Great Man Theory

There is a question that has haunted

every serious mind for as long as

history has been written down. [music]

Does the man make the moment or does the

moment make the man? [music] Stand at

any turning point in human history and

you will find a single figure standing

at its center. [music] Alexander at the

edge of the known world, Caesar at the

river, Napoleon on the bridge at Arcole,

[music]

Genghis Khan looking out across the

steppe, and the question follows you

everywhere you look. Were these men the

authors of history or merely its

instruments?

>> [music]

>> Did they bend the world to their will or

did the world simply find in each of

them [music] the vessel it happened to

need? This is the great man theory

[music] and it is one of the most

dangerous, most seductive, and most

misunderstood ideas ever conceived about

[music] the nature of power, greatness,

and the human capacity to change the

course of everything. In 1840, [music]

a Scottish writer named Thomas Carlyle

stood before an audience in London and

delivered a series of lectures that

would define this idea for the next

[music] two centuries. The lectures were

published under a title that announced

exactly [music] what he believed: On

Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic

[music] in History. And in those pages

he wrote one sentence that has echoed

ever since.

>> [music]

>> The history of the world, he declared,

is but the biography of great men,

[music] not the biography of nations,

not the biography of economies or

movements

>> [music]

>> or the slow grinding of social forces.

The biography of men, specific men,

>> [music]

>> singular, exceptional, irreplaceable men

who appeared at the decisive moments and

through nothing but the sheer force of

who they were reshaped [music]

the world and left it permanently

altered. Carlyle was not interested in

the comfortable idea that history is

made by everyone equally. he found that

idea weak,

>> [music]

>> dishonest, a story the mediocre tell

themselves to avoid confronting the

uncomfortable truth [music] that some

men are simply built on a different

scale.

He [music] looked at history and he saw

mountains rising out of flat ground and

he refused to pretend [music] the

mountains were the same as the plain.

He identified what he believed were the

different forms the great man [music]

could take.

The hero as divinity like the Norse god

Odin,

>> [music]

>> the hero as prophet, the hero as poet

like Dante and Shakespeare, the hero as

priest, the hero as writer, and finally

the hero as king, the commander, the

ruler of men embodied for Carlyle above

all in Napoleon Bonaparte.

>> [music]

>> Different domains, different centuries,

but in every case the same underlying

truth, a single individual

possessed of something the rest of

humanity lacked, [music] who stepped

into the current of history and changed

its direction. And here is the line that

should make you stop and think.

>> [music]

>> Carlyle argued that studying these men

was not just interesting, [music]

it was profitable to your own soul. He

believed that by examining the lives of

the truly great, you could not help but

uncover [music] something about your own

nature, that greatness observed closely

enough awakens something in the

observer. This is why the idea refuses

[music] to die because somewhere inside

the person studying the great man is the

suspicion, quiet [music] but persistent,

that the same fire might be waiting in

them. But to [music] understand why this

idea is so powerful, you have to

understand what it was really claiming

because Carlyle was not simply saying

that great men exist. [music]

He was making a far more radical claim

about the structure of reality itself.

[music]

He was saying that history has a shape

and that shape is determined by

individuals.

Consider what [music] this means. It

means that if you removed one man from

the timeline, the entire structure would

[music] collapse and reform into

something unrecognizable.

Remove Napoleon and the map of Europe is

different.

Remove Alexander

>> [music]

>> and the entire fusion of Greek and

Eastern civilization that shaped the

ancient world never happens. [music]

Remove Caesar and Rome takes a different

road entirely.

>> [music]

>> The philosopher Sidney Hook captured the

heart of this with a question that cuts

straight to the bone.

"How many battalions?" he asked, [music]

"Are they equivalent of a Napoleon?"

How many minor poets added together will

give you a single Shakespeare? The

answer, of course, is none. You cannot

assemble a genius out of ordinary parts.

Genius is not the sum of talent. It is a

different thing entirely, appearing

rarely, refusing to be manufactured,

[music] and changing everything when it

arrives.

This is the core of the great man theory

>> [music]

>> at its most compelling.

Not that great men are better people,

>> [music]

>> not that they are more moral or more

deserving or more good, but that they

are decisive, that they are the hinge on

which the heavy door of history turns,

[music]

that without them the door does not

move. But Carlyle was not alone in

wrestling with this. [music] The German

philosopher Hegel approached the same

mystery from a stranger and more

profound angle. Hegel did not believe

the great man created history through

personal force.

