plication or threat of physical force - like the power of Hercules. Nor can it be based on the moral superiority, as several simple-minded historians seem to think, since they keep setting certain historical figures up as heroes, men imbued with a special quality of mind and spirit which goes by the name of genius. This power cannot be based on moral superiority, because, even if we forget about historical heroes like Napoleon, opinions of whose moral stature differ widely, history shows that none of your Louis XIs or Metternichs, who governed men in millions, showed any special propensity for spiritual strength; quite the reverse, in most cases they were morally weaker than every last one of the millions they governed.
If the source of power lies not in the physical or moral qualities of the possessor, it is obvious that the source of this power must be found outside the particular person - in the relationship which the possessor enjoys with the masses.
That is precisely how power is seen by the science of jurisprudence, the historical bank of exchange that undertakes to exchange historical power-tokens for pure gold.
Power is the collective will of the masses transferred to rulers selected by open or tacit consent.
In the realm of jurisprudence, which is based on arguments about how a state and power should be constructed if only they could be constructed, this is as clear as crystal, but when applied to actual history this definition of power calls for further elucidation.
Jurisprudence treats the state and power as the ancients treated fire, seeing them as absolute entities, whereas for history the state and power are merely phenomena, just as for modern physics fire is a phenomenon rather than an element.
Because of this fundamental difference in attitude between history and jurisprudence the latter can hold forth in great detail about power, how in the lawyers' opinion it should be organized, and even what it is, this absolute entity with its timeless existence, but jurisprudence has no answers to historical questions about power as it exists and develops over time itself.
If power is the transfer of collective will to rulers, was Pugachov a representative of the will of the masses? If not, why was Napoleon I considered to be one? Why was Napoleon III a criminal when he was seized at Boulogne,5 whereas afterwards it was the people seized by him who turned out to be the criminals?
In a palace coup, which might involve only two or three people, do we observe the will of the masses being transferred to a new person? In international affairs is the will of the popular masses transferred to their conqueror? In 1808 was the will of the Conference of the Rhine transferred to Napoleon? Was the will of the mass of the Russian people transferred to Napoleon in 1809 when our army allied itself with the French and went to war with Austria?
The possible answers are threefold:
(1) The will of the masses is always transferred unconditionally to a chosen ruler or rulers, which means that every upsurge of new power, all resistance to transferred power, must be regarded as an infringement of real power; or
(2) The will of the masses is transferred to rulers on known and specific conditions, which means that every time power is curtailed, resisted or even abolished this must be due to non-observance by the rulers of the conditions on which power was transferred to them; or
(3) The will of the masses is transferred to rulers conditionally, but on conditions that are unknown and unspecific, which means that when many different authorities arise, clash and decline, this must be due to the greater or lesser extent to which the rulers have been observing the unknown conditions by which the will of the masses is transferred from one group to another.
This is the historians' threefold explanation of the relationship between the masses and their rulers.
Some historians - the specialist biographers referred to above, naive enough not to understand questions about the meaning of power - seem to accept that the collective will of the masses is transferred to historical leaders unconditionally, and therefore, when these historians come to describe any such authority, they assume it to be the only authority, absolute and real, so that any other force that opposes this real authority is no authority at all, but an infringement of authority amounting to violence.
The theory works well enough for primitive people in peace-time, but when applied to complex and turbulent periods in national life, with different authorities arising simultaneously and fighting each other, it runs into trouble: legitimist historians will argue that the National Convention, the Directory and Bonaparte amounted to nothing more than infringements of real authority, whereas Republicans and Bonapartists will argue that the Republic or perhaps the Empire was the real authority, and everything else an infringement. It soon becomes clear that the explanations offered by these historians, which cancel each other out, are good for children of tender years but nobody else.
Another type of historian, seeing the error of this view of history, will tell us that authority rests on the conditional transfer of collective will from the masses to their rulers, and that historical leaders possess power only on condition that they fulfil a certain programme which by tacit consent the will of the people has set for them. But these historians fail to tell us what this programme consists of, or if they do they constantly contradict one another.
Every historian will have his own view of what constitutes the goal of a people in movement, and will therefore imagine the conditions to be greatness, wealth, freedom or enlightenment for the citizens of France or some other country. But if we overlook the contradictions between historians concerning the nature of these conditions, and even allow for the possibility of one overall set of conditions applicable to everybody, the facts of history almost always contradict this theory.
