GUERRA E PACE (Isaiah Berlin)

Riflessioni di Isaiah Berlin su 'Guerra e pace'....per Tolstoy..." What are great men? they are ordinary human beings, who are ignorant and vain enough to accept responsibility for the life of society.."

"Tolstoy's central thesis [....] is that there is a natural law whereby the lives of human beings no less than those of nature are determined; but that men, unable to face this inexorable process, seek to represent it as a succession of free choices, to fix responsibility for what occurs upon persons endowed by them with heroic virtues or heroic vices, and called by them 'great men'. What are great men? they are ordinary human beings, who are ignorant and vain enough to accept responsibility for the life of society, individuals who would rather take the blame for all the cruelties, injustices, disasters justified in their name, than recognize their own insignificance and impotence in the cosmic flow which pursues its course irrespective of their wills and ideals. This is the central point of those passages (in which Tolstoy excelled) in which the actual course of events is described, side by side with the absurd, egocentric explanations which persons blown up with the sense of their own importance necessarily give to them; as well as of the wonderful descriptions of moments of  illumination in which the truth about the human condition dawns upon those who have the humility to recognize their own unimportance and irrelevance." (THE HEDGEHOG AND THE FOX By Isaiah Berlin, pag. 27)