How true is the Great Man fallacy/theory?

Hello everyone,

Something's bugging me. You know about the Great Man fallacy, how it's not one man who can change history but general conditions have more influence.
Yet, there is a number of thread about WI Hitler died, Napoleon didn't decide to go to Russia, etc...

So, what's your opinion on this? Do great men matter or is it just the general conditions of the time?
 
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Saphroneth

Banned
Conditions matter long-term, generally.

I think just about everyone on this forum believes a kind of synthesis view to some extent (whether they admit it or not) - it's hard to dispute that, say, Nelson influenced things a lot, but then again it's hard to argue that he could have ever achieved those victories if he was Austrian - insufficient navy!

So the long term conditions define what is possible, and then great and lesser men navigate through those corridors of possibility.

Another example is Santa Ana. The man was such a breathtaking incompetent as a general that he led to Mexico substantially underperforming their potential.

I think the flaw in the great-man thinking per se, though, is thinking that if a Great Man didn't exist or did something different everything else would progress without surprises - that is, the Great Man fallacy is kind of like saying the Great Man is the one player character in a world of limited-response NPCs.

No Marx? Well, perhaps the writers of the books which lay out the intellectual foundations of communism are Bradshaw and Engels, or Bradshaw and Holdt...

Hitler dies? Well, the German nation-state isn't just going to sit there on its laurels - as if he was the only person who could give it life. Something's going to happen - perhaps Goering always had this bright idea, or Bormann wanted a house in the Swiss Alps, or maybe OKH and the SS and the Party as a whole fall out over the spoils and the whole thing collapses in a diadochi-like mess.
 
General conditions can change history, masses of people can change history and "great men" can change history. It's any, and I hate the post-modernist take that there is no such thing as "great men". Of course there are; people give an individual a high degree of authority, and the more power and influence they have, the more they can effect things. President Kennedy had a more massive effect on history than a plumber in Iowa. At a same time, either can effect history. It's just that the more base of influence you have, the more likely you are to effect more things in more varied ways.
 
Hello everyone,

Something's bugging me. You know about the Great Man fallacy, how it's not one man who can change history but general conditions have more influence.
Yet, there is a number of thread about WI Hitler died, Napoleon didn't decide to go to Russia, etc...

So, what's your opinion on this? Do great men matter or is it just the general conditions of the time?

Great Men matter. Otherwise, the Union Army's Anaconda Plan is a success in the East (Blockade, seize the ports, drive down the Mississippi, and drive down the eastern seaboard (1), linking up in the Deep South, with both eastern and western armies driving the surviving Southern forces into the unfriendly confines of the Appalachian mountains) as well as the West right from the get-go. Instead, Southern Great Men in the East keep the war going for far longer than it should have (having mostly lackluster at best opponents pre-Gettysburg certainly helped). So too, Great Men in the West had a much easier time of things making war against the mostly herd of cats that were the Confederate Armies of Tennessee and Mississippi. Having Joe Johnston avoid being wounded in the 7 Days spurs on the North, while Sherman having a nervous breakdown and Grant stopping a bullet at Shiloh spurs on the South.

1) The colored sections never realized

General conditions can change history, masses of people can change history and "great men" can change history. It's any, and I hate the post-modernist take that there is no such thing as "great men". Of course there are; people give an individual a high degree of authority, and the more power and influence they have, the more they can effect things. President Kennedy had a more massive effect on history than a plumber in Iowa. At a same time, either can effect history. It's just that the more base of influence you have, the more likely you are to effect more things in more varied ways.

As a Tolstoyan, I'm supposed to agree with the basic premise of this thread, BUT. There are no absolutes one way or the other. The whole Great Man Theory flourishes in the circumstances of the American Civil War. In the Russian Civil War, not really.

EDIT: "FALLACY" IS AN OVER-USED WORD. IF YOU DISAGREE WITH AN IDEA, IT'S A FALLACY. IF YOU AGREE WITH IT, IT'S A THEORY. IF YOU'RE NOT SURE, IT'S A HYPOTHESIS.:p
 
Great men (and women) are the product of the conditions of their time. There is an usual theoretical clash between agency and structure, but it's not a no-end path. Individual actions affect the course of events (not only those of the great names,also the actions of anonymous people it's only that those actions done by famous people are generally better reported), but those individual actions work in a given historical context, thus they are limited by the general conditions (material, ideological etc) and are limited in the deepth they can affect those conditions to allow new horizonts of action for the next generations.
 
Hello everyone,

Something's bugging me. You know about the Great Man fallacy, how it's not one man who can change history but general conditions have more influence.
Yet, there is a number of thread about WI Hitler died, Napoleon didn't decide to go to Russia, etc...

So, what's your opinion on this? Do great men matter or is it just the general conditions of the time?