If the conditions determining any transfer of power amount to wealth, freedom and enlightenment for the people, how is it that monarchs like Louis XIV and Ivan the Terrible lived out their reigns in peace and quiet, while monarchs like Louis XVI and Charles I were executed by their people? To this question these historians reply that the effects of things done by Louis XIV in violation of his programme were visited upon Louis XVI. But why not Louis XIV and Louis XV? Why did they have to be visited specifically on Louis XVI? And is there any time limit on this kind of visitation? To questions like these there are no answers, and there never can be. Equally inexplicable in terms of this view of history is the reason why collective popular will can remain century after century in the hands of rulers and their heirs, and then all at once during a fifty-year period transfer itself to a Convention, a Directory, a Napoleon, an Alexander, a Louis XVIII, back to another Napoleon, a Charles X, a Louis Philippe, a Republican government and then to a Napoleon III. To explain these rapid transferences of popular will from one individual to another, especially in the broader context of international affairs, conquests and alliances, these historians are forced to admit that at least some of these developments do not amount to a proper transfer of popular will, they are chance events dependent on cleverness, error, double-dealing or weakness on the part of some diplomat, monarch or party leader. So, most historical phenomena - civil wars, revolutions, conquests - are, according to these historians, not the results of popular will freely transferred but the results of misdirected will on the part of one or more persons, which means, once again, infringements of authority. So it is that even this type of historian comes to regard historical events as exceptions to his theory.
These historians are like a botanist who observes that some plants develop with a double seed-leaf and therefore insists that every growing thing grows only by dividing into two leaves, with the result that palm-trees and mushrooms and even fully grown oak-trees with a canopy of foliage nothing like the original double seed-leaf have to be regarded as exceptions to his theory. There is a third type of historian who agrees that the will of the masses is transferred to historical leaders conditionally, but without us knowing what the conditions are. He will claim that historical leaders retain power only because they are carrying out the transferred will of the masses.
But in that case, if the force that moves nations lies not in their historical leaders but in the people themselves, what is the role of the leaders?
Historical leaders are, according to these historians, living embodiments of popular will, and the activity of historical leaders represents the activity of the masses.
But that gives rise to another question: does all the activity of historical leaders represent the will of the masses, or only one particular aspect of it? If all the activities of historical leaders amount to an expression of the popular will, as some believe, then the entire biographies of people like Napoleon and Catherine the Great, with all the bits and pieces of court scandal, amount to expressions of the peoples' lives, which is obviously nonsensical, but if only one aspect of a historical leader's activity amounts to an expression of the peoples' lives, as other self-styled philosophical historians believe, then in order to determine which aspect of a leader's activity is the one that expresses the life of a people, we need to know at the outset what constitutes the life of the people.
Confronted by this difficulty, this type of historian will invent the most obscure, insubstantial and generalized abstraction that can be found to cover the greatest possible number of events, and tell us that this abstraction represents the aim of humanity in movement. The most commonly encountered abstractions, accepted by virtually all historians, are: freedom, equality, enlightenment, progress, civilization, culture. Presenting any old abstraction as the goal of human movements, the historians go on to study those people who have left behind the greatest number of memorials - kings, ministers, generals, authors, reformers, popes and journalists - arranging them in order, according to the effect these people have had (in the historians' opinion) in advancing or retarding the abstraction in question. But since there is no proof whatsoever that the goal of humanity really is freedom, equality, enlightenment or civilization, and since the connection between the masses and their rulers or educators rests on the arbitrary assumption that the collective will of the masses is always transferred to figures who attract our attention - it so happens that the activities of the millions who uproot themselves, burn their houses down, abandon the fields and go off to butcher each other never find expression in the descriptions of activities limited to a dozen personalities who don't happen to burn houses down, work the soil or kill their fellow creatures.
History shows this at every end and turn. Take the ferment among western people towards the end of the last century, and the way they went rampaging eastward - is all of this explained by the actions of Louis XIV, Louis XV and Louis XVI, or their mistresses and ministers, or by the lives of Napoleon, Rousseau, Diderot, Beaumarchais6 and others?
The eastward movement of the Russians, to Kazan and Siberia, is that expressed in the details of the morbid character of Ivan the Terrible and his correspondence with Kurbsky?7
The movement of peoples at the time of the Crusades, is that explained by studying any number of Godfreys and Louis8 and their ladies? That particular movement of people from west to east has remained incomprehensible, having had no goal, no leadership, nothing but a crowd of vagrants, followers of Peter the Hermit.9 And even more incomprehensible is why it suddenly stopped, at a point when a rational and sacred aim for the Crusades - the liberation of Jerusalem - had been clearly established by the historical leaders.
Popes, kings and knights urged the people to liberate the Holy Land. But the people didn't go, because the unknown cause that had got them going before was no longer there. The history of the Godfreys and the Minnesingers10 clearly cannot encompass the lives of the people. Meanwhile what has remained is the history of the Godfreys and the Minnesingers, whereas the history of the people's lives and their motivation remains for ever unknown. And the biographies of writers and reformers will tell us even less about ordinary people's lives.
