In defence of the Great Man Theory of history

Writing elsewhere
I argued in The Critic that King Charles can be a late bloomer by becoming the builder king.

Salon tonight!
My salon series How to Read a Novel continues tonight, all about Silas Marner. We would love to see you there.

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Thomas Carlyle’s Great Man Theory is a fairly discredited view among historians, who don’t tend to take biography seriously. It is self-evidently absurd to take literally Carlyle’s claim that “The History of the world is but the Biography of great men”. Collective forces are real. But we can endorse Carlyle’s theory without abandoning what Auden called the “vast impersonal forces” of history.

There’s more nuance to Carlyle’s idea than you get from that quote, although that is often how the Great Man Theory of history is presented. And not just by detractors. I found Andrew Roberts’ biography of Churchill defensive to the point of being lopsided because he refused to admit any weakness in the heroic picture, a silly approach for such a brilliant writer. The truth is that Churchill was a great man and a flawed, failed, and weird one. You can worship a hero with all their flaws. Look around: people do it all the time.

Let’s look at Carlyle’s original definition to set terms.

Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realisation and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world’s history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these.

This is not a claim that history is only made by great men. The claim is that people of high accomplishment lead, model, pattern, and create the history of high accomplishment. History is driven by ideas. Ideas originate in Great Men. We are not all capable of having or expressing ideas that change the course of the world. Individuals can tip the balance. Every mob has a leader.

Let me restate the theory: great talent is irreplaceable. We cannot account for Shakespeare and Einstein, Curie and Woolf just with the ideas of materialism or social history. Genius is more than the product of its time. If we don’t believe that, then rather than celebrating the extent of Renaissance talent we should ask: why did it produce so few people of the highest accomplishment? All the cultural factors were in place for a great flourishing but they only enlivened a selection of people.

You might argue against this and say that Leibniz would have discovered calculus if Newton hadn’t. And simultaneous discovery is a well-documented phenomenon. But who was there after Leibniz? For how long can we play that game? The fact that there are great men hardly disproves the case. It is certainly true that for dominant figures to rise the right circumstances must be in place: political leaders are the product of their times. But the combination of personalities on the world stage does matter. We have seen that again and again in the last few years.

We also know that talent is significantly heritable. It is not easy to measure heritable talents, as such, but many facets of talent like intelligence and athletic ability are highly heritable. Talent runs in families, as it did with the Bachs. This all relies on culture and education — but it was the Bach family that produced so many musicians and composers. Can we plausibly deny that J.S. Bach was a Great Man? When it comes to “the history of what man has accomplished” he ranks pretty highly as an irreplaceable talent, perhaps the irreplaceable talent.

Thomas Carlyle, three years before his lectures On Heroes and the Heroic in History. Ironically, not one of the heroes of this blog.

Great talent is also irreplaceable in the sense that a superstar performer cannot be replaced with ten or a hundred median performers. Was there anyone on the Remain campaign with Dominic Cummings’ peculiar combination of interests and abilities? Could that combination really be replicated with a team? And great talent tends to spawn great talent: in philosophy, science, business, and art the best performers tend to have been the pupils of the best performers.

Historians debate Great Man theory in the context of politics. Was the Cold War ended by the rise of decentralised networks in society rather than by the major personalities of Thatcher, Reagan, and John Paul II? When we look broader than politics, Great Man Theory is a little closer to common sense. The argument about whether society shapes people or people shape society is the wrong framing. Of course society shapes Great Men’s development, as it shapes everyone’s. But not everyone, in turn, then shapes society. We are all under the influence of society: only a very few of us then become the influencer.

Great Man Theory gets wheeled out to blame people, even if it is not thought to be reliable to praise them. Increased polarisation in US politics in the 1990s is often blamed on Newt Gingrich and the reforms he made as House Speaker. Network analysis of congressional relationships has shown that there was “a sharp increase in partisan polarization which preceded and then culminated in the 104th Congress (1995-1996).” Gingrich was the high point of an existing trend, not the initiator of one. Polarisation is likely to have caused Gingrich to take control of the House. You see this again and again, like when Hoover gets blamed for the Great Depression. I wonder how you all feel about Liz Truss right now?

Hero worship gets its parallel in the hysterical despair so many people feel about their anti-heroes. This is the inverse of what Carlyle was talking about, but essentially the same thing. “Society everywhere is some representation, not insupportably inaccurate, of a graduated Worship of Heroes—reverence and obedience done to men really great and wise.” Indeed, the prevalence of mediocrity in our leaders was one of Carlyle’s original arguments that it is insufficient to believe times call important figures forward. “Alas, we have known Times call loudly enough for their great man; but not find him when they called!” People do worship heroes (and despise anti-heroes), irrespective of how responsible for history those heroes are.

The question of just how difficult it is to become influential is key. There are very few people on the level of Jesus. As Tyler Cowen says, “Overall it is hard to have very much influence.” Thus, the people who do have influence must be acknowledged as exceptional in some way. It doesn’t matter what the exact role of genetics, environment, and culture all are as much as it matters that they do all have a role. The fact is, some people have a phenomenal impact and most people have almost no impact. Look at what happened when Queen Elizabeth II died. Was that not hero worship of the purest Carlyle sort?

Some people take the “Man” part of Great Man Theory very literally and discredit it on that basis. The Great Man Theory can become the Great Woman Theory or the Great Anyone and Everyone Theory. Just because it originated in a patriarchal world (and, in Thomas Carlyle, in a deeply patriarchal person) doesn’t mean that the existence of Great Women discredits the theory. This criticism reminds me of Samuel Johnson’s comment about small details not disproving general assertions.

If I come to an orchard, and say there’s no fruit here, and then comes a poring man, who finds two apples and three pears, and tells me, “Sir, you are mistaken, I have found both apples and pears,” I should laugh at him: what would that be to the purpose?’

Johnson is as good an example of the theory as any. He wrote a Dictionary. Yes, he had assistants to help with the cutting and pasting and copying — but he read the source material, selected the quotations, and wrote the definitions. What took the French many decades and many men took solitary Sam seven years. When Diderot edited the Encyclopédie he had material from a hundred and forty writers. When Henry Murray worked on the OED in the 1880s, seven hundred and fifty people were involved. Compared with the alternatives, Johnson quite easily fits the definition of a Great Man: he was an irreplaceable talent. He modelled and patterned English and lexicography.

Historians might be more interested in the balance between “bottom up” history and Great Man History but when we look more broadly at talent, Great Man theory remains useful and relevant. We should not take it as far as Carlyle did. His views were possibly tied up with his own personal problems as well as his Calvinist upbringing and his radical politics. And he became right-wing in the worst way.

But it’s hard to flat-out disagree with the way the Poetry Foundation biography of Carlyle puts it: “heroes were necessary for both the individual and society as figures of support and guidance in morally difficult times.” Don’t we see people engaged in hero worship and its opposite all the time? Isn’t that ultimately a good thing? As he said, “great men are still admirable.”

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Salon tonight!
My salon series How to Read a Novel continues tonight, all about Silas Marner. We would love to see you there.

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