Hey folks! I had a few other projects that I really needed to get finished this week, which left me with limited time to put a blog post together. My plan for next week is something for the worldbuilders out there, a sort of ‘guide’ to different kinds of army structures, drawing on a number of the series we’ve done looking at different ways armies could be raised.
That said, I don’t want to leave you with nothing to read on a Friday so here are some suggested things:
From Kiran Pfitzner (‘Dead Carl’), an older essay of his I found interesting, “The Kaiser and a ‘Mediocre Man’ Theory of History: A Case Study in the Historical Importance of Incompetence.” We’ve never done a full take-down of Thomas Carlyle style ‘great man’ history here (we should, at some point), but one of the real objections to it is that not only is history often shaped by impersonal forces (so not singular leaders at all), but often history is shaped not by ‘great men’ but by greatly incompetent men in positions of leader (a possibly which Carlyle’s ‘heroic’ great man theory does not really permit).
He also had a wonderful more recent essay, “Rights and Righteousness: From ‘The War People’ to ‘A People at War,’” which builds off of a discussion of The War People (recommended here back in February!) to think more broadly about how armies are shaped by conditions of service and how and why those conditions evolved from the 17th century into the 20th. Perhaps most on point is the reminder he offers that just because the resources for war expanded from the 18th century to 1945 does not mean they will so expand forever.
I also really liked James’ meditation on the Melian Dialogue in Thucydides and how it should be understood today, “American Melos.” The Melian Dialogue is one of those very famous passages in Thucydides that is often taught in isolation – often in political science contexts – where the removal of the context Thucydides assumes his reader knows (because they had all lived through it) really warps and undermines the passage. I think we probably ought to do a second ‘Trip Through’ Thucydides focused on the Dialogue at some point; maybe soon.
So we’ll be back next week with something more substantive!
‘The War People’ has got to be one of my favorite history reads. Thanks for recommending it and nice to see it pop up here again.
I know I had to read Thucydides in college, and I think it was in the school’s “if you’re not going to major in a social science you need to take this yearlong survey course” – I think it was the same professor who assigned, at various points, Thucydides, Marx, and Durkheim.
Anyway, definitely we learned it in context and I’m baffled that it would occur to anybody to teach it otherwise. Especially since in a modern cultural context, a reading of the Melian Dialogue that doesn’t rely on the dramatic irony of the audience knowing what was going to happen to Athens ought to founder on the Athenian position being at odds with the informal ethical tradition we’ve all been steeped in since kindergarten.
Very often the people who quote the Melian Dialogue are making an argument that relies on the context being suppressed.
Yes! It’s really, really important in the book that the Melian episode comes directly before the Sicilian Expedition where Athens’ hubris wrecks their chances of winning the war. The point is not that the Athenians are correct, the point is that the Athenians are already well on the road to their own destruction.
And the broader theme of the book in my opinion is that Athenian democracy was a deeply flawed system of government that only worked under Pericles, because then it was almost a monarchy. After his death the book becomes an account of how the misgovernment of the Athenians by their demos and demagogues caused them to lose an almost unlosable war. A message which might not be completely inappropriate in a contemporary context.
That is clearly Thucydides thesis. Though it should be pointed out he’s not a disinterested party here.
People quoting it and people teaching are two different things.
It’s no surprise people quoting it do so out of context to suit their wills, but the expectations for people teaching are different.
Anyway, definitely we learned it in context and I’m baffled that it would occur to anybody to teach it otherwise.
It is depressing, and grating, how often I hear that line about “the strong do what they will, etc.” quoted “straight”, including by people whose opinion I was otherwise predisposed to respect. I don’t know whether that’s because they don’t know the context (i’m guessing that’s the case) or they know it and choose to ignore it.
I guess my only explanation for it is as a symptom of … I don’t know if there’s an accepted term for this, but Quotation Culture (?). The belief that a pronouncement attributable (truthfully or apocryphally) to a notable and respected thinker must be accepted seriously, as though the history of notable and respected thinkers doesn’t involve them disagreeing with each other all the time.
Because another way to compress the lofty “strong do / weak endure” line is to say: “Might makes right,” which I learned was a bad idea from my parents, and then again from TH White, and then again from 17 years of education.
So to be a little more charitable, while I think you’re right, I also think another part of the story is that like all good lies, the realist thesis contains a certain measure of truth. It doesn’t contain a lot of truth, which is why it’s not a great lie, it can be fairly easily dismantled (as Bret himself has done, in one of his posts last year i think). But, it’s good enough to convince some people who haven’t thought about the issues very deeply, because it has a certain surface plausibility, at least when you’re in a certain state of mind.
Like it is true that power politics matter, and are a thing. Especially in the era when wars of conquest were not necessarily a lose-lose game like they are today. And it’s also true that realism can sometimes be a useful corrective to the kind of perspectives that hold (usually in a pompous and self-important way) that politics are all about high and noble principles. It’s just that other things matter too, and power politics are not the only thing, and are often not the important thing.
The interesting part is that even in context, the guy saying the quote isn’t actually proven wrong. He just thought he was going to be ‘the strong’ in this scenario, and wasn’t.
The overall message isn’t that ‘might makes right’, its that ‘right without might doesn’t actually do anything’.
I first encountered it during the introductory training to my country’s foreign service (I was attached from another ministry for exposure, not an foreign service officer myself). For added context, we are a small country surrounded by much bigger countries. I vaguely recall that the lecturer mentioned that Athens did ultimately lose, but that would’ve been of little comfort to the Melians who survived.
So basically Mike Duncan’s Great Idiot Theory of History then?
Yeah if you want to great man theory you got to go just as important incompetent man theory, and then middling theory and woopsie daisy your at the everyone matters to some degree or another and they all effect each other.
Like great man is a very pretty blue in a rainbow or something but all the other colors are there.
Alexander is important, but so is the soldier in the line, the dude that made the armors and weapons, the dude that fed them as well as the families that raised them.
(Qu circle of life playing)
Anyway worldbuilding armies so found the how squads and then how flat the structure or how tall it is would be fun.
I always thought the “mediocre man” was a necessary component of the great man theory and the actual more convincing part.
There are so many cases of just the wrong person in the wrong place screwing things up for thousands of people.
