Men uniting in these combinations always assume such
relations toward one another that the larger number take
a more direct share, and the smaller number a less direct
share, in the collective action for which they have combined.
Of all the combinations in which men unite for collective action one of the most striking and definite examples
is an army.
Every army is composed of lower grades of the servicethe
rank and fileof whom there are always the greatest number;
of the next higher military rankcorporals and noncommissioned officers of whom there are fewer, and of still-higher
officers of whom there are still fewer, and so on to the highest
military command which is concentrated in one person.
A military organization may be quite correctly compared to a cone, of which the base with the largest diameter
consists of the rank and file; the next higher and smaller
section of the cone consists of the next higher grades of the
army, and so on to the apex, the point of which will represent the commander in chief.
The soldiers, of whom there are the most, form the lower
section of the cone and its base. The soldier himself does
the stabbing, hacking, burning, and pillaging, and always
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receives orders for these actions from men above him; he
himself never gives an order. The noncommissioned officers
(of whom there are fewer) perform the action itself less frequently than the soldiers, but they already give commands.
An officer still less often acts directly himself, but commands still more frequently. A general does nothing but
command the troops, indicates the objective, and hardly
ever uses a weapon himself. The commander in chief never
takes direct part in the action itself, but only gives general
orders concerning the movement of the mass of the troops.
A similar relation of people to one another is seen in every combination of men for common activityin agriculture,
trade, and every administration.
And so without particularly analyzing all the contiguous sections of a cone and of the ranks of an army, or the
ranks and positions in any administrative or public business whatever from the lowest to the highest, we see a law by
which men, to take associated action, combine in such relations that the more directly they participate in performing
the action the less they can command and the more numerous they are, while the less their direct participation in the
action itself, the more they command and the fewer of them
there are; rising in this way from the lowest ranks to the
man at the top, who takes the least direct share in the action
and directs his activity chiefly to commanding.
This relation of the men who command to those they
command is what constitutes the essence of the conception
called power.
Having restored the condition of time under which all
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events occur, find that a command is executed only when
it is related to a corresponding series of events. Restoring the essential condition of relation between those who
command and those who execute, we find that by the very
nature of the case those who command take the smallest
part in the action itself and that their activity is exclusively
directed to commanding.
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Chapter VII
When an event is taking place people express their opinions and wishes about it, and as the event results from the
collective activity of many people, some one of the opinions
or wishes expressed is sure to be fulfilled if but approximately. When one of the opinions expressed is fulfilled, that
opinion gets connected with the event as a command preceding it.
Men are hauling a log. Each of them expresses his opinion
as to how and where to haul it. They haul the log away, and it
happens that this is done as one of them said. He ordered it.
There we have command and power in their primary form.
The man who worked most with his hands could not think
so much about what he was doing, or reflect on or command what would result from the common activity; while
the man who commanded more would evidently work less
with his hands on account of his greater verbal activity.
When some larger concourse of men direct their activity to a common aim there is a yet sharper division of those
who, because their activity is given to directing and commanding, take less less part in the direct work.
When a man works alone he always has a certain set of
reflections which as it seems to him directed his past activity, justify his present activity, and guide him in planning
his future actions. Just the same is done by a concourse of
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people, allowing those who do not take a direct part in the
activity to devise considerations, justifications, and surmises concerning their collective activity.
For reasons known or unknown to us the French began to drown and kill one another. And corresponding to
the event its justification appears in people’s belief that this
was necessary for the welfare of France, for liberty, and for
equality. People ceased to kill one another, and this event
was accompanied by its justification in the necessity for a
centralization of power, resistance to Europe, and so on.
Men went from the west to the east killing their fellow men,
and the event was accompanied by phrases about the glory of France, the baseness of England, and so on. History
shows us that these justifications of the events have no common sense and are all contradictory, as in the case of killing
a man as the result of recognizing his rights, and the killing of millions in Russia for the humiliation of England.
But these justifications have a very necessary significance
in their own day.
These justifications release those who produce the events
from moral responsibility. These temporary aims are like
the broom fixed in front of a locomotive to clear the snow
from the rails in front: they clear men’s moral responsibilities from their path.
Without such justification there would be no reply to the
simplest question that presents itself when examining each
historical event. How is it that millions of men commit collective crimesmake war, commit murder, and so on?
With the present complex forms of political and social
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life in Europe can any event that is not prescribed, decreed,
or ordered by monarchs, ministers, parliaments, or newspapers be imagined? Is there any collective action which
cannot find its justification in political unity, in patriotism,
in the balance of power, or in civilization? So that every
event that occurs inevitably coincides with some expressed
wish and, receiving a justification, presents itself as the result of the will of one man or of several men.
In whatever direction a ship moves, the flow of the waves
it cuts will always be noticeable ahead of it. To those on
board the ship the movement of those waves will be the only
perceptible motion.
Only by watching closely moment by moment the movement of that flow and comparing it with the movement of
the ship do we convince ourselves that every bit of it is occasioned by the forward movement of the ship, and that we
were led into error by the fact that we ourselves were imperceptibly moving.
We see the same if we watch moment by moment the
movement of historical characters (that is, re-establish
the inevitable condition of all that occursthe continuity of
movement in time) and do not lose sight of the essential
connection of historical persons with the masses.
When the ship moves in one direction there is one and
the same wave ahead of it, when it turns frequently the wave
ahead of it also turns frequently. But wherever it may turn
there always will be the wave anticipating its movement.
Whatever happens it always appears that just that event
was foreseen and decreed. Wherever the ship may go, the
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rush of water which neither directs nor increases its movement foams ahead of it, and at a distance seems to us not
merely to move of itself but to govern the ship’s movement
also.
Examining only those expressions of the will of historical persons which, as commands, were related to events,
historians have assumed that the events depended on those
commands. But examining the events themselves and the
connection in which the historical persons stood to the people, we have found that they and their orders were dependent
on events. The incontestable proof of this deduction is that,
however many commands were issued, the event does not
take place unless there are other causes for it, but as soon as
an event occursbe it what it maythen out of all the continually expressed wishes of different people some will always
be found which by their meaning and their time of utterance are related as commands to the events.
Arriving at this conclusion we can reply directly and
positively to these two essential questions of history:
(1) What is power?
(2) What force produces the movement of the nations?
(1) Power is the relation of a given person to other individuals, in which the more this person expresses opinions,
predictions, and justifications of the collective action that is
performed, the less is his participation in that action.
(2) The movement of nations is caused not by power, nor
by intellectual activity, nor even by a combination of the
two as historians have supposed, but by the activity of all
the people who participate in the events, and who always
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combine in such a way that those taking the largest direct
share in the event take on themselves the least responsibility and vice versa.
Morally the wielder of power appears to cause the event;
physically it is those who submit to the power. But as the
moral activity is inconceivable without the physical, the
cause of the event is neither in the one nor in the other but
in the union of the two.
Or in other words, the conception of a cause is inapplicable to the phenomena we are examining.
In the last analysis we reach the circle of infinitythat final limit to which in every domain of thought man’s reason
arrives if it is not playing with the subject. Electricity produces heat, heat
