A refutation of Thomas Carlyle’s ‘Great Man Theory’ from below

Learning the correct lessons from history is the non-negotiable requirement of any government and leader in times of world-historical importance. And the correct and most salient lesson of all is the role of the individual in catalysing revolutionary upheaval in society’s that are ripe for such at critical points.

History is littered with affirmation of Thomas Carlyle’s (above) Great Man Theory, popularised in the 19th-century as being central to understanding the world and its historical drivers, abstracting in the process the agency of the masses when it came to shaping the future as anything other than putty in the hands of history’s ‘great men’.

Carlyle:

The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

A pedestrian survey history makes it hard to disagree with the above sentiment. After all what are the lives of Alexeander the Great, Julius Caesar, the Prophet Mohammad, Charles Martel, George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, Lenin, Stalin, Churchill, Hitler, Fidel Castro et al., if not clear evidence of the role of the great man in forging history.

But, then, as Bonaparte himself once opined: ‘History is a set of lies agreed upon.’