He believed something far more

unsettling. [music]

He believed that history itself had a

direction, a hidden logic unfolding

across the centuries, [music]

which he called the world spirit.

And the great man, in Hegel's view, was

not the author of history, [music] but

its agent, its instrument, the point at

which the deep current of history broke

the surface and became visible.

>> [music]

>> Hegel wrote that the great historical

men are those whose own particular aims

contain the deeper will of the world

itself.

>> [music]

>> When Napoleon marched across Europe, he

believed he was pursuing his own

ambition.

>> [music]

>> But according to Hegel, he was

unknowingly carrying out something far

larger than himself.

>> [music]

>> He was the hand through which history

wrote its next sentence.

There is a famous moment that captures

this perfectly. Hegel was in the town of

Jena in 1806 [music] as Napoleon's army

arrived, and he watched the emperor

himself ride through the streets.

[music]

And Hegel wrote that he had seen the

world spirit on horseback. One man

riding through a provincial town, and a

philosopher looking at him and seeing

not a man at all, but the movement of

history

>> [music]

>> made flesh. This is a subtler and darker

version of the idea. The great man does

not impose his will on a passive world.

He becomes the focal point through which

historical [music]

necessity expresses itself. He feels

free. He feels like the author of his

own greatness, [music] but he is, in

Hegel's chilling phrase, doing the work

of the world spirit, whether he

understands it [music] or not. And here,

we arrive at the deepest tension inside

the entire idea.

Is the great man free, or is he fated?

[music] Does he choose his greatness, or

is he chosen by it?

The men themselves rarely had the luxury

of asking.

>> [music]

>> They were too busy acting. But those who

watched them could not escape the

question. Now, no idea this powerful

goes unchallenged, and the challenges to

the great man theory [music]

are not weak. They strike at its very

foundation. The first and most forceful

came from the English philosopher

Herbert Spencer, [music]

and his objection was simple,

devastating, and difficult to answer.

>> [music]

>> The great man, Spencer argued, does not

appear from nowhere. He is produced.

[music]

He is the product of the society that

came before him, the conditions that

shaped him, the long accumulation of

circumstances that made his particular

[music] greatness possible. Spencer put

it directly, "Before the great man can

remake his society, his society has to

make him."

The genius of Napoleon was meaningless

without the French Revolution that

created the vacuum he [music] stepped

into.

The conquests of Alexander were

impossible without the army and the

kingdom his father Philip built before

[music] him.

Remove the soil, and the seed grows

nothing.

>> [music]

>> Spencer considered the great man theory

to be primitive, childish even,

a leftover from an age that explained

[music] thunderstorms by the anger of

gods, now explaining history by the will

of heroes. [music] To him, it was a

refusal to look at the real machinery of

the world, the [music] slow, complex,

unglamorous forces that actually shape

events, [music] in favor of a flattering

story about singular men.

And then came the most profound [music]

critic of all.

Leo Tolstoy.

>> [music]

>> In War and Peace, beneath the surface of

the novel, Tolstoy waged a quiet and

relentless war against the entire idea

of the great man.

>> [music]

>> He had looked closely at Napoleon, the

supposed master of history,

>> [music]

>> the man who believed he was directing

the fate of nations. And what Tolstoy

concluded was merciless.

>> [music]

>> The great man, Tolstoy wrote, is

history's slave. He argued that the

leaders we celebrate are not the cause

of events, but merely their label.

>> [music]

>> The general who believes he is

commanding the battle is in fact swept

along by 10,000 forces beyond his

control. The morale of the soldiers, the

terrain, the weather, [music] the

accumulated weight of a million

individual decisions made by men whose

names history will never record.

Napoleon thought he was moving his

armies.

Tolstoy believed the armies were moving

Napoleon.

>> [music]

>> For Tolstoy, the greatness of great men

was largely an illusion, a story we tell

afterward, assigning to one visible

figure the credit for what was really

the work of countless invisible hands.

>> [music]

>> History is written by the victors, and

the victors place a single name at the

top of events that belong to multitudes,

>> [music]

>> and this is the hardest version of the

criticism to dismiss, because there is

obvious truth in it. No man acts alone.

[music]

No conqueror conquers without an army.

No revolution is [music] the work of one

mind. The great man is always standing

on a mountain built by people whose

names are lost.

