes things happen. Take Gervinus and Schlosser,4 for instance (though there are others like them): at one point they argue that Napoleon is a product of the French Revolution and the ideas of 1789, and so on, but elsewhere they state plainly that the campaign of 1812 and other events not to their liking are simply products of Napoleon's misdirected will, and the actual ideas of 1789 were stopped in their tracks by Napoleon's eccentric behaviour. So ideas associated with the Revolution and the spirit of the age - these were what produced Napoleon's power. But at the same time it was Napoleon's power that snuffed out ideas associated with the Revolution and the spirit of the age.
This curious inconsistency is no chance event. We come across the like of it at every end and turn; in fact everything written by these general historians consists of an inevitable stream of inconsistencies like this one. And it is all due to the fact that the historians have only gone half-way down the road of analysis.
For component forces to equate with a composite or resultant force, the sum of the components must equal the resultant. This condition is never observed by general writers, and this is why they can explain resultant forces only by making allowances for some deficiency in the contributory forces and also an extra, unexplained force affecting the resultant.
The specialist historian describing the campaign of 1813, or the restoration of the Bourbons, states categorically that these events were produced by the will of Alexander. But the general historian Gervinus stands this view on its head when he seeks to prove that the campaign of 1813 and the restoration of the Bourbons were not caused by Alexander on his own, they were caused also by Stein, Metternich, Madame de Stael, Talleyrand, Fichte, Chateaubriand and others. The historian has evidently broken down Alexander's power into its component forces: Talleyrand, Chateaubriand and the others, but the sum of these component forces - the interaction between Chateaubriand, Talleyrand, Madame de Stael and all the rest - is obviously not equal to the resultant effect, which was nothing less than the capitulation of millions of Frenchmen to the Bourbons. The only thing that emerges from all the words exchanged between Chateaubriand, Madame de Stael and the others is their own interrelationship, which cannot account for the capitulation of millions. So, in order to explain how the capitulation of millions came about as a direct result of their interrelationship, in other words how it was that component forces equal to a given quantity A somehow produced a resultant equal to a thousand times A, the historian has to fall back on the strength of individual power, which is something he has already denied by acknowledging it as a resultant force - he has to allow for an unexplained outside force acting on the resultant. This is precisely what the general historians do. Which is why they contradict not only the specialist historians, but also themselves.
Country folk, watching out for either rain or fair weather but lacking all knowledge of where the rain comes from, will say the wind has blown the rain up, or the wind has blown the rain away. General historians are just like that; when they are looking out for something, and it fits in with their theory, they'll say that power is the result of events, but on other occasions, when they want to prove something different, they'll say that power determines events.
There is a third group of historians, historians of culture, who follow the path laid down by the universalists in being prepared sometimes to acknowledge literary men and women as determining forces, though they interpret this power rather differently. For them power resides in 'culture', intellectual activity. Historians of culture are perfectly consistent in taking after their progenitors, the writers of universal history, for if historical events can be explained by certain persons dealing with one another in certain ways, why not explain them by certain persons writing certain books? From the vast array of connotations associated with every aspect of life, these historians select the single connotation of intellectual activity and call this connotation a cause. But despite their best efforts to demonstrate that the cause of events lies in intellectual activity, only by a great stretch of the imagination can one agree that there is anything in common between intellectual activity and the movements of peoples, and in no way can we allow intellectual activity to have determined the actions of men, for any idea that the savage butchery of the French Revolution stemmed from the doctrine of the equality of man, or that the bloodiest of wars and executions arose from the doctrine of love, falls short of confirming such a proposition.
But let us say for the purposes of argument that all the clever sophistries that fill these histories are right; let us accept that nations are directed by mysterious forces called ideas - even so, the essential question of history remains unanswered; either that, or we have to add another force to the power of monarchs and the influence of counsellors and other persons introduced by the universal historians, and this new force is the idea, and how the idea relates to the masses calls for some explanation. We can understand that Napoleon possessed power and because of that an event came to pass; with a little latitude we can even imagine that Napoleon, along with some other influences, might have been the actual cause of an event, but precisely how Rousseau's book The Social Contract could have made the French people go out and slaughter each other must be beyond comprehension unless some causal connection can be established between this new force and the event.
There clearly is a connection between all living things at any one time, and so it must be possible to establish some sort of connection between the intellectual activity of men and their historical movements, just as a connection can be established between the movements of humanity and commerce, handicrafts, horticulture and anything else you care to name. But why intellectual activity should be singled out by cultural historians as the cause or the expression of an entire historical movement is not easy to understand. Historians could arrive at such a conclusion only with the following provisos: (1) that history is written by educated people who find it natural and agreeable to believe that the activity of their social group is a source of movement for the whole of humanity, just as this kind of belief would come naturally and agreeably to tradesmen, agriculturalists and soldiers (only their beliefs don't get expressed because merchants and soldiers don't write history), and (2) that spiritual activity, enlightenment, civilization, culture and ideas are all vague and indeterminate concepts, flags of convenience under which even more opaque phrases can be used very conveniently, thus accommodating any kind of theory.