Both, of course.

That said, most posters here are mainly fascinated by the idea of a different history. They think of a different development, then, in order to tell a somewhat believable story, they need a point of divergence. It's easier to reduce that to one man remaining alive instead of dying, or vice versa; it's also easier if that one man simply changes his mind. Easier, I mean, than changing macro factors such as the overall economy, political and philosophical thinking, the public opinion in the population involved etc.
That does not mean that those who do so really believe it was all down to that one man.
 
Like many above say, it matters. For some things, a certain distinctive person might be very, very necessary. For other things, you could replace a so-called great man for another one of rougly similar attributes, and things could proceed more or less among the same lines.

For Finnish history, we have Mannerheim. I would argue that even if he had died in Russian service during WWI, the post-1917 Finnish history might still have unfolded more or less the way it did, with some other (military) figure(s) filling the role(s) he had in 1918-1946. For both the White effort in the Civil War and especially the Finnish military's and nation's cohesion and functionality during the Winter and Continuation Wars the "existence failure" of such a towering, unifying figure would present big challenges. As to day to day leadership, I believe other men could make the day-to-day decisions - it would have been more a question of missing a trusted, monolithical figure that was used as something of a canvas for projecting the Finnish hopes and expectations about good military leadership on. It was as if the nation needed a "great man" it could pin its hopes on, and Mannerheim was the kind of man who fit the bill perfectly.

This is of course if some other suitable man is not "assigned" a similar role. It might well be that there was a position for a "great man" (or men) to be filled and that the right man (or men) for the job would be found, to some extent, among those candidates that would be available. Again, I believe the job of a "Mannerheim" in Finnish history does not need a military genious, just someone in military terms reasonably competent who is also somewhat politically savvy and can project a certain believable image as an independent leader. Mannerheim was particularly successful in achieving an image of a military man who was "above party politics" - but this does not mean someone else could not have achieved a roughly similar position, even if by somewhat different meanst
 
usertron2000 said:
As a Tolstoyan, I'm supposed to agree with the basic premise of this thread, BUT. There are no absolutes one way or the other. The whole Great Man Theory flourishes in the circumstances of the American Civil War. In the Russian Civil War, not really.
Yeah, this reflexion was spurred by War and Peace which kinda bugged me on that matter (and that 50 pages conclusion? Fuck you Tolstoï)

The way he puts it is that nobody has any influence and nobody actually matters because it's all in the great scheme of things and stuff will happen anyway, so you know, why even bother? Better to have a mildly happy marriage and live in a remote domain. [/rant]
Anyway.

I always liked the quote "Heroes are men thrown in the circumstances"
 
As I've said in previous such thread, it's true to a degree. There are people who influence events but they need events to be present in some form or another.

Hitler in different Germany wouldn't be able to do what he did, OTL Germany without Hitler would be soemthing different as well. And you can say that for any crucial period which was influenced by Great Man*. Henry VIII and CoE, French revolution and Napoleon.....



*works for both genders, obvi!
 
I've always said that circumstances create Great Men. Like Thomas Jefferson was a Great Man but probably wouldn't have become one had he been, say, a Slave.
 
It's surprising to what extremes each factor - individuals and circumstances - can reach.

To take an oft-cited example, what if Catherine of Aragon had been able to produce a male heir? Would Henry have been satisfied to keep Ann Boleyn as a mistress, and would the Church of England thus never exist? Royalty of course have much more power and influence than the average person, but the entire course of world history for the last 500 years rests, at least in part, on accidents of conception and a few momentous decisions by Henry VIII.

At the other end of the spectrum, no conceivable president or even series of presidents in the history of the 19th-century US could have prevented or derailed the spread of white settlement across the North American continent. Manifest Destiny was such an instantiation of pure demographic momentum (made self-aware through philosophical and historiographical justifications) that the US could have had 25 completely different presidents from OTL during the century, and the pattern of westward expansion would have been largely the same. The Great Man plays almost no part here.
 
Great men can alter currents. They cannot create currents. Conversely currents are directed by Great men, they have no goals on their own.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
I've always said that circumstances create Great Men. Like Thomas Jefferson was a Great Man but probably wouldn't have become one had he been, say, a Slave.
Indeed - so, say, Belisarius was a great general, but he was from about as far down the social order as a man could be at the time and still become a general. How many Napoleons or Marlboroughs never rose above the rank of sergeant? (Or, for that matter, lived their days staring at the south end of a northbound plowhorse...)
 
For me, Nikola Tesla is the epitomy of this phenomenon. Tesla was a marvellous inventor and engineer but he was still subject to the laws of physics. That, however, has never stopped the wide-eyed predictions of semi-magical futuristic discoveries far too many posters think he would have made in "But what if Tesla had lived" threads.
 
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