viii PREFACE TO ORIGINAL EDITION OF VOLUME I
the School of Modern History at Oxford under the tuition of Mr A. J. P. Taylor
did not pass entirely into oblivion. Unlike our illustrious predecessor at
Magdalen College, Edward Gibbon, I cannot pretend that my years at Oxford
'were the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life'. I did not accept that Mr
Taylor's inimitable opinions are invariably perverse, and I respect his prompt-
ings that both chance, and the will of individual human beings, play their part
in directing the course of events. As a result, in trying to reconcile the contrary
influences, I have come to hold that Causality is not composed exclusively of
determinist, individualist, or random elements, but from a combination of all
three. In any given historical situation, I insist at the start on identifying a matrix
of social, economic, cultural, institutional, military, personal, and dynamic
political factors which are pertinent to all further developments. But there I
draw the line. I think that the matrix of historical forces determines the limits of
the possible, but does not, and cannot determine what course events will subse-
quently take within those given limits. I believe that a range of choices is always
available to individuals, especially to those set in positions of authority, and that
their response to the options before them can influence mankind's fate deci-
sively. In the realm of human motivation, I happen to believe in the primacy of
the irrational, seeing Reason as the servant, not as the master of our fears, emo-
tions, and instincts. Finally, I believe that all human beings are fallible; that all
leaders of men are inadequate to their calling: and that the results of their
actions are rarely an exact measure of what they intended. As Bismarck once
remarked, they are not so much in full control of events, as in a position occa-
sionally to deflect them. When they fail to do either, they lay themselves open to
what the ancients called Fate or Providence, what the moderns call Accidents,
and what the British call 'muddling through'. In short, life is not entirely absurd;
but it is not entirely rational either. Among British and American scholars, atti-
tudes of this sort are not uncommon; but whether they find any coherent expres-
sion in the text only the reader can judge.
In writing the history of a modern country, however, philosophical reflections
must often take second place to more practical problems. Among them is
the problem of hindsight. On the one hand, the cautious historian is bound to
wonder whether the teleological exercise of tracing the origins of a modern state
or nation from the present into the past is essentially unhistorical. It tends to
confuse antecedent and postcedent with cause and effect, and obliterates the
multifarious alternatives which faced the actors of the drama at each stage of
their progress. It justifies the course of events in terms of their outcome. In the
Polish case, it suggests that the present People's Republic of Poland is the one
and only conceivable product of the historical process. On the other hand, the
historian is unable to deny that he is living in the fourth quarter of the twentieth
century, and not in the Dark Ages, and that he is blessed with the benefit of hind-
sight whether he likes it or not. Nor can he ignore the interests of his readers,
whose curiosity about a modern country will have more probably been aroused
by the happenings of their own times than by any thirst for knowledge about the