To Tolstoy, theories of history are a fultile attempt to impose order on chaos. He rejects in particular the "great-man" theory, cutting Napoleon down to size.
When the current Chief of Naval Operations took office in 2015, he emphasized reading history as an important professional development practice. Knowing history enables better decisions about the future. This was well received, as most military leaders I know already are avid readers of history.
To be sure, it would be hard to argue that reading history is not intrinsically valuable for a military leader. Reading literature, however, more often is considered superfluous or of minimal benefit. This is unfortunate, as the best literature can enrich good leadership traits in many ways, such as fortifying a mature sense of justice. It also can inform the way we read nonfiction, especially history.
Thus, for those who read mostly history, I recommend taking a break to read Tolstoy’s War and Peace if you have never done so. In it, Tolstoy challenges the very way we understand history. Indeed, with this text, he wages his own war against how history traditionally is recorded, understood, and conveyed.
Tolstoy’s epic spans the years 1805 to 1820, including the battles of Schongrabern and Austerlitz in 1805 and Borodino in 1812, the latter during Napoleon’s Russia campaign. It brings forth more than 500 characters in a social, political, and cultural examination that is a remarkable achievement, if unsparing in laying bare humanity’s capacity for both folly and cruelty. Tolstoy imposes on the early 19th-century setting many social problems of his day, and in so doing bends his own telling of history. But he also attempts to set the historical record straight, namely, by debunking any notion that history can be understood only through the prism of some grand theory or framework.
Tolstoy does not attack any specific historical theory as being wrong. They all are nonsense. Theories of history reflect only man’s conceit and are a futile attempt to impose order on chaos. We think we know why things turned out the way they did, but actually we haven’t a clue. Whether we get crushed or exalted is mostly a matter of chance.
By the mid-19th century, philosophers and historians aplenty had written and were writing elaborate theories of history. Tolstoy reserves particular contempt for the “great-man” theory, cutting Napoleon down to size. Another target of Tolstoy’s ire is Karl von Clausewitz, whose theory of grand strategy is incapable of accounting for the actual chaos and misery experienced by soldiers in battle. As scholar Arnold Weinstein notes, “Tolstoy seems obsessed by the disconnect between sweeping global theories and the actual murkiness of real experience.”
It is not hard to reject, in whole or part, Tolstoy’s rather extreme view. If real experience is so mysterious and chaotic that it is impervious to a theoretical structure for comprehension and analysis, it would seem impossible to draw enduring lessons from major historical events. We would be better off forgetting the past. On its face, that is absurd.
But Tolstoy was a great artist who makes us think, so we should be cautious about summarily dismissing the critique. He gives us ammunition to more incisively question the historian’s cause-and-effect assertions. In a history of the Battle of Midway, for example, the historian may claim Admiral Chester Nimitz ordered A, B, and C, and these orders resulted in X, Y, and Z. Are we sure chance did not play a bigger role? I suspect Tolstoy would endeavor to explain how a thousand twists and turns in the battle, experienced and reacted to by thousands of pilots and sailors, had a far greater impact on the outcome than did orders from on high. Tolstoy writes at length in the epilogue on how flawed these attempts at causality can be, more often just post-facto constructions to assign blame or justify hero worship.
I do consider Admiral Nimitz a genuine American naval hero who took courageous and consequential decisions ahead of Midway and many other battles. I have read Tolstoy carefully and cannot agree in the main with his argument. I can better appreciate, however, how easy it can be to ignore or dismiss the complexity of experience when one grasps for some unifying historical framework or theory. We can all fall into the trap of emphasizing the experiences that fit the formula.
After reading War and Peace, one is unlikely to ever read history the same way again. Tolstoy forever expands our critical aperture. And that is just one of his many gifts to us.
Captain Bray served as a naval intelligence officer for 28 years before retiring in 2016. He will join the Naval Institute staff later this month.