Yeah, it’s also a strong argument against the anti-great-man theory: if the big guy doesn’t matter and it’s all impersonal historical forces and societal pressures, This One Idiot shouldn’t matter either.
If the Kaiser’s idiocy mattered, that does necessarily imply that a particularly able person in the right seat could matter too.
(We could, of course, argue that the problem is not really that the Kaiser is an idiot. The problem is that all the people around the Kaiser are responding to a historical force/societal pressure that is causing them to follow the Kaiser’s orders even though he is an idiot. There’s some truth to that, but it becomes circular pretty quickly, right?)
To Bismarck is ascribed the statement that “once in his lifetime, a statesman may sense the mantle of history pass by, in which case he ought to grab it and hold on for dear life”.
“Great men”, defined as “people in positions of power”, do affect history, but what they are *able to do* is both enabled and limited by the circumstances in which they operate. Jan Hus could not do what Luther later did, because conditions were different for Hus and Luther. Charles V could not do what Sigismund did, to stay in the same periods, because, again, the situations in which they acted were not the same. Nixon could go to (Communist) China, because anyone accusing Nixon of Commie sympathies would have been laughed out of the room . . . but it also required that the PRC had fallen out with the USSR.
Bismarck himself was a textbook example for this, for good and ill. Notably, a lot of things he did were fine in the short run, but ultimately catastrophic, like the prominent position of the Kaiser, which Bismarck had insisted on, because he knew he could manage Wilhelm I . . . and that he’d have the devil of a time managing any parliament.
It’s an interesting thing to see “Only Nixon could go to China” alongside a discussion of the misuse of the Melian dialogue, because this is one of the most often misused bits of commentary about Nixon. Nixon was the only President who could go to China, not because Nixon was immune to accusations of Commie sympathies, but because Nixon was the only politician that wouldn’t be personally destroyed *by Richard Nixon,* and this was how the comment was initially used.
The better way to frame the counterpoint is that the historical force is the existence of a kaiser. Basically the argument is that you’ve accepted the pretense that there’s always a kaiser, once that’s true the inevitability of an idiot *is* the flow of history. The individual decade by decade competencies or incompetencies of the rulers blend into a generic soup, the trajectory can be plotted. The Kaiser was *eventually* going to be an idiot and that was *eventually* going to lead to the end of the institution when he overstretched his power. The important part was having a Kaiser to begin with.
The best counterpoint to this is that every once in a while something actually drastic happens that’s a terminal stop to any cyclic movements. This is historically exceedingly rare, but Alexander, Caesar, Genghis Khan, and Napoleon have a good case to be the examples of individuals who *structurally change the world*, by changing the institutions of power. The rise of Hellenic monarchy in the eastern med, the fall of the Roman Republic, the definitive breakthrough of the steppe nomads into larger Eurasian politics, and the victory of nationalism and liberalism were *structural* changes. However of those, Alexander and Genghis Khan were the only ones whom didn’t embody a trend that, in hindsight, seems inevitable. Nothing made an Alexander or a Genghis Khan inevitable, but a Caesar or Napoleon probably was.
To the point of this discussion this answer is probably incomplete too; to most every Alexander you have a Darius III, a king of kings who kept fleeing from him rather than standing and fighting. In other words it’s not just unique competence but also unique incompetence or foolishness that make for histories upsets. Plus there’s also just historical mess.
An idiot Kaiser was inevitable. That this kaiser happen to be in charge during a critical period of political development where various political forces were changing isn’t. Without the Kaiser you probably don’t get WW1 *when it happens*, without WW1 *when it happens* you probably don’t get the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany during the first half of the century, and without them *when they happened* you might end up with no WW2 or a nuclear one. The events of the 20th and 21st centuries in particular are so fast, and involve such great and terrible forces wielded by such vast and centralized states, that history could easily change just because of someone’s personality. This doesn’t mean great men make history, but the follies and whims of modern politicians do.
I’m with you in most respects, but the connection between Napoleon and the victory of nationalism and liberalism seems out of place there.
Napoleon was both a nationalist and sort-of liberal. He was building a Greater French Empire, and for a while, he fulfilled about every French foreign policy fantasy of the previous centuries: conquering Netherlands, Rheinland, and subjugating Italy. His armies were built on the principle of conscription, which relies on the idea that the individual is part of the political nation.
Napoleon’s legislative work introduced a legal system which was very much the basis of liberal European jurisprudence. (Although Napolon did personally decide it to be less equal between genders than the preparatory works would have proposed.) It was “liberal” in the sense that it was capitalist, based on individual’s rights and responsibilities, and didn’t care about the individual’s personal status. (And illeberal in the sense that only a male citizen was really an individual sui juris, but that was par for the course in most 19th century liberalism.)
@FinnishReader,
Napoleon was both a nationalist and sort-of liberal.
I think nationalism and imperialism are inherently in conflict with each other (i.e. a nation state is an inherently different thing than an empire), so I wouldn’t call Napoleon a nationalist, but I’d concede that I have a narrower definition of nationalism (broadly, revolving around the “separate states for separate national groups” idea) than some other people.
I don’t think foreign policy fantasies or imperialism strictly make for nationalism, especially not when Napoleon is effecting that subjugation by making his family members into monarchs.
There might have been liberal principles in his legal code (which I would argue was primarily for pragmatic reasons), but not in his manner of governance.
In any event, I would find a vast difference between the perspective that Napoleon’s policies could be interpreted as expressions of nationalism and liberalism, and the idea that he was the creator of a “victory” for those ideologies in a broader sense.
For the former, at least, perhaps at least not directly. Napoleon at least drove a lot of forces that strengthened nationalism in opposition to him.
But liberalism? The greater prominence of that in Europe took several more decades of struggle that had nothing to do with him.
The arguments are less about Napoleons personal aims (which to be fair, were always somewhat hazy and contingent) but more about what the consequences of his actions were. He forced his opponents to reorganize along national lines which further lead to all sorts of repurcussions. Despite attempts you could not go back to 1789.
@Isator Levi the obvious contradictions between nationalism, liberalism, imperialism, and authoritarianism obviously muddy the waters, but the fact that Napoleon embodies basically every single aspect of that contradiction is part of the point.
