War and Peace, Part 2: Second Epilogue, Chapter 2 summary

What happens

1. Historians who attribute events to individual rulers undermine one another through conflicting explanations of those rulers’ power.
2. Universal historians describe rulers as products of surrounding forces but also treat their power as an independent cause.
3. The narrator argues that interactions among prominent individuals cannot account for millions accepting Bourbon rule.
4. A comparison with peasants discussing clouds exposes historians’ shifting claims about whether power causes events or results from them.
5. Cultural historians identify intellectual activity as the driving force, without explaining how ideas govern collective actions.
6. When cultural historians discuss actual campaigns, they return to rulers’ wills and contradict their own explanations.

What to notice

The sentence identifies the central gap in explanations based on ideas. Naming a force does not establish how it produces collective action.

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