Overcoming system and "Science" in war and peace

Ever since Isaac Newton explained the amazingly complex movements of the planets by four simple laws, thinkers have claimed to have done the same for society and history. They have aspired to a social "science," in the hard sense, a deterministic model as capable of prediction as physics and astronomy. Tolstoy regarded all such ambitions as absurd and dedicated War and Peace to showing why. Most generals believe in a hard science of warfare that will allow them to "foresee all contingencies," but Kutuzov knows that battle is a matter of "a hundred million diverse chances which will be decided on the instant." The putative social science presumes a world of certainty, but in Tolstoy's world wisdom consists in knowing how to orient oneself to a world of radical uncertainty, as Kutuzov does. Tolstoy's argument is all the more pertinent in our time.