Napoleon was a “victory” and turning point for these idealogies, in that he implemented what would prove to be a very unstable but critically important fusion that still forms the core of our political discourse today. As I said he’s less an example than others of great man theory because you can absolutely interpret him as just a product of his time, but the fact he succeeded when and how he did contributed to a lot of the political context that would define European politics.
These contradictions we’re arguing about, the contradiction between a nationalist and liberal figure conquering other nations and installing his friends and family as kings, is persistent in modern politics in part because Napoleon codified the fusion of these ideas by *winning so much*.
It’s absolutely nonsense to talk about him as a liberal figure and yet the liberal movement in Germany and elsewhere directly owed it’s power to him; he not only literally rode into town and elevated them, the political capital that led to their tepid toleration post war owes itself to Napoleon. European monarchs feared and *envied* Napoleon, and had to liberalize or be left behind as their intellectuals, industrialists, and scientists fled. You can also directly lay the foundation of socialism at Napoleons feet, precisely because Marx, Engels, and especially Hegel, were commenting on precisely this contradiction as they sought to form their own thesis of history. They had to fight like hell to continue being tolerated and attempt to continue their idealogies, but Napoleon conquering the holy Roman empire was a critical victory for the liberals there.
Likewise, his nationalism and imperialism contradict. How can a nation state which derives its authority from the people justify oppressing other people? Isn’t that hypocrisy? Napoleon basically rode a crusading impulse to justify his wars; a combination of us or them and spreading the good word of the revolution. But after Napoleon you still have nationalist regimes invading their neighbors to create imperialist cores, in part precisely because Napoleons image, which a lot of authorities are imitating to “perform” leadership, was of a conquering general. The justifications for this spark the mass media of the Victorian and world war ages, into today, and increasingly rely on racism; “*We* derive our national will through our popular sovereignty, but *those* subhumans have no popular sovereignty as they aren’t fundementally people, so we can impose our will to replace/enlighten them”. This creation of borders between the well to do body politic and the other is *the* key flaw in classical liberalism, and the eventual split between nationalism and liberalism that in part gave rise to fascism and socialism harkens back to Napoleon, who was a very uneasy blend of these forces.
My point is that the victory of these idealogies and the contradictions therin were enshrined by Napoleons conquests setting the stage for the idealogical conflicts that defined the modern world. His victory of liberalism *and* nationalism wasn’t notable for being a final victory for either, but because it was a critical victory for *both at once*.
These contradictions we’re arguing about, the contradiction between a nationalist and liberal figure conquering other nations and installing his friends and family as kings, is persistent in modern politics in part because Napoleon codified the fusion of these ideas by *winning so much*.
@Terry,
Just wanted to say, this is an excellent comment.
Genghis I think is an interesting case because while the mongols did New Things, steppe peoples coming in and conquering sedentary lands wasn’t new: What was unsual is that the mongols, for a brief period, managed to conquer basically *all* of the steppe-adjacent areas at the same time, something no previous nomad empire had done.
Of course many of the places they conquered were *already* inhabited by previous waves of steppe conquerors!
It’s also significant in that it really brought the various previously unrelated spheres of the world into conflict. Russia had conflicts with Asian nomads before, but nothing remotely like what the golden horde did to them. Ditto for what would become the ottoman empire, whose foundation would be in part helped and in part hindered because of the Ilkhanite breaking local politics.
Likewise the fact you end up with a significant Mongolian successor state nearly uniting India and bringing with it all sorts of new ideas (like, for instance, a massive Muslim population) has basically defined the subcontinents politics since.
There’s also the technological and biological aspect; the mongols spread precursor technologies to cannons to Europe and the Middle East, and are pretty well fingered in the black death and other plagues to one degree or another. There’s also lesser biological transfers like some Asian strains of crops (rice, citrus, and tea apparently? Not my field) and livestock.
The reach of the mongols was what was new, and this reach is basically a product of a bunch of interpersonal drama and unique personality characteristics centered on Genghis and his successors. There’s no clear historical force to blame, Genghis just appeared and won the game of steppe politics harder than anyone prior through charisma, intelligence, and ruthless ambition.
And unlike most other “great men”, Genghis actually intended some of this. He set out to conquer, unite the tribes, and make them an integral part of Eurasian politics, and boy howdy did he succeed.
Likewise the fact you end up with a significant Mongolian successor state nearly uniting India and bringing with it all sorts of new ideas (like, for instance, a massive Muslim population) has basically defined the subcontinents politics since.
This is a fairly minor point, I guess, but I don’t think the Mughals were in any way responsible for the substantial Muslim presence in South Asia. Islam arrived in South Asia (both through the southern trade-based route and thru the northern military route) back in the 8th century, the high profile (and to this day, extremely controversial) invasions of Mahmoud Ghaznavi were 500 years before the Mughals, much of modern-day south-central India was (intermittently) conquered by Muslims a couple of hundred years before the Mughals. Don’t forget that the Mughals took power by seizing it (in the first place) from other Muslim rulers of the Delhi Sultanate, not by diplacing Hindus. There was a long, interesting and storied history of Islam in South Asia going back long before the Mughals ever got there.
I have no personal acquaintance with it, so I can’t vouch for its truth, but I have heard it said (by a Pakistani American) that Pakistani history textbooks trace the origin of the idea of Pakistani, and of a separate South Asian Muslim national identity, back to Muhammad ibn Qasim in the 8th c, and his conquest of Sindh, *not* to the Mughals.
Arilou, if a Great Man is one who imposes his will on the world, then for Napoleon to be one, his major effects on the world must have been the ones he intended.
By that argument, the main reason not to call Napoleon a Great Man is that he ultimately lost. He surely did not intend that.
This is an argument on some level attacking a strawman. Even the most hard-core annales school historian will accept that individuals can have an outsized impact on history. Bret makes that argument here: https://acoup.blog/2021/10/15/fireside-friday-october-15-2021/
Our host talked about that on Bluesky. I quote:
The funny thing about Great Man Theory history is the core idea (history is a catalog of heroic men to be emulated) is so obviously stupid that normies will immediately edit it to something reasonable (some people have outsized historical impact), even as the chuds demand the pure, uncut variety.
