character,’ says a reactionary French historian of Louis. Those words might have been written of Nicholas: neither of them knew how to wish, but both knew how to not wish. But what really could be ‘wished’ by the last representative of a hopelessly lost historic cause? ‘Usually he listened, smiled, and rarely decided upon anything. His first word was usually No.’ Of whom is that written? Again of Capet. But if this is so, the manners of Nicholas were an absolute plagiarism. They both go toward the abyss ‘with the crown pushed down over their eyes.’ But would it after all be easier to go to an abyss, which you cannot escape anyway, with your eyes open?”[1]
More persuasively than Plechanov, Trotsky is calling attention to the fact that a historic personality cannot be explained from the point of view of the individual psychologist alone, that his traits, intellectual and moral, are products of a continuous interaction between his native powers and social conditions. Does that mean that any king or czar in the place of Louis XVI. or Nicholas II. would have had the same personal traits? Trotsky is not so rash as to affirm this. He admits that if the historical accidents of heredity had been different, the Russian Revolution might have run into “a very different make of Czar.” But the historical result would have been the same, because the fall of the autocracy was inevitable. Even a strong czar could not have saved it for long.
This shifts the position to the familiar view that the significance of personality in history is limited to comparatively unimportant variations, and that every major development in the historical process is determined by social and economic forces in which heroes and great men are a negligible factor. The greater the historic event, the more intense the discharge of accumulated social tensions—the more completely does it wipe out the personal peculiarities of the actors. In powerful and gripping metaphors, Trotsky sums up:
“To a tickle, people react differently, but to a red-hot iron, alike. As a steam-hammer converts a sphere and a cube alike into sheet-metal, so under the blow of too great and inexorable events resistances are smashed and the boundaries of ‘individuality’ lost.”[2]
What Trotsky makes us see is that there are certain historical