But even allowing histories of this kind a certain intrinsic value (maybe they are of use to somebody or something), histories of culture - and all general histories now show tendencies in that direction - are notorious for presenting a serious and detailed analysis of various religious, philosophical and political doctrines as causes of events, and every time they are called upon to describe an actual historical event like the campaign of 1812 they automatically describe it as resulting from the exercise of power, baldly stating that this campaign came about by Napoleon's will. By saying things like this, cultural historians automatically fall into self-contradiction, or else they demonstrate that the new force invented by them does not reflect historical events, and the sole means of explaining history is by the very power they seemed to have rejected.
CHAPTER 3
A railway engine moves along. The question is: what makes it move? A peasant says the devil is moving it. Another man says the engine is moving because its wheels are going round. A third tells you to look for the cause of the movement in the smoke wafting away on the wind.
The peasant's claim is irrefutable. To refute what he says someone would have to prove there is no such thing as the devil, or else another peasant would have to explain that it's not the devil who makes it go, it's a German. At that point their contradictory views will show them they are both wrong. But the man who says the cause is in the movement of the wheels refutes his own argument; once embarked on analysis, he ought to have kept going. He ought to have explained why the wheels are moving, and he has no right to stop looking for a cause until he finds the ultimate cause of the movement of the engine, which is steam under compression in the boiler. As for the man who explained the movement of the engine in terms of the smoke wafting away on the wind, all he has done is noticed that the wheel explanation doesn't produce a cause, seized on the first available indicator and proclaimed this as his cause.
The only concept capable of explaining the movement of the engine is the concept of a force that equates to the movement observed.
The only concept capable of explaining the movements of nations is the concept of a force that equates to the entire movement of the nations. Yet we see all manner of forces pressed into the service of this concept by all manner of historians, and they still do not equate to the movement observed. Some use it to identify a force arising spontaneously in heroes, just as the peasant sees the devil in the engine. Others identify a force made up of several other forces, like the movement of the wheels. A third group identifies an intellectual influence, like the smoke wafted on the wind.
While ever authors continue to write histories of individuals - your Julius Caesars, Alexanders, Luthers and Voltaires - and not histories of everybody, absolutely everybody, involved in an event, there is no possibility of describing the movement of humanity without falling back on the concept of a force that impels men to direct their activity to a single end. And the only concept of this kind known to historians is the concept of power.
This concept is the only way of getting a handle on history as presently expounded, and anyone who broke off this handle, as Buckle did, without finding some other technique for dealing with historical material, would only be depriving himself of the last possible way of dealing with it. The necessity for this concept of power as an explanation of historical phenomena is supremely well illustrated by the writers of universal and cultural history themselves; having ostensibly repudiated the concept of power, they keep returning to it at every step, and they are bound to do so.
So far the study of history as part of the human spirit of inquiry has been like money in circulation, notes and coins. Biographies and national histories are like paper money. They can pass and circulate, doing their job without harming anyone and fulfilling a useful function, as long as no one questions the guarantee behind them. And as long as no one questions precisely how the will of heroes is supposed to direct events, historical works by Thiers and his ilk will retain a certain interest and educational value, not to mention the odd touch of poetry. But just as doubts about the validity of banknotes can arise, either when too many go into circulation because they are so easy to make, or because of a sudden rush to covert them into gold, in the same way doubts about the real value of this type of historical work will arise either when too many of them are written, or when some naive person asks the simple question, 'Precisely what force was it that made it possible for Napoleon to do that?' - in other words, when someone wishes to change a working note for the pure gold of a valid concept.
The writers of universal and cultural history are like men who feel let down by paper money and decide to stop making notes and make hard coins instead, using a metal of lower density than gold. Their coins would certainly turn out to be 'hard', but that's all they would be. Ignorant people might be taken in by a paper note, but nobody is going to be deceived by a hard coin made of low-value metal. Just as gold remains gold only as long as it can be used for something as well as exchanged, so the universal historians will be golden only when they can answer the crucial question of history, 'What is power?' Universal historians give contradictory answers, and as for cultural historians, they evade the issue and give answers to completely different questions. Imitation gold tokens can be used, but only within a community that has agreed to accept them as gold, or in one where no one knows the properties of gold; in the same way, the universal and cultural historians who, for reasons best known to themselves, keep running away from the crucial questions of humanity, are still accepted as hard coinage in our universities and by a wide readership with a taste for what they like to call 'serious reading'.
CHAPTER 4
Having repudiated the ancient view of the people's will being subjected to a chosen person by divine inspiration, and through him subjected to the Deity, history cannot take a step without running into contradictions. It has to choose between two alternatives: either a return to the old belief in the Deity's direct intervention in human affairs, or a definitive explanation of the force called 'power' that is responsible for historical events.
Any return to the old way of thinking is out of the question, the old beliefs having been shattered, which means that an explanation must be found for the meaning of power.
Napoleon gave the order for an army to be raised and go to war. This idea is so familiar, we have grown so used to it, that the question why six hundred thousand men go off to do battle just because Napoleon has said a few words seems to have no meaning. He had the power, so his orders were carried out.
This answer is perfectly satisfactory if we believe that power was given to him by God. But the moment we decide not to accept this, it becomes necessary to define the significance of this power, the power of one man over others.
This power cannot be the straightforward power deriving from the physical superiority of a strong creature over a weak one, a superiority based on the ap