>> [music]

>> So, where does this leave us?

With a genuine and unresolved tension at

the heart of how we understand [music]

power and history.

On one side, Carlyle and the undeniable

fact that certain individuals seem to

bend reality around themselves, that

some men are simply not interchangeable,

>> [music]

>> that you cannot replace a Napoleon with

a committee, or a Caesar with a

consensus. [music]

On the other side, Tolstoy and Spencer,

and the equally undeniable fact that no

man rises without the world that made

him, that the great are carried by

forces far larger than themselves, that

the hero is partly an illusion we

construct [music] after the fact. And

here is what almost everyone misses. The

truth is not on one side or the other.

The truth is in the relationship between

[music] them. There is a remarkable note

in the historical record. The historian

Ian Kershaw, who spent his life studying

one of the most destructive figures of

the 20th century, [music]

observed something crucial.

The personal qualities of such a figure

[music] meant nothing without the

specific conditions that allowed those

qualities to seize power.

>> [music]

>> The man and the moment were both

necessary. Neither alone was sufficient.

This is the synthesis.

>> [music]

>> The great man is neither the sole author

of history nor merely its passive

instrument. [music]

He is the point where exceptional

individual capacity meets a moment that

demands exactly that [music] capacity.

The seed and the soil. Remove either one

and nothing grows. But when the right

man meets the right moment, the result

is something that reshapes the world and

looks in retrospect [music]

like destiny. Carlyle himself, beneath

his hero worship,

>> [music]

>> said something that points toward this.

He wrote that the great leaders arise

when the need for them is great. [music]

Read that carefully. Even in his most

heroic formulation, the need comes

first. The moment opens and the man

steps through [music] it. The man is

decisive, but he is decisive within a

moment that called for him. This is why

the question that opened this video

[music] has no simple answer.

Does the man make the moment or the

moment make the man?

>> [music]

>> The honest answer is that the greatest

figures in history are precisely those

in whom the two became

indistinguishable.

>> [music]

>> The man so perfectly suited to his

moment that we can no tell where the

necessity ended and the will began.

>> [music]

>> But there is one final dimension to this

idea, the most personal one.

And it is the reason this question still

matters to you sitting here [music]

centuries after Carlyle gave his

lectures.

Carlyle believed that the study of great

men was profitable to your own heroic

side.

That by looking closely at the lives of

those who shaped the world, you would

uncover something about your own nature.

And whatever you make of his theory as

an explanation of history, this [music]

claim contains a truth that survives

every criticism.

Because the question of whether great

men shape history [music] is, underneath

everything, a question about whether you

can shape your own. If history [music]

is nothing but vast impersonal forces,

if the individual is powerless, if

everything is determined by conditions

and [music] circumstances, and the slow

grinding of systems too large for any

one person to move, then there is a

[music] strange comfort in it. You are

off the hook. Nothing you do matters

very much. You are a leaf in the river.

But if even one man in history truly

bent the world to his will, even once,

then the door is open. Then the

individual is not powerless. Then the

possibility exists, however rare,

[music]

that a single person with enough will,

enough vision, enough refusal to accept

the world as given, can [music] change

what seemed unchangeable.

The great man theory, in the end, is not

really a theory about the past. It is a

mirror held up to the person studying

it.

>> [music]

>> Carlyle understood this. He knew that

when you look long enough at Alexander,

[music] at Caesar, at the men who

refused to be ordinary, you are not just

learning history. You are being asked to

question about yourself. [music]

What are you when you stand before the

lives of the great? Are you the leaf in

the river, carried wherever the current

goes, [music] or is there something in

you, dormant perhaps, untested perhaps,

that recognizes itself in them?

>> [music]

>> The boy in the painting sits with his

book open, and behind him the great

ships [music] of history rage across the

sea, cannons firing, empires colliding,

the whole magnificent and terrible drama

of human greatness unfolding in his

imagination.

>> [music]

>> He is not yet anything. He is ordinary.

He is small. But he is reading, and in

the act of reading, in the act of

looking directly at greatness and

[music] refusing to look away, something

begins. That something is the only part

of the great man [music] theory that was

ever truly within your control. The

great men are gone. The moments that

made them will never return in the same

form. But the question they leave behind

is still here, [music] unanswered,

waiting. Does the man make the moment,

or does the moment make the man? [music]

You will only ever discover the answer

the same way they did, by the way you

choose to meet your own.