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War and Peace: Possibilities for a New History Daniel John Thrift Clemson University, [email protected]

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War and Peace: Possibilities for a New History Daniel John Thrift Clemson University, Dthrift12@Gmail.Com Clemson University TigerPrints All Theses Theses 8-2019 War and Peace: Possibilities for a New History Daniel John Thrift Clemson University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_theses Recommended Citation Thrift, Daniel John, "War and Peace: Possibilities for a New History" (2019). All Theses. 3171. https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_theses/3171 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses at TigerPrints. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Theses by an authorized administrator of TigerPrints. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WAR AND PEACE: POSSIBILITIES FOR A NEW HISTORY A Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of Clemson University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts History by Daniel Thrift August 2019 Accepted by: Dr. Michael Meng, Committee Chair Dr. David Coombs Dr. Stephanie Barczewski ABSTRACT By piggybacking on the critiques of the historical discipline provided by Leo Tolstoy in his momentous novel, War and Peace, I assert that history may undergo a reconstruction. By ridding the historical discipline of the self-interest that has atrophied its ability to make a significant, positive impact on the world, and installing a metaphysics devoted to equality, freedom, and universality, I believe that it may be revitalized as a profession. I call for a new history, one built in the Hegelian-Marxist tradition, which will lead humanity into a future defined by love and self-sacrifice. It is a history explicitly opposed to neutrality; love is not neutral. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page TITLE PAGE .................................................................................................................... i ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... ii INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 1. TOLSTOY AND HISTORY ....................................................................... 15 Napoloen and the Mockery of the Actor................................................ 15 The Mockery of the Narrator ................................................................. 23 The Mockery of Historical Narrative ..................................................... 33 Evaluation of the Polemic ...................................................................... 39 2. THE RESPONSE TO TOLSTOY ............................................................... 44 The Mistake of Omission ....................................................................... 46 The Mistake of Interpretation ................................................................ 56 3. HISTORIANS GRAPPLING WITH THE PARTICULAR AND THE UNIVERSAL ......................................................................................... 70 Historical-Philosophical Explorations ................................................... 72 Examples of Historical Writing in Recognition of the Particular-Universal Tension ........................................... 85 4. A NEW HISTORY ...................................................................................... 97 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................ 130 iii INTRODUCTION The human as a free agent, unbound by determinism and available for historical investigation, is foundational to the generally accepted structure of history currently dominant in the West. The modern historian (in broad terms) asserts that history is shaped by individual human actions, is knowable to historians through the construction of historical narratives, and is non-teleological. In his tremendous work, War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy challenged professional historians and the modern notion of freedom which undergirds the modern historical enterprise. The critique that he delivered in the novel covers every inch of the aforementioned ideological ground, from agency, to historical narration, to non-determinism. Tolstoy viewed history as none of those things; it consists of natural laws that determine the course of events through time. Natural laws impersonally dictate the course of events, in which humans happen to be involved. Humanity, in the meantime, naively believes that its existence possesses that grander meaning known as freedom. Tolstoy accused historians of essentially being false priests, proselytizers of a religion that peddles the dishonest narrative of human freedom, when Tolstoy knows that the only freedom humanity can attain is freedom from the desire for freedom. And, like so many other such proselytizers, Tolstoy accuses historians of selling their narrative of freedom for the sake of their own gain. The self-interest of national identity, which Tolstoy exploited to its fullest when addressing the historical interpretations of the Napoleonic Wars during his time, is certainly prominent in his discourse. National identity as a form of political partiality has featured largely (something modern historians are more likely to admit to now than they 1 might have been then) in historical narratives, at least through the Cold War. Modern historians, and modern academics generally, now understand themselves to be much more international, inclusive, and globally minded. Conferences and organizations for the various historical subdisciplines take place on a regular basis, and include PhDs from universities the world round. Modern historians would therefore be either dismissive of, or offended by, the critique initially offered by Tolstoy. The self-interest of nationality is, however, only Tolstoy’s starting point, and is used to illustrate a basic problem which is the focus of the rest of his polemic: historians write different narratives of past events because their finite nature as humans prohibit them from understanding the whole, the universal. And when historians do write different histories, attributing this or that event to this or that cause in contradictory ways, examples of which Tolstoy illustrated with a polemic concerning the French invasion of Russia at the beginning of the third volume of War and Peace, how must such a conflict be mediated? There can be no mediation between narratives under Tolstoy; the histories written thus far have all been false reconstructions of the past designed to preserve the self-interested error of freedom. Tolstoy characterizes the diversion historians attempt to make from determined history, or truth, as error within a determined system, although that description raises the question of how error is feasible in a determined system. The most prominent answer to the question of competing narratives, an answer which diverges from Tolstoy, rests largely in Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay The Hedgehog and the Fox. Massively influential on how Tolstoy’s thoughts concerning history have been understood, Berlin would have had us believe that Tolstoy was resigned to the 2 different narratives he disregarded in War and Peace. According to Berlin, Tolstoy was an historical, empirical Skeptic who believed that history could only be found in the existence of facts, thus limiting the historical pursuit in its ability to make claims of certain truth. The type of empiricism described by Berlin avoids the elements of reconstruction and future action that could be part of the historical discipline, but instead places absolute primacy on historical data points, thus negating the potential for the construction and use of facts toward an end. Berlin used the analogy of the hedgehog and the fox as a dichotomy to understand artists and thinkers relative to their approach to knowledge and metaphysical truth. He characterized Tolstoy as someone who wished for a dominant unifying truth, but who knew too much about the world to honestly think such a metaphysical truth could exist (the fox who believed in being a hedgehog). Such a characterization was rather convenient for academics of the time, and provided only a partial look at Tolstoy’s thought. Portraying Tolstoy as favorable to the historian who would recognize their own limited perspective without seeking something greater was a theistic narrative. Berlin’s portrayal of Tolstoy enshrined the particular as valuable and dismissed hope of the universal. It supported the academic system as bourgeois, since affirming the particular is also to affirm self-interest. The particular is that which can be identified as separate. The particular resides within the universal as a single point. The particular may be described, as it allows for comparison and disparity. Because it can only exist alongside comparison and disparity, the particular assumes the existence of opposition and conflict. The universal is that which is; it is comprehensive, all-encompassing, 3 without an opposition. The human is particular, its history is particular, and its expression thus far in its existence has all been particular. Tolstoy recognizes the universal through natural law, but places humans as subservient to those laws because of our particularity. We are self-interested, express desire, and take action for those desires and thus cause violence and conflict because our particularity restricts us from the universal. Berlin’s approach to the particular-universal dichotomy, or perhaps tension as described by Tolstoy, lacks nuance, but the empiricism and pluralism he espouses are part of the particular.
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