It took almost exactly two months, but I finished War and Peace last night.
Not to give away the ending, but Tolstoy spends the last 37 pages disproving two premises: (1) that wars are the result of leaders giving orders; (2) that all humans are free to act according to their will. Tolstoy argues—not with characters or metaphors or narrative, but with numbered lists and formal logic—that people act based on context, and that their actions abide by historically-determinable rules.
Gripping stuff, let me tell you.
What interests me here is that Tolstoy uses his 1200-page novel to provide a narrative framework that helps humanize economic theory. Yes, we resist seeing ourselves as statistical automata acting out a predictable system of relations, but if we can develop a narrative language for this sort of behavior then perhaps a more democratic and less heroic vision of the world becomes possible.
But wait, there’s more! W&P is at least as political as it is economic—Tolstoy proposes three ways to think about power:
Either (1) by recognizing that the will of the masses is always unconditionally handed over to a ruler or rulers whom they have chosen, and that therefore any rise of a new power, any struggle against the power once handed over, should be considered only as a violation of the real power.
Or (2) by recognizing that the will of the masses is transferred to a ruler conditionally, under definite and known conditions, and by showing that all constraints, clashes, and even destructions of power come from the non-observation by the rulers of the conditions under which the power was transferred to them.
Or (3) by recognizing that the will of the masses is transferred to a ruler conditionally, but under unknown, undefined conditions, and that the rise of many powers, their struggle, and their fall come only from the greater of lesser degree to which the rulers fulfill those unknown conditions under which the wills of the masses are transferred from some persons to others. (1189.)
(I am quoting from the 2007 Pevear/Volkhonsky translation. I assume that the parenthetical numerals are Tolstoy’s.)
Don’t those theories sound like they were written by a writer on DailyKos analyzing the superdelegate situation?
It is as though W&P were published yesterday. Much of this is the result of the fluent contemporaneity of the translation, but even after two decades of reading prescient human fictions I found myself repeatedly surprised by the clarity and potency of Tolstoy’s world.