If you discuss it in any environment with both groups present (e.g. The Bad Place) you find yourself fighting a two way battle, struggling to convince the normies that Great Man Theory really does imply that history’s greatest murderers are also its best men to be admired and emulated…
…and then at the same time dealing with the alt-right chuds who treat you as a cultural vandal if you point out that Alexander’s ‘greatness’ rests entirely on his capacity for death and destruction or that history is not always defined by individual figures.
This is a typical motte and bailey style of argument: retreat to the “obviously some individuals have historical influence” motte when pressed, then re-occupy the bailey of “great men make history” when the danger has passed.
except that it’s not a motte and bailey argument if it’s actually two separate people makin two separate arguments, neither of whom needs to retreat nor advance from their position. At that point you own argument has merely been flanked, pinned against the walls of the still manned bailey by the very much still occupied motte, and outnumbered into the bargain. This understandably makes delivering an effective argument hard, and delivering an effective siege of a 10th century fortification even harder.
“…but one of the real objections to it is that not only is history often shaped by impersonal forces (so not singular leaders at all)…”
I wonder how much of this is related to how we think of history. In the past “history” meant Great Men, wars, and maybe a few inventors thrown in. Read “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” and you get the sense that Rome had maybe ten people that actually mattered at any given time, the rest were just faceless, interchangeable, unimportant people. Or, see the line in “Troy” “That is why you will be forgotten.” The boy was literally not great enough to become history.
In contrast, today a great deal of attention is paid to those unwashed masses (I’m aware they washed, I’m using the term ironically). Those “impersonal forces” are generally the rules that govern the lives of peasants–the metabolics of wheat/rice/corn/potato farming, the economics of fabric production, the difference between land, river, and naval transportation, that sort of thing. Kings come and go, but the real changes happen at the level of the farmers. You see this with the arrival of the potato in Europe, and (if you’ll excuse dipping into archeology and anthropology) the rise of maize in North America. These fundamentally change how the mass of people lived, in ways that impact society.
Of course, there’s also the modern obsession with innovation. This wasn’t always the case–fairly recently it was acceptable to be against innovation–but because our society today elevates innovators (well, ostensibly anyway) we have a movement towards reading history through the lens of those innovators. Check out “Roots of Progress” for examples of this.
In the end, while all of these may be useful, I’m not sure any of them are more true than any others. It’s like a recent series of subsurface bedrock topography maps I saw. One version used drilling data, another used seismic, another used electromagnetics of some sort. All of them produced reasonably similar, but not identical, results. They all have different biases and pros and cons and are influenced by different things. They all produce good, useful maps! But where bedrock really is isn’t something we can truly know until we start digging (and even then, it’s more of a gray area than people think). Likewise, different theories of the past have different biases and emphases and pros and cons. Sometimes one is more useful, sometimes another is, but typically applying several will give you the best outcome, because each will cover areas the other misses.
Those “impersonal forces” are generally the rules that govern the lives of peasants–the metabolics of wheat/rice/corn/potato farming, the economics of fabric production, the difference between land, river, and naval transportation, that sort of thing. Kings come and go, but the real changes happen at the level of the farmers. You see this with the arrival of the potato in Europe, and (if you’ll excuse dipping into archeology and anthropology) the rise of maize in North America. These fundamentally change how the mass of people lived, in ways that impact society.
To be fair though, all those things are profoundly affected by policy and governments. (At least in the 20th and 21st century, maybe/probably less so in prior eras).
As far as I understand, Thucydides is regarded as a historian who analysed his subject matter in terms of observing cause and effect of certain larger historical trends, rather than just attribute the likes of the Peloponnesian War to the drive and ambition of leading figures.
I think the problem is that they are, for historical record reasons, divided in a way that’s only a few steps better than random. Of course we have more personal details about influential leaders, but those potatoes didn’t swim to Europe by themselves. Even though we don’t remember the name of that first enterprising potato merchant, they were a person who did in fact choose to import the potato. That is not, in fact, an impersonal force, or really inevitable. The reason potatos caught on as a staple in northern europe, but maize did not resulted from people making personal choices. You certainly can farm corn effectively in northern europe (and that is done a decent amount), but it’s rare to find cornflour, or cornflour based dishes in quantity, whilst we’re up to our eyeballs in potato based foods (fresh corn, plus canned/frozen is still popular, for the americans who’re wondering what we do with the corn i just said is farmed).
When a plague breaks out, or poor rain causes a harvest to fail, or the climate shifts, those are impersonal forces (well, the climate one isn’t so much anymore). But societal forces boil down to personal decisions made by individual people, and those are not nearly so inevitable overall, even if they can be somewhat predictable at times.
I disagree somewhat; the potato was so obviously a great crop, I do believe it was just a matter of time before someone brought it across the Atlantic.
The impersonality here comes from the inevitability of the previous equilibrium breaking. It is, naturally, always some private person who decides to import seed potatoes in Europe. However, the potato is so advatageous a plant that when it is available, it becomes inevitable that someone notes this and starts to cultivate it in Europe, and that this innovation spreads. Because people make random selections all the time, the potato will be imported by one person or another, and will spread inevitably, regardless of individual choices. It is like a round boulder on a hilltop where kids are playing. It is inevitable that somebody rolls it down. If not today, then someday.
Maize, on the other hand, is by no means superior to the European staple crops, and most older cultivars don’t do well in Western and Central Europe, let alone in Northern Europe. So, there is no similar slope of advantage that the rolling the boulder down would be inevitable.
@Finnish Reader,
I think there are limits to “inevitability” in agriculture though, since a lot of this stuff ultimately boils down to food preference, which reflects people’s choices. Not individual decisions by Great Men, of course, but cultural ones. Soybeans haven’t taken off in South Asia to the extent that, on paper, you would think they would, and then when it comes to livestock agriculture, things like the Islamic prohibition on pork and the Hindu (mostly) prohibition on beef certainly shape agriculture in many parts of the world.
We know a fair bit about why potatoes became popular. While Antoine-Augustin Parmentier may not have been the first to bring the spud to Europe, he certainly played a major role in getting people to eat it. Some of those PR moves were, frankly, funny in a very Tom Sawyer way!
