In historical events great men—so called—are but the labels that serve to give a name to an event, and like labels, they have the least possible connection with the event itself.
Leo Tolstoy
Anyone who has made it to the end of War and Peace will remember the strange sensation of finishing one of literature’s most epic stories and immediately being thrown into—of all things—an essay on the philosophy of history. With your heart throbbing with emotion for the characters who made it to the end of the novel, you are hardly in a fit frame of mind for considering the deep mechanisms of historical progress.
Tolstoy himself may not even have been in a fit frame of mind, as his essay—while well-written and interesting—is not exactly persuasive. Indeed, the famous philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote one of his most famous philosophical essays, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” analyzing why a man as brilliant as Tolstoy could put forward a work of analysis that does not really hold together. In Berlin’s opinion, Tolstoy is a classic “fox” trying to be a “hedgehog”—meaning, that although Tolstoy’s brilliance was expansive and intuitive, born of his great gift for empathy, he longed to be a systematic thinker who could subject his life to logical conclusions.
Tolstoy’s particular gifts aside, let us turn to the main argument of his essay—namely, that the “Great Man” theory of history is a mistake. Tolstoy argues that, although we conventionally ascribe major historical events to the decisions of certain powerful individuals, it is more accurate to think of history as the product of a countless number of choices and actions by everyone involved. To use Tolstoy’s own example of Napoleon, he argues that, although Napoleon is treated as a kind of mortal god who changed European history—a military genius who defeated so many foes—in reality he was usually unaware of what was happening during his major conflicts, and entirely powerless to influence the outcomes of his battles.
Now, I think nearly everyone would say that Tolstoy pushes his point too far. I doubt many historians would be willing to argue that Napoleon was not a particularly important man, who certainly did exert an influence on the outcome of his battles. Nevertheless, the opposite opinion —say, that Napoleon was wholly in control of his destiny—can also easily be taken too far. Indeed, as far as I can tell, amid historians nowadays there is quite a bit of hostility to the “Great Man” view of history.
I hate to be the sort of person to argue for a middle ground. “It is a little of both” is the oldest intellectual cop out in history. Nevertheless, it does seem logically inescapable that “men” (or, to be a little more inclusive, “people”) are both products of their times and makers of events. The more interesting question is to what extent any given individual is crucial to the shape of history.
The most convincing proponent of the “Great Man” view of history I know is Robert Caro (whose tomes make even War and Peace seem lightweight). In his biography of Bob Moses, for example, Caro makes a convincing case that Moses was a uniquely gifted administrator—an expert in the accumulation and deployment of political power. The very shape of New York City—its many highways, bridges, and tunnels, its parks and housing developments—is, for better or worse, a testament to Moses’s influence.
But a skeptic might say that, as special as Moses might have been, cities all over the United States implemented similar programs—bulldozing neighborhoods for highways, demolishing buildings to create high-rise public housing. If Moses was really so special, then why did he merely accomplish what was basically accomplished all around the country by far less famous individuals?
This rebuttal works in the abstract but not the concrete (pun intended). In Caro’s telling, you can see exactly how Moses subverted rules, bypassed regulations, and bent politicians and contractors to his will, in a way that was completely unprecedented. After witnessing his machinations, it is very difficult not to be convinced that, at the very least, Moses’s specific personality and prejudices carried historic weight.
This is not to take the opposite view, that so-called “Great Men” are the only ones who count in history. It is just to make the claim that, while every individual can exert some influence on the shape of history, some individuals wield considerably more influence than others. And while this may feel like a cop-out, arguably both Tolstoy’s view or the opposite extreme are anti-humanistic—the former, because individual qualities are held to play no role in history, and the latter, because the majority of humankind are reduced to automatons carrying out the will of a few geniuses on top.
I will cease to belabor this point—which I suspect will seem rather obvious to most—as it is just another form of the “chicken and egg” problem. I will only add that, as an amateur student of history, I think it is greatly rewarding to consider the individual experiences of both the major players (the so-called “Great Men”) and the supposedly “ordinary” people on the bottom. It all has much to teach us.
Lotz in Translation 