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. History is a process of mutual reinforcement, hundreds of thousands of threads constantly pull at one another creating a canvas. One man cannot do much to affect this whole generally, or even near universally. However, should that one man be in the right moment, at the right time, as well as being the right man, then the entire course of human history can be altered in a single moment. Military leaders, prominent and influential politicians, famous authors, philosophers, and people connected to the arts, and people of high ranking nobility all wield a disproportionate amount of power over the course of history. The leader of the country is even more pivotal. Even if at best their power to influence history is normally capped at around 30% at best, if we accept ergodicity and sensitivity to outside stimuli with regards to human beings, then your fallacy is rendered rubbish. One thing that people often tend to forget is that when we think of Great Men, we do not think of just one man - we think of the hundreds of thousands, the millions of people, who are moved by him.
The creation of the great empires of Europe can be more or less completely reduced to family politics as a primary mover until the rise of nationalism. Other factors are important, do not get me wrong, but in the grand scheme of things it is marriages, wars based on claims, and the great men and women who determine the flow of time. It matters that Charlemagne was Charlemagne. If one man could not really take much of a chance in history, just do some thought experiments regarding Charlemagne. Imagine if a man half as talented was put in charge, imagine if he was unwilling to work with the papacy, and imagine if he had a disdain for learning. In short, imagine Charlemagne was just another, like so many other leaders. I doubt anything in this world would bare even the slightest resemblance to what it is now. Another would probably have taken his place, but that would have taken time - time that may well result in a world completely unrecognizable.
Anyone who tells you the great course of human affairs were not influenced by a man named Temujin who would become Genghis Khan is a fool. Anyone who tells you men like Rousseau, Voltaire, Robespierre, Napoleon, and Louis XVI had no influence on, or did not radically define the character of the French Revolution is monstrously ill equipped to even begin to study history. People tend not to realize that the Russian Revolution was actually jump started when Kaiser Wilhelm decided to deposit political dissidents, like Lenin, into Russia in order to take them out of the war. This supports great men theory not just because of Lenin and his compatriots, but also because of Wilhelm. We have the likes of Marcus Aurelian who brought about the end of the third century crisis through ruthless and unrelenting competence. It was he who allowed Diocletian and later Constantine to emerge within just a few decades, should he not have existed or been less successful the entire character of the later Roman World would have been altered unless you assume a man of similar talent accomplishing the same thing with successors who would likewise repeat things exactly.
The idea of Great Man theory being a fallacy ultimately stems from fundamentally misunderstanding what the idea of Great Men mean and a sickeningly modern retroactive application of Realism and Economic Liberalism into the past, along with an idea of predestination in regards to societal, cultural, economical advancement. Anyone who does not buy into predestination or is a constructivist will disagree.
