Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (6 page)

With such arguments, Hegel had, it might be said, secularised predestination, translating Calvin’s theological dogma into the realm of history. The individual now lost control not only of his salvation in the afterlife, but also of his fate on earth. In this sense, Hegel represents the culmination of a theological tendency towards out-and-out determinism: a logical enough conclusion, perhaps, if the existence of a supreme deity is accepted, but one which Augustine and others had done much to temper. At the same time, there was at least a superficial resemblance between Hegel’s idealist philosophy of history and the materialist theories which had developed elsewhere. Hegel’s ‘cunning of Reason’ was perhaps a harsher master than Kant’s ‘Nature’ and Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand’; but these other quasi-deities performed analogous roles.

A Hegelian would presumably say that a synthesis of the idealist and materialist approaches was inevitable. However, that would have seemed a remote possibility at the time of Hegel’s death. The great idealist’s British contemporaries may also have constructed their models of political economy on implicitly religious models (as Boyd Hilton and others have argued); but outwardly and self-consciously they continued to operate on empirical and materialist principles. Moreover, the striking feature of political economy as it developed in the early nineteenth century was its pessimism compared with the relative optimism of Hegel, who shared with Kant a basic assumption that history was progressive. Ricardo’s economic laws of diminishing agricultural returns, the falling rate of profit and the iron law of wages, like Malthus’s principle of population, portrayed the economy as self-regulating, self-equilibrating and morally retributive - a system in which growth must inevitably be followed by stagnation and contraction. The logical conclusion of British political economy was thus a cyclical rather than a progressive model of history.

Nor was there much obvious affinity between Hegel’s idealist model of the historical process and the various materialist theories being developed at around the same time in France. Comte’s
Cours de philosophie positive
claimed to discern yet another ‘great fundamental law’: ‘That each of our leading conceptions - each branch of our knowledge - passes successively through three different theoretical conditions: the Theological, or fictitious; the Metaphysical, or abstract; and the Scientific, or positive’.
⁵⁸
Taine offered another ‘positivist’ trinity, of milieu, moment and race. Both took pride in their empirical methods. According to Taine, the monograph was the historian’s best tool: ‘He plunges it into the past like a lancet and draws it out charged with complete and authentic specimens. One understands a period after twenty or thirty such soundings.’
⁵⁹
In short, there was nothing preordained about the synthesis of British political economy and Hegelian philosophy which was to prove the most successful determinist doctrine of all.

What distinguished Marx from other nineteenth-century philosophers of history was that he did not worry much about free will; perhaps this was the secret of his success. When John Stuart Mill called on ‘really scientific thinkers to connect by theories the facts of universal history’ and to find ‘the derivative laws of social order and of social progress’, he was echoing Comte, and Kant before him. Yet like many other nineteenth-century liberals, Mill had a sneaking dread of slipping from determinism into fatalism. After all, it was not easy for a liberal to throw free will - the role of the individual - overboard. Mill’s solution to the problem was to redefine ‘the doctrine of Causation, improperly called the doctrine of Necessity’, to mean ‘only that men’s actions are the joint result of the general laws and circumstances of human nature and of their own particular characters; those characters again being the consequence of the natural and artificial circumstances that constituted their education, among
which circumstances must be reckoned their conscious efforts
‘. On closer inspection, however, this was a hefty qualification. Moreover, in a passage which explicitly posed counterfactual questions, Mill acknowledged openly that ‘general causes count for much, but individuals also produce great changes in history’:

Indeed, Mill quoted with approval two further counterfactual points: that without Caesar, ‘the venue ... of European civilization might ... have been changed’ and without William the Conqueror ‘our history or our national character would [not] have been what they are’. After this, his conclusion that the individual’s ’conscious efforts’ would be subordinated to ‘the law of human life’ at the collective level, and over the long run, was unconvincing:

The same sort of uncertainty can be detected even in the work of Henry Thomas Buckle, whose
History of Civilization in England
(the first volume of which was published in 1856) appeared to answer Mill’s description of a ‘scientific’ history. Here the parallel with the natural sciences was explicit and confident:

For Buckle, study of social statistics (the volume of which was just beginning that exponential growth which continues today) would reveal ‘the great truth that the actions of men ... are in reality never inconsistent, but however capricious they may appear only form part of one vast system of universal order ... the undeviating regularity of the moral world’.
⁶¹
Yet Buckle too was worried about free will. His model of causation, like Mill‘s, stated that ’when we perform an action, we perform it in consequence of some motive or motives; that those motives are the results of some antecedents; and that, therefore, if we were acquainted with the whole of the antecedents, and with all the laws to their movements, we could with unerring certainty predict the whole of their immediate results’. Thus ‘the actions of men being determined solely by their antecedents, must have a character of uniformity, that is to say, must, under precisely the same circumstances, always issue in precisely the same results’. This would have been undiluted fatalism if Buckle had not added a rather lame rider: ‘All the changes of which history is full ... must be the fruit of a double action; an action of external phenomena upon the mind, and another action of the mind upon the phenomena.’
⁶²

Perhaps no nineteenth-century writer wrestled harder with this problem - the contradiction between free will and deterministic theories of history - than Tolstoy in the concluding chapter of
War and Peace
.
⁶³
Tolstoy ridiculed the feeble attempts not only of popular historians, memoir-writers and biographers, but also of Hegelian idealists, to explain the world-shaking events of 1789-1815, and particularly the French invasion of Russia and its ultimate failure - the historical setting of his great epic. The role of divine providence, the role of chance, the role of great men, the role of ideas - all these he dismissed as insufficient to explain the huge movements of millions of people which occurred during the Napoleonic period. For Tolstoy, ‘the new school [of history] ought to be studying not the manifestations of power but the causes which create power.... If the purpose of history is the description of the flux of humanity and of peoples, the first question to be answered ... will be: What is the power that moves nations?’ Borrowing the terminology of Newton, he insisted that ‘the only conception capable of explaining the movement of peoples is that of some force commensurate with the whole movement of peoples’. He was dismissive of jurisprudential definitions of the relationship between ruler and ruled, especially those implying a contractual delegation of power from the latter to the former:

This line of argument appeared to lead him into something of a dead-end: ‘Morally, power appears to cause the event; physically, it is those who are subordinate to that power. But inasmuch as moral activity is inconceivable without physical activity, the cause of the event is found in neither the one nor the other but in the conjunction of the two. Or, in other words, the concept of cause is not applicable to the phenomenon we are examining.’ However, Tolstoy merely took this to mean that he had arrived at his goal: a law of social motion comparable with the laws of physics:

‘Electricity produces heat; heat produces electricity. Atoms attract and atoms repel one another.... We cannot say why this occurs, and [so] we say that such is the nature of these phenomena, such is their law. The same applies to historical phenomena. Why do wars and revolutions happen? We do not know. We only know that to produce the one or the other men form themselves into a certain combination in which all take part; and we say that this is the nature of men, that this is a law.’

A moment’s reflection will, of course, suffice to expose the hollowness of this definition of a natural law (that is, a law is a reciprocal relationship which we cannot explain). But what follows is even more baffling, as Tolstoy goes on to discuss the implications of his ‘law’ for the idea of individual free will. For ‘if there is a single law controlling the actions of men, free will cannot exist’. Thus, for the sake of determinist theory, one of the greatest of all novelists - whose insights into individual motivations give
War and Peace
its enduring power - sets out to disprove the existence of free will. Can he really mean that all Pierre’s long agonisings had no bearing whatever on his inevitable fate? So it would seem. According to Tolstoy, the individual is as much subject to the Tolstoyan law of power as he is to the Newtonian law of gravity. It is just that man, with his irrational sense of freedom, refuses to
acknowledge
the former law the way he acknowledges the latter:

The implications of this dichotomy for history are spelt out in another (rather more intellectually satisfying) Tolstoyan law: ‘In every action we investigate we see a certain measure of freedom and a certain measure of necessity.... The ratio of freedom to necessity decreases and increases according to the point of view from which the action is regarded; but their relation is always one of inverse proportion.’ Tolstoy concludes that the historian will be less inclined to credit his subjects with free will the more he knows about their ‘relation to the external world’; the further in time he is from the events he describes; and the more he apprehends ‘that endless chain of causation demanded by reason, in which every phenomenon capable of being understood ... must have its definite place as a result of what has gone before and a cause of what will follow.’

Interestingly, at this point Tolstoy is forced to admit that ‘there can never be absolute inevitability’ in historical writing because ‘to imagine a human action subject only to the law of necessity, without any freedom, we must assume a knowledge of an
infinite
number of spatial conditions, an
infinitely
long period of time and an
infinite
chain of causation’:

In fact, there is nothing in those lines which logically implies strict determinism. However, he then adds: