History is the biography of Great Men. Points including this topic.
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When we say, as Carlyle said, that “Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who worked there”.
We mean that in every age there have been men who have risen head and shoulders above their fellows, and who, by their strong character, dominant personality and intellectual genius, have been “the modelers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain.”
For example, the life of Pericles is a summary of what Athens accomplished in art, literature and statesmanship; the biography of Julius Caesar is a history of the rise of the Roman Empire; Martin Luther was the creator and abstract of the Reformation; William Pitt’s life is the history of the creation of the British Empire, and the work of Rousseau accounts for the French Revolution.
It was such great men great statesmen, soldiers, poets, writers, prophets, rulers, priests, philanthropists, and business-organizers who started the great movements in history, and led men, for good or evil, in the way they have gone.
No doubt there is truth in this view; but it is not the whole truth. For it is as true to say that the Great Man is the product of his age, as to say he is its creator.
We mean that in every age there have been men who have risen head and shoulders above their fellows, and who, by their strong character, dominant personality and intellectual genius, have been “the modelers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain.”
For example, the life of Pericles is a summary of what Athens accomplished in art, literature and statesmanship; the biography of Julius Caesar is a history of the rise of the Roman Empire; Martin Luther was the creator and abstract of the Reformation; William Pitt’s life is the history of the creation of the British Empire, and the work of Rousseau accounts for the French Revolution.
It was such great men great statesmen, soldiers, poets, writers, prophets, rulers, priests, philanthropists, and business-organizers who started the great movements in history, and led men, for good or evil, in the way they have gone.
No doubt there is truth in this view; but it is not the whole truth. For it is as true to say that the Great Man is the product of his age, as to say he is its creator.
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The Great Man theory is a 19th-century idea according to which history can be largely explained by the impact of "great men", or heroes; highly influential individuals who, due to either their personal charisma, intelligence, wisdom, or political skill used their power in a way that had a decisive historical impact. The theory was popularized in the 1840s by Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle. But in 1860 Herbert Spencer formulated a counter-argument that has remained influential throughout the 20th century to the present: Spencer said that such great men are the products of their societies, and that their actions would be impossible without the social conditions built before their lifetimes. Thus subsequent social history, economic history, and political history have de-emphasized the primacy of great men.
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