Tag: Great Man Theory of History

Most of us, when we were young, were taught history as a series of events, with the names of important men and women attached. In effect, we were taught the “Great Man” theory of history, that history is the result of the actions of great individuals.

Do the great matter? Do they make a difference?

Sometimes, I think.

In some cases, a person we call great fills a role someone else would have filled, and does it no better than anyone else would have. Sometimes they fill a role someone else would have filled and perform it so well it makes a huge difference.  And sometimes they wrench history about, in a role someone else would not have filled.

Let us start with a man who filled a role someone else would have, but did it brilliantly, and it mattered.

Napoleon.

The Revolution almost inevitably ended with a dictator. I don’t think, given the sort of revolution France had, that could have been avoided.

That it was Napoleon, one of the greatest generals in history, mattered. He didn’t have to be a great general to get the job, he had to be in the right place at the right time. A competent general could have gotten the job.

Napoleon almost never lost a battle. Other French generals lost often. That mattered. Napoleon, wherever he went, changed everything: from ending the Holy Roman Empire, to shattering various other bonds of feudalism, Napoleon changed Europe far, far beyond France. A man who lost even a few more battles than Napoleon did, wouldn’t have.

Let us take two modern great men who, I think, changed little. Start with Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook. Someone was going to win the “social friends” space. For a while it looked like it would be MySpace, and there were contenders before Facebook. Indeed, Facebook is not dominant in every country in this space.

All Zuckerberg did was win a space someone would have won. The details are different, sure, but not enough to really matter to anyone. Having won it he has done nothing particularly different anyone else would have done in that space.

Though still worshipped as a genius, I think Bill Gates is in the same category. MS DOS (in which I was an expert) was little different from any other OS that IBM could have chosen at the time. Windows (like the Macintosh) is just Xerox Park tech, which if Gates had not been around, would have been stolen/co-opted by someone else (aka. Jobs).

Gates was very good at creating a near-monopoly for a couple decades, but other businessmen in the same situation might well have done the same thing.   Perhaps they wouldn’t have, and he made a difference. If so, that difference was negative, it seems to me.

If something is inevitable, someone will do it. The specific individual Who does it only matters if they are extraordinary. If they are just very good at what they do, well, someone else very good could have stepped up and the difference would have been minor.

I suspect this applies to a lot of earlier “Lords of Industry.” Ford, for example.

In the “inevitable” but it mattered who it was category I’d slot, say, Genghis Khan. He wasn’t the only one trying to unify the Mongols, but his degree of success rested on his own particular genius, which, oddly, was mainly that he was an extraordinary judge of ability and character in other men and women. Temujin’s generals and administrators were extraordinary, and he made loyal followers out of people he had been enemies with. Similar to Shaka (but much more succesfully since he didn’t have to face 19th century weapons), he was also able to turn his society into an extraordinarily efficient war machine.

So who came out of nowhere and changed the world? Who forged a position which wouldn’t have existed otherwise, then did something extraordinary with it?

I find it hard to think of anyone. In the intellectual sphere, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, for example, came out of a specific time and place where philosophers and teachers were very highly valued because they taught people how to argue.  (Read Plato’s dialogues and tell me, for all his sneering at “sophists” he is not an amazing debater.)

Perhaps one can make a case for Newton, but Leibniz created calculus almost at the same time. Were the rest of his discoveries made much sooner than they otherwise would have been?

Or perhaps the great religious figures? Buddha, Christ, Confucius. Does a Buddha have to happen? Certainly the circumstances are there for one in the newly urbanized cities of northern India with their loss of faith in the old Vedic religion. Indeed, modern Hinduism really comes out of that period as well, for all they claim the Vedas they have little in common with that religion.

Someone would have done what Buddha did, but I think a strong argument exists that how well he did it, and how he did it matters.

So, what do my readers think? Who would you nominate as coming out of nowhere and changing the world? Who is the great one who did not fill a slot someone would have filled?