That said, many things after that were far less personal. Potatoes give something like 4x the calories per acre that wheat does. More labor-intensive, though, and you can’t get silage and hay from them. Those facts mean that whatever the farmers may wish, certain methods of farming will be better than others. And that will impact manufacturing, distribution networks, and the like. And that impacts warfare and governments. None of those factors can reasonably be ascribed to personal choice, any more than the need to wear clothing outside in Ohio in February can reasonably be ascribed to personal choice.
There’s also a certain inevitability in things like research and innovation. I’m a heretic, I’m not all that impressed with Charles Darwin’s most famous book. The idea of evolution had been floating around in the culture for literally generations–his grandfather wrote on the subject, for example–and at least one other person was publishing the same idea. When who we identify as the discoverer is due to a race to a publishing house, we can reasonably call the discovery inevitable. (For the record, in my opinion Darwin’s greatest achievement was expressing objections to his ideas better than his opponents could and still defeating them.) Likewise, certain inventions were so obviously significant, and so many people were working on them, that do say any individual created the technology is arbitrary. Take artificial refrigeration–we could find the person with the earliest patent, sure, but there were so many people working on it that the name becomes a mere matter of trivia.
I think there’s also a bit of English not being a precise language going on here. “Impersonal forces” is the term used to describe things that are not Great Men doing Great Things. It defines the idea in opposition to the previous dominant idea (with, again, the understanding that this is always a matter of emphasis, and even the most ardent supporter of Great Man theory will admit that some things are beyond the control of Great Men). You can’t treat this like a court case, where every word is weighed and measured based on some concept of what it must mean. English is a language of nuance, variability, and poetry, and quite often what’s meant only vaguely resembles the literal definitions of words. There’s a LOT of historical contingency in definitions, in other words!
Potatoes were adopted so easily in Europe because you can 1-for-1 substitute potato for chestnut in 15th Century recipes. Maize was also adopted easily at the same time as a potential wheat substitute, but nixtamalization was not brought over from the Americas and so populations that got the vast majority of their calories from wheat bread prior to maize introduction then suffered epidemic pellagra, and maize monoculture was abandoned.
“Roots of Progress” is a recent propaganda program designed to revive the reverence for innovation/industrialism. It’s a deliberate attempt to push back on the ascendance of NIMBY-ism and of thinking like “the System wants your data/taxes/KYC/submission and there is nothing you can do about it because you are nobody and can never change anything”. It is an attempt to remind the public that in the Bad Old Days, people actually DID things in the physical world. They did not take a generation to build half a skyscraper or a quarter of a subway route or to pass a constitutional amendment.
https://www.startpage.com/av/proxy-image?piurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thevintagenews.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2016%2F07%2Fh2rd4MeR.jpe&sp=1780483314Tf5f4f860f162d2800878b6d9812a9a308bc8fe0ee08f3e881859d3e4ac5f2cfc
> We’ve never done a full take-down of Thomas Carlyle style ‘great man’ history here (we should, at some point)
Yes please!
Rather than address Carlyle’s ‘great man’ theory, which is somewhat old and simplistic, it would be more interesting to address the question of how much history turns on the idiosyncratic characteristics of individuals vs broader impersonal forces.
I get the impression that humanities profs went overboard with the impersonal forces thing and ignored the kind of embarrassing hard-to-quantify “unscientific” idea that a lot of history really would have been different if specific individuals had had completely different personalities. Not necessarily great individuals, not necessarily extraordinary incompetence, just idiosyncratic differences. Would the English Civil War have played out the same if King Charles had been a networking people person instead of a high-handed autocrat? (Not if he’d been great, extraordinarily competent, etc, just if he’d had a substantially different personality type.)
IMO the clearest example of “great man” theory in action (ie that individual personalities really matter to the course of history): what if the guy in charge of the Soviet nuclear early warning system on a specific shift in 1983 wasn’t Stanislav Petrov but a rule-follower who would escalate the nuclear alert up the chain of command per protocol? Probably we’d all be dead and the world would be a post-apocalyptic wasteland. One can believe that Petrov vastly changed history without believing that he was a genius or a great man in the Carlyle sense.
Yes, I would much more like to see this analysis too. That the literal “Great Man Theory” is too simplistic is pretty obvious, but the assessment of “impactful individuals” (some of whom were not men and most of whom were certainly not “great”) vs impersonal forces would be a much more interesting exercise.
Carlyle’s “great man” thesis seems wrong in being dismissive of the great mass of humanity as anything but a herd of sheep to be directed by “great men”, but surely his talk of “heroes” shouldn’t be read at face value? I confess when I’ve tried to read Carlyle I’ve had a hard time parsing the subtext of his purple prose, but he doesn’t actually strike me as a huge fan of Napoleon.
Something I’d love to know, do you have any recommendations for other historians doing similar public facing blog type work like you, but on areas you’re less familiar with? Especially Asia, but also Africa, the Americas, different time periods, etc. Really interested in anything I can learn more about, but I just don’t have time to get into full books on topics I’m not already working on right now.
Doc Wellerstein writes a great deal about the history of nuclear weapons and the Cold War both at his old blog, and his new Substack newsletter:
https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/
https://doomsdaymachines.net/
I’m probably not the first to point this out, but Thucydides in both the Melian Dialogues and the speech in Sparta gives the Athenians arguments that are inherently hypocritical and rely on granting Athens a special status compared to its opponents.
In Sparta, the argument can be boiled down to “We might have acted immorally, but that’s because we acted rationally, and therefore it would be immoral for you to go to war over it.” To which the obvious retort is that it’s therefore also fair game if dismantling the Athenian empire by force of arms happens to be the rational choice according to Spartan fears, interests and honor, even if it’s immoral according to Athenian logic.
And similarly, in Melos the argument is “By right of our superiority in fighting, we have the privilege of making demands of you without having to fight.” Once again it’s an argument which relies on refusing the recipient being allowed to use the same premises. If Athen gets to take what it can and Melos has to suffer what it must, then so Melos gets to take what it can (not much, in the event) and Athens has to suffer what it must (the logistical cost of mobilizing and the reputational cost of attacking a supposed ally).
To make a quibble, Melos wasn’t an Athenian ally and that was the entire point of the conflict, they were free-riding on the Athenian system without paying in and now that they were at war with Sparta, they were also implicitly Spartan aligned. Part of the point for Athens is attacking is that they were demonstrating to the rest of the Aegean island communities was that free riding on Athens’s ability to keep Persia at bay wasn’t going to be allowed now that Sparta wasn’t in a position to intervene on their behalf.
Well also Melos was on the list of contributors to the Spartan war fund so they were not even doing a decent job of neutrality. And in the long run given they manged only the minimum possible barely showing up in Persian wars (once), the Oligarchy at Melos was implicitly it seems to me fine with Persian rule which would have been more expensive than the Athenian Arche. Thucydides is rather good at failing to note that many Greek oligarchs seem to have felt Persian rule preferable than comparatively mild rule by a democracy.
World War I actually furnishes a general rebuke to the “great man” theory, perhaps more than any other historical event. The war clearly had major historical significance, but it’s hard to see any of the individual actors as a “great man.” (I mean, Gavrilo Princip?) In contrast, once we accept that “great man” status has no moral valence, Hitler clearly did have a major impact on World War II.
I mean mostly its the death of kings cause they are fucking useless in that day and age, and most of the Greats in Lord Salisbury, Otto von Bismarck, the Count of Cavour, and Pyotr Stolypin were all dead.
Reminder that Bismarck’s foreign policy strategy with Russia and Austria was constantly teetering under the growing escalation of those states no matter how much he tried to get them to play nice, that he had to make domestic policy decisions that were against his personal inclinations because he knew that was the way the wind was blowing (such as various social welfare reforms, and that his loss of political influence was not predicated on his death but by his being forced to resign owing to conflict with Wilhelm a good eight years before his death.
Bismarck lived to see all of his grand strategy to keep France militarily isolated come to failure when they made alliance with Russia in the early 1890s.
The war clearly had major historical significance, but it’s hard to see any of the individual actors as a “great man.” (I mean, Gavrilo Princip?)
I’m pretty sure even Gavrilo Princip, and certainly his superiors (who seem to have thought of him and his comrades as disposable but ideologically energetic cannon fodder), wouldn’t have thought of Gavrilo Princip as a great man, they’d probably have thought of him as, well, a fairly trivial individual who was nonetheless the vehicle of a great ideological force (ethnic nationalism). And I say that as someone fairly (though not uncritically) sympathetic to the Serbian cause and hostile to the Austrian one myself.
Yes it would have been clear to everyone involved that Gavrilo was a utterly disposable nobody being groomed and used like a suicide bomber by a terrorist organization that also happened to be effectively running the Serbian state.
I think you could probably make the case for Lenin as the “Great Man” figure in the period of World War I and its immediate aftermath. He was the only major political faction leader in Russia who seemed to realize in 1917 that Russians were Done with the War, and thus maneuvered his faction into total control while his rivals all imploded.
If the Germans don’t put him on that train, or he takes a bullet at some point on the way there, then it’s quite possible we don’t get a Cold War As We Know It.
@Brett,
So, I’m going to largely disagree with that point about Lenin (not entirely, but largely). And I say that as someone fairly sympathetic to Lenin (again, not uncritically, but largely). I think some kind of communist revolution was going to happen around that time, inevitably. Both in the sense of 1) overthrowing private ownership of the means of production, and in the sense of 2) trying to centrally plan as much of the economy as possible, and probably also in the third sense of 3) having an authoritarian vanguard party rule society to the end of accomplishing goals 1) and 2). These ideas had been around for a long time, they made a certain degree of sense (whether you agree with them or not, I think even most critics of communism would concede they had a certain logic to them, that’s why people found them convincing), and sooner or later some country was going to try them out. I also think that the problems of early 20th century capitalism had become severe enough that, again, someone was going to make an effort, sooner or later, to overthrow the system and try something different. Whatever your ideological perspective, there are reasons (both in terms of economic and social factors, and in terms of the inner logic of ideas) that communist revolutions happened roughly at the point in time they did, and there are reasons the ideas themselves have outlasted the fall of the Eastern Bloc. Those things would be true even if Lenin, or for that matter Marx and Engels, had never had existed.
I also think that Russia’s problems by the mid 1910s were severe enough that they were going to have some kind of revolution. Maybe not the kind they got: maybe an agrarian-communist revolution instead of a Marxist one, or maybe a moderate-socialist one, or maybe a right wing, proto-fascist one.
I’d agree though that there wasn’t anything inevitable about the *confluence* of these these two things, socialist revolution happening in the Russian Empire and turning it into the world’s first socialist state. Lenin was largely responsible for that. If communist revolution had happened first in, say, the Austro-Hungarian Empire instead of the Russian Empire (it almost did, Hungary was briefly the world’s second communist state), I bet things would have looked very different. I’m sure there would eventually have been a Cold War of sorts, at least for a while, until capitalists and communists (hopefully) learned to live with each other, but quite possibly not a Cold War *as we know it*.
I do think they were going to try that (they tried it in Germany as well under Luxembourg), but I think without Lenin it fails. The Bolsheviks get marginalized by other factions and we end up with something more akin to postwar Germany with the SRs playing the role of the SPD in Russia (and with an antagonistic Russian military itching to topple the new government).
The Bolsheviks get marginalized by other factions and we end up with something more akin to postwar Germany with the SRs playing the role of the SPD in Russia (and with an antagonistic Russian military itching to topple the new government).
I guess my big point of disagreement is that I don’t see the SRs (at least, their left wing and probably the center of gravity of the party too) as anything like the German SPD, either in terms of ideology or tactics. Maybe they would have become a moderate reformist party with time, but I doubt it. I think that the pressures of ruling would have eventually pushed them to go authoritarian and crack down on the right, and I think they had enough of a mass base to win the inevitable civil war just like the Bolsheviks did.
The thing about “Great Man Theory” is that it’s an argument concerning a universal application for history that has to apply in all instances.
The refutation of it does not deny that there are sometimes very consequential individuals where there decision making or their good fortune has significant larger impact. It just argues against them being the sole driving force in history, or the most important ones.
Indeed. Who else would have realised the importance of terrorising people into freedom?
Who is Hitler in a Germany that isn’t reeling from the cultural and economic consequences of defeat in World War I?
A bad painter
i know i’m defending Literally Hitler, but really now? There’s a sample of his works in Wikipedia, and, if nothing else, he’s pretty skilled with a brush.
An Austrian.
