The "Great Man" Theory of History

Considering the extent to which the Great Man theory of history remains the conventional wisdom among even the "educated" portion of the population (certainly to go by what passes for popular historiography) I look back and remember how fairly early in my readings in history what I was struck by was how the will of the Great Men constantly bumped up against limits--and how often those limits thwarted their will.

Consider, for example, that relatively recent and therefore relatively well-studied and well-known "Great Man," the more notable as such for his name being so closely connected with the notion of the "genius," Napoleon Bonaparte.

When those discussing the figure speak of Napoleon as a genius they sometimes have in mind his accomplishments as politician or administrator, helping give established form to the changes wrought by the French Revolution; or the wide range of interests that had him, for instance, interested in meeting Goethe (and making a far from unfavorable impression on that other genius of the age). However, they usually have in mind his military record above all.

Alas, reading about Napoleon's wars one cannot but be struck by how much he was a beneficiary of the combination of the revolutionary context that allowed for the "career open to talent" in a way little seen before, and how the revolutionary and nationalistic politics of the moment enabled a mobilization of France's then-considerable demographic weight in a way that had little precedent at the time. Along with all this, Napoleon was a beneficiary of the many innovations in areas ranging from artillery design to army organization that did much to enable the victories of France's armies over those of its opponents.

Looking more closely at the individual victories themselves I noticed (alongside the enormous numbers of other people's lives with which the conqueror purchased his triumphs) how incomplete and unsatisfactory and tenuous Napoleon's successes proved to be, with defeat of a foreign government and installation of some in-law of his on the throne falling far short of translating to successful rule--the same engagement of "the people" that enabled French armies to win so many battles turning against them in their occupations of Italy, of Germany, of Spain, and of course Russia, where taking Moscow ended up availing him nothing at all in the long run. (As Rupert Smith reminded us, the age of "war amongst the people" was on.) I also noticed how geography again and again checked his ambitions--those factors more generally that made Britain the more natural "sea power" checking his ambitions in the Levant, and preventing a repeat of his military triumphs over his enemies in Vienna and Berlin over his enemies in London, while if far from the whole story distances and weather played their part in the calamity of his Russian campaign. The result of that combination of political and geographic fact was that in a few short years Napoleon's Europe-wide empire ceased to exist, the dynasties he had attempted to establish across the continent ceased to rule, and he was exiled to St. Helena in the South Atlantic, where he lived out the remainder of his days. It would seem that Napoleon's participation in these events contributed to hugely consequential historical developments (no matter what a filmmaker like Ridley Scott may sneeringly tell us), but the point is that those developments were absolutely not reducible to that individual contribution, given all that had to happen for that contribution to be possible at all, and the mark that Napoleon ultimately made in history not at all what he intended.

Faced with such facts one can chalk up the endurance of the Great Man theory to the way conventional wisdom lags the cutting edge of thought, especially in our time; the simplicity of explanation of events in terms of personal actions as compared with considering a broader and more complex array of factors; and the attraction to "characters" and "drama" even in consideration of the past, evident in the preference for "narrative nonfiction" to other kinds of historical writing, and indeed the confusion of biography with history that clearly prevails in America, at any rate, if not elsewhere. However, there is a more blatantly political reason at work here. There is the intuitiveness of the theory to a culture which is both highly individualistic and inegalitarian, readily acquiescing in claims that what history records was ultimately a matter of the acts of a very few highly placed individuals, demigods, towering like Galactus above mere mortals. There is the tradition of "gentlemen's history" so readily produced by that privileged layer which gets to write history, especially that which reaches a more than academic audience, with all its propensity for identifying upward and playing courtier to the powerful generally. And there is, of course, the fact that not explaining history in this way would mean explaining it in some other way, with many of these less comfortable and less pleasant for the privileged and conservative than romanticized images of those who have been at the pinnacle of power.