ON CERTAIN TENDENCIES PECULIAR TO HISTORIANS IN DEMOCRATIC CENTURIES
HISTORIANS who write in aristocratic centuries generally attribute everything that happens to the will and humor of certain individuals, and they are likely to impute the most important revolutions to the merest of accidents. They shrewdly elucidate the smallest of causes and often fail to notice the greatest.
Historians who live in democratic centuries exhibit quite opposite tendencies.
Most of them attribute almost no influence over the destiny of the species to the individual and no influence over the fate of the people to citizens. On the other hand, they ascribe great general causes to the most insignificant particular facts. These opposing tendencies can be explained.
When historians in aristocratic centuries contemplate the world stage, they see all the leading roles filled by a very small number of prominent actors. The august personages standing in the limelight monopolize their full attention, and while busy unveiling the hidden motives behind what the principals say and do, they neglect everything else.
Because of the importance of what these few leading actors do, the historians in question develop an exaggerated idea of the influence that a single individual can exert, and this naturally leads them to believe that the activities of the multitude must always be traced back to the specific action of an individual.
By contrast, when all citizens are independent of one another and each of them is weak, none exerts a very great, much less a very durable, power over the masses. At first sight, individuals seem to have absolutely no power over the masses, and society seems to proceed on its own owing to the free and spontaneous cooperation of all its members.
This naturally prompts the mind to look for the general reason that could have struck so many intellects at once and simultaneously reoriented them all.
I am firmly convinced that, even in democratic nations, the genius, vices, and virtues of certain individuals can delay or hasten the fulfillment of a people’s natural destiny. But these kinds of fortuitous and secondary causes are infinitely more varied, more hidden, more complicated, less powerful, and consequently more difficult to sort out and trace in ages of equality than in centuries of aristocracy, where the only problem is to analyze the particular action of one man or a small number of men within a general context.
The historian soon tires of such labor. His mind loses itself in a labyrinth, and, unable to see individual influences clearly or to elucidate them adequately, he denies their existence. He prefers to speak of the nature of races, of the country’s physical constitution, or of the spirit of civilization. This reduces his toil and gives the reader greater satisfaction with less effort on the historian’s part.
M. de La Fayette says somewhere in his memoirs that the exaggerated system of general causes is a wonderful source of consolation for mediocre public men. I would add that it is also an admirable source of consolation for mediocre historians. It invariably provides them with a few grand explanations useful for quickly extricating themselves from any difficulties they encounter in their works, and it favors weak or lazy minds by allowing them to garner a reputation for profundity.
My own view is that in every period some of the events of this world must be ascribed to very general causes, others to very particular ones. Causes of both kinds are always encountered; the only thing that differs is their relative importance. General facts explain more things in democratic centuries than in aristocratic ones, and particular influences explain less. In ages of aristocracy, the opposite is true: particular influences are stronger, and general causes are weaker, unless inequality of conditions itself is considered a general cause, which allows certain individuals to thwart the natural proclivities of all others.
Historians who seek to describe what goes on in democratic societies are therefore right to pay a great deal of attention to general causes and to devote their primary effort to uncovering them, but they are wrong to deny the particular actions of individuals simply because it is not easy to find these out or trace their effects.
Not only are historians who live in democratic centuries inclined to ascribe a great cause to every fact, but they are also apt to connect facts to one another and derive a system from them.
In aristocratic centuries, the attention of historians is always focused on individuals, and they therefore miss the connections among events, or, rather, they do not believe that such connections exist. To them it seems that the fabric of history is constantly being rent by the passage of one individual or another.
In democratic centuries, by contrast, the historian is far more aware of acts and far less of actors, hence he can easily relate one act to another and establish a methodical order among them.
Although ancient literature has left us some very fine histories, it offers no great historical system, whereas the most miserable of modern literatures abound with such systems. Classical historians apparently made insufficient use of those general theories that our historians are prepared to abuse at the drop of a hat.
Those who write in democratic centuries have another, more dangerous tendency.
When all trace of the action of individuals on nations is lost, it is common to see change in the world without being able to discover any driving force behind that change. Since it becomes quite difficult to identify and analyze the various factors which, acting separately on the will of each citizen, cause an entire people to undergo change, it is tempting to believe that the change in question is not voluntary and that societies are unwittingly obedient to a superior force, which dominates them.
Even if one should discover on earth the general fact that controls the particular will of each individual, this would not preserve human freedom. A cause vast enough to apply to millions of people at once and strong enough to move them all in the same direction might easily seem irresistible. After surrendering to it, one is quite prepared to believe that it was impossible to resist.
Thus historians who live in democratic times not only deny certain citizens the power to act on the fate of the people but also deny peoples themselves the ability to shape their own destiny, thereby making them subject to either inflexible providence or a sort of blind fatality. According to such historians, the destiny of every nation is irrevocably fixed by its position, origin, antecedents, and nature, and nothing it does can change that. They see each generation as firmly linked to the preceding one, and in this way they proceed backward in time, from era to era and necessary event to necessary event, all the way back to the origin of the world, forging a long, closely linked chain that encompasses and binds the entire human race.
Not content to show how things happened, they also like to show that they could not have happened otherwise. They contemplate a nation that has reached a certain point in its history and contend that it was obliged to follow the path that took it there. This is easier than showing how it might have chosen a better route.
Perusing the historians of aristocratic ages, and particularly those of Antiquity, one often has the impression that man can become master of his own fate and govern his fellow man if only he can bring himself to heel. A glance at the histories written nowadays would suggest that man has no power over either himself or his surroundings. The historians of Antiquity taught men how to command; today’s historians teach little but how to obey. In their texts, the author often looms large, but humanity is always small.
If this doctrine of fatality, which is so attractive to those who write history in democratic times, were to spread from writers to readers and thereby infiltrate the citizenry en masse and take hold of the public mind, it would soon paralyze the new societies and reduce Christians to Turks.
I would add, moreover, that such a doctrine is particularly dangerous at the present time. Our contemporaries are only too ready to doubt the existence of free will because as individuals they feel frustrated by their weakness no matter which way they turn, yet they are still quite prepared to recognize the strength and independence of men joined together in a social body. One should be careful not to obscure this idea, because the goal is to exalt men’s souls, not to complete the task of laying them low.