Indeed, but what is post-WWI Germany without Hitler but a newly established parliamentary republic like, say, the 4 other ones established in central Europe after WW1?
To be fair to Hitler, he was not the only radical around, and the Nazi party was not the only anti-democratic party that had a public platform of ending the Weimar Republic and was actively undermining it. It’s of course questionable (and somewhat unanswerable) if any other figure would have been able to sell themself to the elites as somebody it’s safe to give all power to despite their anti-government views.
huh could have sworn did a comment.
but yeah Great Man theory always forgets its brother which is Stupid Idiot Theory, and Competent Man Theory.
must have both and all.
Yes that guy was important, but just as important was that fucking idiot over there tripping over a rock and killing that one dude.
I think part of why amateur Roman historians often fall for great men theory is that the “average” Roman emperor rules for four years. The median length of reign is 4 years. In contrast the ten longest reigning emperors account for about 2/5ths of Imperial history, 200 years between them (counting the empire as between Caesar Augustus and Romulus Augustus, for 503 years and 77 emperors). The top 13 are more than 250 years.
This reflects an exceedingly high turnover rate for idiots. The Roman system so harshly punishes incompetence and mediocrity that the good rulers stick out more, creating a mirage or competence. Of course its also violently destructive and it’s possible any of the barracks emperor’s could have been competent if they didn’t die, but they did.
Contrast to more institutionalized monarchies and it’s easier to talk about how King John was a mediocre king at best because, despite his weakness, he ruled for at over a decade. If you had a hundred pages to mention a thousand years of English history he’d earn a good one or two pages. Do the same for all the Roman emperor’s and over half earn less than a page.
Aurelian ruled for 5 years. If you had to rank every Emperor on some great man scale Aurelian would rank really high. Like behind Augustus, Constantine, maybe some Nerva-Trajans, but top 10 definitely. I feel any sophisticated Roman historian would know that Claudius, Tiberius, Antoninus Puis or Septimius Severus were not as remarkable great men as Aurelian. Maybe there is a trap for a certain sort of Roman historian but Tiberius reigned for much longer than the average Emperor and he was not remarkable.
Eh, there are *arguments* there. Tiberius is after all largely responsible for the entire idea of an emperor continuing. (whether or not you think that is bad or not is a different matter) He didn’t write a philosophy book though, so he gets less cred.
The bad emperors do nothing of note but die horribly in 3 years, the great emperors rule for 20 years and make lasting contributions to the empire. Where exactly is “the mirage” of competence?
The mirage is that we remember Roman history as a series of dynamic emperor’s, ignoring the idiots who died horribly, making the average emperor seem better than they were.
It makes the average emperor look better if popular histories only talk about the ones who survived. It’s not so much that it makes the survivors look competent (although it does, I’ve heard takes that Nero had to be competent because he lasted more than a decade), it’s that it further the framing of great man theory if all the mediocre men get paved over quickly.
A topical music recommendation: “History Is Made By Stupid People”, by The Arrogant Worms.
Huh, I always understood “great man” history to be influence of greatly influential individuals like kings and Kaisers including the influence of mediocre or even terribly bad greatly influential individuals.
That essay about the Kaiser Wilhelm’s “Great Mediocrity of History” impact on European politics was fascinating. I had no idea his governance was so chaotic as to potentially influence outside political alignment against Imperial Germany.
My personal “Great Idiot of History” case example is always Henry VI of England, who inherited a surprisingly durable regime from his father (including a 2+ decade-long regency that held together). If he had been merely functionally competent – not even a good King, just competent – we probably don’t get anything resembling the War of the Roses and the churn in English royal houses that ultimately lands on the unlikely Tudors. I don’t know if that changes the overall trajectory of England, but I do think it has a big influence on English politics and warfare.
But instead he was completely incapable of even doing the basic requirements of Kingship, and so it fell apart around him.
Staying with English history: What about Æthelred the Unready?
Re, the Wilhelm II essay: a reminder of what an incompetent idiot Wilhelm II was, is definitely useful… but I don’t really get how this supports a “mediocre man theory”? Wilhelm II wasn’t “mediocre” i.e. middling, boring, just-below-average competence – he was spectacularly incompetent and actively caused chaos. “Crazy toddler theory” would be a better description…
If you want a character who had an outsize personal impact on history because of their *mediocrity* while in a position of power, my pick would by Louis XVI. Reading about the French Revolution, it’s striking how he often doesn’t accept the proposed reforms but neither does he oppose them strongly or develop a principled defence of absolute monarchy. He just sort of muddles along passively, half-heartedly blocking and stalling when he can.
This matters because throughout the Revolution years some form of constitutional monarchy was by far the most popular solution, but it proved impossible to form a coherent and widely supported party around this when there wasn’t a remotely inspiring “monarch” figure to rally around.
Returning to Wilhelm II and “crazy toddler theory”, the parallels with Trump in the essay are glaring. And IMO he’s another example of someone who’s gotten into a position of power and is making a mark on world history because of his crazy and chaotic personality. E.g. a significant minority of Americans now believe the electoral system is fraudulent and the 2020 election was “stolen” – the kind of thing that was barely an issue before 2016 afaik. This seems in large part due to Trump’s personal narcissism and inability to ever admit he “lost” at anything (combined of course with his ability to gather a cult following, to the point that even Republican establishment figures who knew better, felt they had to parrot these idiotic fraud accusations for electoral purposes). Recall that he said the same thing in 2016 when he won the election but lost the popular vote – I really believe this started as personal petulance rather than any grand strategic plan to erode democracy, and yet it did have that effect!
It’s been pointed out that “big” three monarchs who get executed, Charles I, Louis XVI and even Nicholas II all kinda have those personalities (though to different degrees) they’re all wafflers, which made them come across as untrustworthy.
Well, Charles I was untrustworthy. He abandoned friends and supporters, made pledges and then reneged, plotted to undo what he had agreed. It was what took him to the block.
Starting in 2016 there was a multi-year, highly publicized consensus in the media that the election was stolen by Russian interference (motte: a Russian address paid for at least $1 in ads, bailey: the KGB was running an intelligence and counterintelligence campaign on behalf of Trump). A Pulitzer was awarded for the reporting around this.
The distinction matters if the claim is that the drop in electoral legitimacy is especially caused by Great Man Trump. I suppose the media would not have been so outraged if Jeb! had won in 2016, but it’s hard to be sure.
