1 To understand the laws of this continuous movement is the aim of history.
2 It needs no critical exertion to reduce utterly to dust any deductions drawn from history.
3 Moving troops in close proximity to an enemy is always dangerous, and military history supports that view.
4 So the histories say, and it is all quite wrong, as anyone who cares to look into the matter can easily convince himself.
5 "But every time there have been conquests there have been conquerors; every time there has been a revolution in any state there have been great men," says history.
6 But later on, to fit what had occurred, the historians provided cunningly devised evidence of the foresight and genius of the generals who, of all the blind tools of history were the most enslaved and involuntary.
7 To study the laws of history we must completely change the subject of our observation, must leave aside kings, ministers, and generals, and study the common, infinitesimally small elements by which the masses are moved.
8 The ancients have left us model heroic poems in which the heroes furnish the whole interest of the story, and we are still unable to accustom ourselves to the fact that for our epoch histories of that kind are meaningless.
9 While the sea of history remains calm the ruler-administrator in his frail bark, holding on with a boat hook to the ship of the people and himself moving, naturally imagines that his efforts move the ship he is holding on to.
10 The first method of history is to take an arbitrarily selected series of continuous events and examine it apart from others, though there is and can be no beginning to any event, for one event always flows uninterruptedly from another.
11 They were moved by fear or vanity, rejoiced or were indignant, reasoned, imagining that they knew what they were doing and did it of their own free will, but they all were involuntary tools of history, carrying on a work concealed from them but comprehensible to us.