War and Peace

hen an event is taking place people express their opinions and wishes
about it, and as the event results from the collective activity of
many people, some one of the opinions or wishes expressed is sure to be
fulfilled if but approximately. When one of the opinions expressed
is fulfilled, that opinion gets connected with the event as a command
preceding it.

Men are hauling a log. Each of them expresses his opinion as to how and
where to haul it. They haul the log away, and it happens that this is
done as one of them said. He ordered it. There we have command and power
in their primary form. The man who worked most with his hands could not
think so much about what he was doing, or reflect on or command what
would result from the common activity; while the man who commanded
more would evidently work less with his hands on account of his greater
verbal activity.

When some larger concourse of men direct their activity to a common aim
there is a yet sharper division of those who, because their activity is
given to directing and commanding, take less part in the direct work.

When a man works alone he always has a certain set of reflections which
as it seems to him directed his past activity, justify his present
activity, and guide him in planning his future actions. Just the same is
done by a concourse of people, allowing those who do not take a direct
part in the activity to devise considerations, justifications, and
surmises concerning their collective activity.

For reasons known or unknown to us the French began to drown and kill
one another. And corresponding to the event its justification appears in
people’s belief that this was necessary for the welfare of France, for
liberty, and for equality. People ceased to kill one another, and
this event was accompanied by its justification in the necessity for a
centralization of power, resistance to Europe, and so on. Men went
from the west to the east killing their fellow men, and the event
was accompanied by phrases about the glory of France, the baseness of
England, and so on. History shows us that these justifications of the
events have no common sense and are all contradictory, as in the case of
killing a man as the result of recognizing his rights, and the killing
of millions in Russia for the humiliation of England. But these
justifications have a very necessary significance in their own day.

These justifications release those who produce the events from moral
responsibility. These temporary aims are like the broom fixed in front
of a locomotive to clear the snow from the rails in front: they clear
men’s moral responsibilities from their path.

Without such justification there would be no reply to the simplest
question that presents itself when examining each historical event. How
is it that millions of men commit collective crimes—make war, commit
murder, and so on?

With the present complex forms of political and social life in Europe
can any event that is not prescribed, decreed, or ordered by monarchs,
ministers, parliaments, or newspapers be imagined? Is there any
collective action which cannot find its justification in political
unity, in patriotism, in the balance of power, or in civilization? So
that every event that occurs inevitably coincides with some expressed
wish and, receiving a justification, presents itself as the result of
the will of one man or of several men.

In whatever direction a ship moves, the flow of the waves it cuts
will always be noticeable ahead of it. To those on board the ship the
movement of those waves will be the only perceptible motion.

Only by watching closely moment by moment the movement of that flow and
comparing it with the movement of the ship do we convince ourselves that
every bit of it is occasioned by the forward movement of the ship,
and that we were led into error by the fact that we ourselves were
imperceptibly moving.

We see the same if we watch moment by moment the movement of historical
characters (that is, re-establish the inevitable condition of all that
occurs—the continuity of movement in time) and do not lose sight of the
essential connection of historical persons with the masses.

When the ship moves in one direction there is one and the same wave
ahead of it, when it turns frequently the wave ahead of it also turns
frequently. But wherever it may turn there always will be the wave
anticipating its movement.

Whatever happens it always appears that just that event was foreseen
and decreed. Wherever the ship may go, the rush of water which neither
directs nor increases its movement foams ahead of it, and at a distance
seems to us not merely to move of itself but to govern the ship’s
movement also.

Examining only those expressions of the will of historical persons
which, as commands, were related to events, historians have assumed
that the events depended on those commands. But examining the events
themselves and the connection in which the historical persons stood to
the people, we have found that they and their orders were dependent on
events. The incontestable proof of this deduction is that, however many
commands were issued, the event does not take place unless there are
other causes for it, but as soon as an event occurs—be it what it
may—then out of all the continually expressed wishes of different people
some will always be found which by their meaning and their time of
utterance are related as commands to the events.

Arriving at this conclusion we can reply directly and positively to
these two essential questions of history:

(1) What is power?

(2) What force produces the movement of the nations?

(1) Power is the relation of a given person to other individuals,
in which the more this person expresses opinions, predictions, and
justifications of the collective action that is performed, the less is
his participation in that action.

(2) The movement of nations is caused not by power, nor by intellectual
activity, nor even by a combination of the two as historians have
supposed, but by the activity of all the people who participate in
the events, and who always combine in such a way that those taking
the largest direct share in the event take on themselves the least
responsibility and vice versa.

Morally the wielder of power appears to cause the event; physically
it is those who submit to the power. But as the moral activity is
inconceivable without the physical, the cause of the event is neither in
the one nor in the other but in the union of the two.

Or in other words, the conception of a cause is inapplicable to the
phenomena we are examining.

In the last analysis we reach the circle of infinity—that final limit
to which in every domain of thought man’s reason arrives if it is not
playing with the subject. Electricity produces heat, heat produces
electricity. Atoms attract each other and atoms repel one another.

Speaking of the interaction of heat and electricity and of atoms, we
cannot say why this occurs, and we say that it is so because it is
inconceivable otherwise, because it must be so and that it is a law. The
same applies to historical events. Why war and revolution occur we do
not know. We only know that to produce the one or the other action,
people combine in a certain formation in which they all take part, and
we say that this is so because it is unthinkable otherwise, or in other
words that it is a law.