For history to recognize men’s freedom as a force capable of influencing historical events, that is, as not subject to laws, is the same as for astronomy to recognize a free force moving the heavenly bodies. That recognition destroys the possibility of the existence of laws, that is, of any knowledge whatever. If at least one freely moving body exists, then the laws of Kepler and Newton no longer exist, nor does any notion of the movement of the heavenly bodies. If there exists one free act of man, then not a single historical law exists or any notion of historical events.

Tolstoy, War and Peace

What determines course of history? In the epilogue of War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy proposes there exist as yet unidentified natural laws that govern the movement of peoples across time and space. That history is an artifact of narrative than fact of matter. The beginning, the middle and the end, artificial demarcations of time and space, given form and shape by the collective unconscious. Tolstoy disputing the great man theory of history, that progress hangs on the words and deeds of great men, preferring instead every vector in the field of action bares on the course of history. The present the resultant of innumerable actions, apparent and invisible. Tolstoy appealing to a concrete universe, arguing, “every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own free will, is in a historical sense involuntary and is related to the whole cause of history and predestined from eternity.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY: 

1. Sparks, John B. The Histomaps, Four Thousand Years of World History; Relative Power of Contemporary States, Nations, and Empires. Chicago: Rand McNally & Co., 1931. Print.
2. Tolstoy, Leo Nikolayevich. War and Peace. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, New York: Vintage Books, 2007. Print.