Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

T H E H E D G E H O G AND T H E FOX

superlative skill in this very art-and that it was precisely this for

which he was admired; and he condemned it absolutely. In a letter

written while he was working on War and Peace he said with bittern� that he had no doubt that what the public would like best would be his scenes of social and personal life, his ladies and his gentlemen,

with their petty intrigues and entertaining conversations and marvellously described small idiosyncrasies.• But these are the trivial 'flowers'

of life, not the 'roots'. Tolstoy's purpose is the discovery of the truth,

and therefore he must know what history consists of, and recreate

only that. History is plainly not a science, and sociology, which

pretends that it is, is a fraud; no genuine laws of history have been

discovered, and the concepts in current use-'cause', 'accident', 'genius'

-explain nothing: they are merely thin disguises for ignorance. Why

do the events the totality of which we call history occur as they do?

Some historians attribute events to the acts of individuals, but this is

no answer: for they do not explain how these acts 'cause' the events

they are alleged to 'cause' or 'originate'. There is a passage of savage

irony intended by Tolstoy to parody the average school histories of his

time, sufficiently typical to be worth reproducing in full:1

Louis XIV was a very proud and self-confident man. He had such

and such mistresses, and such and such ministers, and he governed

France badly. The heirs of Louis XIV were also weak men, and

also governed France badly. They also had such and such favourites

and such and such mistresses. Besides which, certain persons were

at this time writing books. By the end of the eighteenth century

there gathered in Paris two dcrzen or so persons who started saying

that all men were free and equal. Because of this in the whole of

France people began to slaughter and drown each other. These

people killed the king and a good many others. At this time there

was a man of genius in France-Napoleon. He conquered everyone

everywhere, i.e. killed a great many people because he was a great

genius; and, for some reason, he went off to kill Africans, and killed

1 Cf. the profession of faith in his celebrated-and militantly moralisticintroduction to an edition of Maupassant whose genius, despite everything, he admires ('Predislovie k sochineniyam Gyui de Mopassana', Po/not

sol!rt�t�it soclline11ii [ cf. p. 30, note 3 above], vol. 30, pp. 3-24). He thinks

much more poorly of Bernard Shaw, whose social rhetoric he calls stale and

platitudinous (diary entry for 3 I january I 908, ibid., voJ. 56, pp. 97-8).

• War a11ti Peace, epilogue, part z, chapter r .

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R U S S I A N T H I N K E R S

them so well, and was so clever and cunning, that, having arrived

in France, he ordered everyone to obey him, which they did.

Having made himself Emperor he again went to kill masses of

people in Italy, Austria and Prussia. And there too he killed a

great many. Now in Russia there was the Emperor Alexander who

decided to re-establish order in Europe, and therefore fought wars

with Napoleon. But in the year '07 he suddenly made friends with

him, and in the year ' 1 1 quarrelled with him again, and they both

again began to kill a great many people. And Napoleon brought six

hundred thousand men to Russia and conquered Moscow. But then

he suddenly ran away from Moscow, and then the Emperor

Alexander, aided by the advice of Stein and others, united Europe

to raise an army against the disturber of her pe;1ce. All Napoleon's

allies suddenly became his enemies; and this army marched against

Napoleon, who had gathered new forces. The allies conquered

Napoleon, entered Paris, forced Napoleon to renounce the throne,

and sent him to the island of Elba, without, however, depriving him

of the title of Emperor, and showing him all respect, in spite of the

fact that five years before and a year after, everyone considered him

a brigand and beyond the law. Thereupon Louis XVIII, who

until then had been an object of mere ridicule to both Frenchmen

and the allies, began to reign. As for Napoleon, after shedding tears

before the Old Guard, he gave up his throne, and went into exile.

Then astute statesmen and diplomats, in particular Talleyrand, who

had managed to sit down before anyone else in the famous armchair1 and thereby to extend the frontiers of France, talked in Vienna, and by means of such talk made peoples happy or unhappy.

Suddenly the diplomats and monarchs almost came to blows. They

were almost ready to order their troops once again to kill each other;

but at this moment Napoleon arrived in France with a battalion,

and the French, who hated him, all immediately submitted to him.

But this annoyed the allied monarchs very much and they again

went to war with the French. And the genius Napoleon was

defeated and taken to the island of St Helena, having suddenly been

discovered to be an outlaw. Whereupon the exile, parted from his

dear ones and his beloved France, died a slow death on a rock, and

bequeathed his great deeds to posterity. As for Europe, a reaction

occurred there, and all the princes began to treat their peoples badly

once again.

Tolstoy continues:

1 Empire chain of a certain shape are to this day called 'Talleyrand armchain' in Russia.

T H E H E D G E H O G A N D T H E FOX

. . . the new history is like a deaf man replying to questions which

nobody puts to him . . . the primary question . . . is, what power is

it that moves the destinies of peoples? . . . History seems to presuppose that this power can be taken for granted, and is familiar to everyone, but, in spite of every wish to admit that this power is

familiar to us, anyone who has read a great many historical works

cannot help doubting whether this power, which different historians

understand in different ways, is in fact so completely familiar to

everyone.

He goes on to say that political historians who write in this way

explain nothing; they merely attribute events to the 'power' which

important individuals are said to exercise on others, but do not tell us

what the term 'power' means: and yet this is the heart of the problem.

The problem of historical movement is directly connected with the

'power' exercised by some men over others: but what is 'power'?

How does one acquire it? Can it be transferred by one man to another?

Surely it is not merely physical strength that is meant? Nor moral

strength? Did Napoleon possess either of these?

General, as opposed to national, historians seem to Tolstoy merely to

extend this category without elucidating it: instead of one country or

nation, many are introduced, but the spectacle of the interplay of

mysterious 'forces' makes it no clearer why some men or nations

obey others, why wars are made, victories won, why innocent men

who believe that murder is wicked kill one another with enthusiasm

and pride, and are glorified for so doing; why great movements of

human masses occur, sometimes from east to west, sometimes the

other way. Tolstoy is particularly irritated by references to the

dominant influence of great men or of ideas. Great men, we are told,

are typical of the movements of their age: hence study of their