This is a disingenuous argument that only serves to distract. Even the most extreme position about the Russian interference in the 2016 election will accept the legitimacy of the voting itself. The interference is about the influence on the voting public’s perception (and thus voting decision-making) of the party positions.
Trump, by contrast, is directly attacking the voting process itself, that the number of votes cast can’t be trusted, that the people who are casting those votes are not doing so legitimately, that the people counting and reporting the vote tallies are conspiring against him, and that the only response to it is to violently disrupt the voting process and intimidate the people trying to cast their votes. These are not the same positions.
And yes, the media has been very complicit in sane-washing and normalizing this abject departure from the normal bounds of discourse. Which is a systemic breakdown in itself, but not the same as trying to violently overturn the result of an election by inciting a mob to storm parliament.
Special pleading.
No, I don’t think so. I think Alien@System gives a very thorough list of reasons as to why one standard should be employed towards the 2020 election (and its relevance to current US electoral politics, where even when he’s winning Trump will constantly go on about how the electoral process can’t be trusted) and the 2016 one. You might want to actually make an argument that it is not the case, rather than a pithy one liner.
The guy started with “This is a disingenuous argument that only serves to distract. “, and proceeded distract. The topic is not how uniquely bad the orange man is. We were talking about Great Man theory and Trump was only mentioned as an example where the presence or absence of one chaotic personality has significantly affected the legitimacy of American elections. No, you can see the same thing even without the Great Man. Hillary concedes, election legitimacy still “systemically” grinds in the same direction (down).
So no, I do not want to actually make an argument for how the guy is special pleading. We don’t have to turn every thread with a Trump mention into a reddit dogma recital.
Interesting compilation of ideals. A bit of polemic in response. Overall it seems hard to say the Melian dialog is used out of context since it is in in Thucydides work a forced construction that is out of context with reality. An act if you will in his constructed tragedy.
Thus on the second point I have to say I rather strongly or perhaps vehemently disagree with the linked discussion of the dialog. The fate of Melos in its often typical (?) use isolation basically seems to me to be used, as far as I can tell in the same forced way that Thucydides presents it. Hubris of empire and power and all that. To be blunt the free riders of the Melos oligargy pretty much dug their own graves and seemly lead their disinterested people along with them. They got what they deserved for being fools the Athenians (as presented by T) were correct in their assertion of that Thucydides’ bias is clear in that they receive a grand treatment in his narrative plot development vs the off handed remark about the sailors Sparta executes out of hand at the war’s open (and what that entailed). Except for Thucydides own construction I so no particular link between the actions at Melos and the outcome of the venture that leads to defeat at Syracuse. Overall that was a reasonable shot at possibly tipping the balance of power to Athens favor.
That link exists (Hubris demonstrated at Melos than Syracuse and then fall) as far as I can tell only because you are in fact reading it in Thucydides’ epic apology for Pericles (err History) which is a lot of things but foremost and leading back to the opening point here an example of great man in history – history telling. In this case for all his hand waving Thucydides can’t really hide that Pericles single-handedly got Athens into a war it could have avoided (and should have avoided) at all costs and then proceeded to saddle it with a set opening moves that very much lost the war before it even really got going. In other words the reality is Pericles premature death did not cause Athens to loose but his to late death rather did by getting Athens into a war it was unlikely to win. Realistically it is Pericles whose overconfidence leads to Athens downfall not some post Melos leaders pushed to a desperate but necessary gamble on Sicily. Which leads back around to the comparison to the US being poor. Athens was not some unassailable juggernaut as presented by Thucydides who very adroitly manages to wave away the elephant in the room of Persia. Nor was Athens as secure and wealthy and comparable to the US before the second Trump term. Athens was frankly in a far more precarious situation and very much needed to avoid a war with Sparta at all cost since it was in no position win one directly and certainty never by some ill conceived dithering passivity and ineffectually waiting out strategy that amounted to looking weak and inviting defeat by a thousand cuts. A war that also by being started at all fatally distracted Athens from critical issues that it needed to focus on to stabilize its Arche (The war in Macedonia for example which was probably a slam dunk if not irrupted a war or rather blunder of choice with Corinth)
edit A further thought. Though I tend to mistrust Thucydides speeches as all to often serving his bias and analytical view and being uncritically accepted as the whole story I will say I do think his Athenians were right at 1.77.1-6 or so they are being judged unfairly than and more often than not ever since than about their Arche and imperialism.
This “Great Man” thing reminds me of a story. Supposedly, someone once polled historians of American history to rank the greatest American Presidents, and the 1st 2nd and 3rd turned out to be Washington, Lincoln, and FDR. From which they calculated that the more likely an American was to be killed in battle under the Great Man, the Greater a Great Man he must be.
Then again, how many Americans would disagree with that ranking, or agree on a different one?
They are great men and they got lots of Americans killed, but it does not follow that they are great because they got Americans killed. That “story” is classic inability to distinguish between correlation and causation.
Let me put it this way. I beat my brother in a chess match losing only 3 pawns. You beat Magnus Carlsen but lost everything except 2 pawns and your king. Am I the better chess player?
Indeed. To be a Great Man it is not merely necessary to get a lot of people killed. You have to win as well. That’s why we talk of Alexander the Great, not Darius the Great.
Well, we do, just a different Darius: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darius_the_Great
A comment which, on a blog of this name, can only be commended.
I think this is sort of true, but draws the wrong conclusion. The issue isn’t that these men got people killed, it’s that these men existed in times of existential crisis (or perceived existential crisis). Washington was the Revolution, which would have happened without him. Lincoln was the Civil War, which would have happened without him. FDR was WWII which largely DID happen without him–it was ongoing long before the USA joined.
This presents the rather dubious idea that to be great means one must exist in times of crisis. Or, put another way: Great men are irrelevant or impossible during normal or good times.
It says something about our culture. We all admire the savior, but we rarely even acknowledge the man or woman who, in times of reasonable safety, improves the lives of everyone. Sure, not being eliminated as a culture is a good thing for members of that culture, but it says something about our view of the world and our place in it that we only consider those times significant.
What it says is summed up quite well by Futurama: “When you do things right, people will think you haven’t done anything at all.”