Is History the Biography of Great Men?
At the beginning of his “Heroes and Hero-worship”, Thomas Carlyle says: “Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the history of the Great Men who worked there”. By this he meant in every age there have been men who have risen head and shoulders above their fellows, and who, by their strong character, dominant personality and intellectual genius, have been “the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or attain”.
For example, the life of Pericles is a summary of what Athens accomplished in art, literature and statesmanship ; the biography of Julius Caesar is a history of the rise of the Roman Empire ; Martin Luther was the creator and author of the Reformation ; William Pitt’s life is the history of the creation of the British Empire ; and the work of Rousseau accounts for the French Revolution. It was such great men-great statesmen, soldiers, poets, writers, prophets, rulers, philanthropists, business organizers—who started the great movements of history, and led men, for good or evil, in the way they have gone. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said : “All history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons”.
No doubt there is a good deal of truth in this view ; but it is not the whole truth. For it is as true to say that the Great Man is the product of his age, as to say he is its creator. Take, for example, Martin Luther, the German monk, who stands out as the chief figure in the Reformation movement of the 16th Century. Before Luther rose, there were many earnest religious men who deplored the corruption of the Christian Church. There had been growing for a long time a feeling of unrest, doubt, criticism and disgust among the masses. It all found its expression in the bold monk, Martin Luther, who put himself at the head of a movement which had already begun, and led it on to victory. He summed up and boldly expressed what many had been vaguely feeling. The powder was already collected ; Luther was the match that ignited it and caused the explosion. But it is doubtful if even a great man, like Luther, could have done what he did, had not his way been prepared for him by many lesser men and the general feelings of the times.
The great movements of history were not entirely the creation of the great men of history. Millions of forgotten individuals made them possible, though the great men guided them and made them successful. So, history is not only the biography of great men, but the biography of millions of lesser men also