Cultural history will elucidate the motivation, the lifestyle and the thoughts of a writer or a reformer. We learn from them that Luther had a quick temper and made certain speeches, we learn that Rousseau was suspicious and wrote certain books, but what we don't learn is why the nations hacked each other to pieces after the Reformation, or why men guillotined one another during the French Revolution.
If we combine these two different kinds of history, as most modern historians do, all we shall get is the history of monarchs and writers instead of a history of the lives of nations.
CHAPTER 5
The lives of nations cannot be contained within the lives of a few men, since the connection between those few men and the nations has never been discovered. The theory that this connection is based on a transfer of collective popular will from a people to its historical leaders is a hypothesis not borne out by historical experience.
The theory of the transfer of collective popular will from a people to historical personages may perhaps explain a good deal in the realm of jurisprudence, and may well be essential for its purposes. But when you apply it to history - the moment revolutions, conquests and civil strife come into the picture, the moment history begins, in fact - this theory explains nothing.
This theory has an air of infallibility, for one good reason: the act of transferring the popular will can never be verified, because it has never existed.
Whatever the turn of events, and whoever takes charge of them, this theory can always say that such and such a person took charge of events because the collective popular will had been transferred to him.
The answers to historical questions provided by this theory are like those of a man observing the movements of a flock of sheep who ignores the variable quality of the pasturage in different parts of the field and the shepherd coming up behind, and thinks that the reasons why the flock takes one direction or another depend on which animal happens to be out in front.
'The flock is moving in that direction because it is being led by the animal in front, and the collective will of all the other animals has been transferred to the leader of the flock.' This is the answer we can expect from the first category of historians, the ones who believe in the unconditional transfer of power.
'If the animals at the head of the flock change from time to time, this is due to the transfer of all the animals' collective will from one leader to another, and everything depends on whether the leader follows the direction chosen by the whole flock.' This is the answer we can expect from historians who assume that the collective popular will gets transferred to leaders on conditions which they regard as known and understood. (With this technique of observation it happens all too often that the observer, looking on things from his own chosen direction, identifies leaders who end up, when the direction of the masses changes, not in front, but off to one side and sometimes even at the back.)
'If the animals at the front are changing all the time, and the whole flock keeps changing direction all the time, this is because in order to move in a given direction the animals transfer their will to others that are particularly prominent, so if we wish to study the movements of the flock we need to observe all the prominent animals on every side of the flock.' This is the answer we can expect from the third category of historians, the ones who identify all historical personages, from monarchs down to journalists, as expressions of their age.
The theory of the transfer of popular will to historical persons is nothing but a paraphrase, a rephrasing of the question.
What is the cause of historical events? Power.
What is power? Power is the collective will of the masses transferred to a single person.
On what terms is the will of the masses transferred to a single person? On condition that he expresses the will of the whole people. In other words, power is power. Which is to say that power is a word with a meaning we cannot understand.
If the realm of human knowledge was restricted to abstract thinking, then humanity, after a critical examination of power as explained by juridical science, would come to the conclusion that power is only a word, with no existence in reality. But for a cognitive inquiry into real-life phenomena, man has another instrument besides abstract reasoning - experience - which enables him to verify the results of his reasoning. And experience tells him that power is not just a word; it is something that actually exists.
We can ignore the fact that no account of concerted action by men can get by without the concept of power; the actual existence of power is demonstrated for us not only by history, but by observation of contemporary events.
Whenever an event takes place, a man or men appear whose will is said to have determined the deed. Napoleon III says the word, and off go the French to Mexico.11 The King of Prussia and Bismarck say the word, and off go the troops to Bohemia.12 At the bidding of Napoleon I, his soldiers march into Russia. At the bidding of Alexander I, the French submit to the Bourbons. Experience shows that whenever an event takes place it is always connected with the will of one person, or several people, who decreed it.
Historians, steeped in the old habit of acknowledging divine intervention in human affairs, tend to look for the cause of events in the will exercised by a person invested with power, though this conclusion is never confirmed by reason or experience.
On the one hand, reason shows that a person's will - the power of his word - forms only a part of the generalized activity that finds expression in an event, say a revolution or a war, and therefore unless we fall back on some incomprehensible, supernatural force - a miracle - it is not arguable that words alone could be the direct cause of the movements of millions of men.
On the other hand, even if we argued that they could, history shows that in most cases an expression of will by historical personages leads absolutely nowhere - their orders are often ignored, and sometimes what occurs is the exact opposite of what they have ordered.
Without allowing for divine intervention in human affairs, we cannot accept power as an actual cause of events.
And when it comes to real-life experience, power is nothing more or less than the dependent relationship that