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,
