What is the Great Man Theory? (NO AI)

History has a habit of orbiting certain men. Remove Julius Caesar from the late Roman Republic, and the fall of that system does not unfold in the same way. Remove Napoleon from revolutionary France, and Europe likely does not rearrange itself in the same way. These men do not simply participate in history. They have the ability to bend and accelerate it. They have the capacity to force moments of decision where hesitation might have otherwise dragged out events for decades. And yet, for the past century or so, historians, philosophers, and academic schools of thought have tried to dismantle this instinct entirely. We are told that history is not shaped by individuals, but by impersonal forces. Things like economics, class struggle, demographics, institutions, and technology. And according to this view, Caesar and Napoleon are not engines of history at all. They are passengers who happen to be sitting at the front of the train. So I have three questions. Is history driven by great men? Are great men just convenient symbols we attach to movements that would have happened anyway? And is there a way you can use these ideas to unlock your full potential as a man? These questions sit at the heart of what has become known as the Great Man Theory, most famously articulated by the 19th century Scottish historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle in a series of lectures that were later written down into a work called Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History in 1840. Carlyle's claim is blunt and deeply unfashionable today. He writes that the history of the world is but the biography of great men. And he goes on to Note the word grace. He does not say good men, moral men, democratic men, or popular men. Great men. These are men of exceptional force of will, vision, courage, and above all, personal agency. They usually rise in moments of crisis and are able to impose their force of will to change the course of history. Carlyle did not believe these men were manufactured by institutions. He believed greatness was largely inborn, that some men simply possess a faculty of insight and decisiveness that others do not. Circumstances, of course, are absolutely important, but they do not act on their own, as these men throughout history have possessed the ability to tip the scale one way or another. And what's important to note is that Carlyle's heroes are not exclusively military commanders. He speaks of divine heroes like Odin, the prophet like Mohammed, the poet like Shakespeare, the priest like Martin Luther, the man of letters like Rousseau, and the king like Napoleon. Therefore, there is an archetype for every man to follow. And of course, it's not the first time we've seen this idea. Machiavelli in The Prince encourages rulers to model themselves on a great man who came before them. He references Moses, Cyrus the Great, Romulus, to name a few. We can take this back even further to Plutarch in Parallel Lives, where he discusses Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Cicero. Aristotle wrote the great souled man in the Nicomachean Ethics. Libby references Kinconatus and Scipio Africanus. There's also the Renaissance man, who fortunately for you, I've done an entire video on that you can go and check out. The point is that this model of trying to learn from and emulate great men occurs in multiple forms throughout history. You cannot follow exactly in another man's footsteps, but you can try and imitate them, absorb their victories, and importantly, learn from their defeats. Oh, and also if you want to just read more about history and don't know where to start, I have a free European history list you can get by clicking the link in the description. Now, back to Carlyle. At the time this came out, so the 19th century openly believed in this type of hierarchy, they believed in inequality of ability, and they believed in individual excellence. But even then, Carlyle's argument did not go unchallenged. It is likely you learned a different version of history in school, one that downplayed the significance of these men's roles. One of Carlyle's critics was a philosopher named Herbert Spencer. He believed that attributing historical events to the decisions of individuals was a hopelessly primitive, childish, and unscientific position. He believed that the great men, Carlyle called great men, were merely products of their social environment. He states, you must admit that the genesis of a great man depends on the long series of complex influences which have produced the race in which he appears, and the social state into which that race has slowly grown. Before he can remake his society, his society must remake him. Another critic was Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy, having lived through the Napoleonic era himself, argued that men like Napoleon were not masters of events at all, but were swept along by vast social forces they barely understood. And as a result of this, we have mistaken momentum for genius. And when we look at Tolstoy's characters in War and Peace, we can see that they are relentlessly pushed about by forces rather than controlling them. Tolstoy's characters describe the Third Coalition's attempt to create a grand strategy to defeat Napoleon. In it, Austria, Russia, and other allies are planning in great detail to trap and destroy the French forces. But later in the story, we learn how their unified blueprint essentially goes to hell. In Tolstoy's view, the failure of the Third Coalition highlights that even with great planning, no human plan or individual genius can fully predict or harness the current of history. Now, War and Peace is a work of historical fiction, but despite the made-up characters and places, it has been widely praised for how vividly it captures the feel of the period. So maybe it's a good argument and there's some merit to it. Well, we see in real warfare that plans do often go out the window as soon as a battle begins. Sometimes orders are misheard, the terrain might interfere, the weather can disrupt everything like the conditions on the battlefield, and the battle will unfold in ways that no single mind can obviously control or potentially even anticipate. Even Napoleon could not micromanage the chaos of combat. But here is the problem with this view. Structures can and do create possibilities, but they in themselves cannot choose. So, for example, revolutionary France produced thousands of capable officers. It produced ambition, mass conscription, and an officer corps open to merit in a way the Ancien Régime had not been. Now, Napoleon was able to rise within this and take advantage of this new structure. Many men of this time were competent, some were even brilliant, but only one was Napoleon. If Napoleon had died, for example, quite young, France would not simply have produced another identical figure right on cue. Because we have people like Toléran, Fouché, and Davo, who are all formidable men in their own right, but none of the combined military genius, political instinct, timing, and sheer bloody audacity in quite the same way as Napoleon. When he took command of the army in Italy in 1796, it was underfed, underpaid, and facing Austrian and Piedmontese forces that were geographically separated, but they were planning to join forces. So instead of fighting conventionally, he recognized that those armies were divided by the terrain. He moved quickly, concentrated his forces against the enemies individually, and defeated them separately before they could unite and become stronger. At Montenot, he prevented Austrian consolidation by acting faster than their coordination allowed them to. Arcole, Napoleon personally seized the flag and advanced towards the bridge to rally his troops, and he nearly got killed in the process. Because here he understood the importance of his men's morale and leading from the front, showing them that he was present in the danger of battle. He used speed, psychological warfare, and his own personal visible presence to maintain momentum when lesser commanders might have just hesitated or not acted at all. At Auschwitz in 1805, he laid a psychological trap. He offered terms of negotiation to seem weaker than he was to bait the allies into an attack. He then deliberately weakened his right flank and appeared vulnerable, encouraging the allied army to commit to an attack on ground he had calculated they would abandon. He allowed them to overextend and then struck through the center at the Pratzen Heights once they had shifted their weight. Now, this gamble could have been a disaster. If the timing was off slightly, if the allies had been more cautious and less egotistical, if Marshall's suit's forecourt had been delayed for some reason and unable to advance as intended, the outcome might have looked completely different. But it didn't. Napoleon did not control every variable, but when the moment opened, he made a decision that others probably would not have. He was bold and brilliant, and you could argue that no other commander of that era could have pulled something like this off. The same applies to Julius Caesar. The late Roman Republic was unstable long before Caesar crossed the Rubicon. In fact, Sulla had marched on Rome decades earlier, and Caesar saw first-hand what happens when politics turns into a political purge. Men like Pompey held enormous prestige at this time, and others like Marcus Crassus possessed extraordinary wealth. Military commands were already highly politicized and frequent. But when faced with the choice of disbanding his army and submitting to prosecution, or marching south and initiating civil war, Caesar chose escalation. Another man might have sought compromise, but Caesar crossed the Rubicon. I think this is the space where the great man theory regains that force. Certain power structures can create tension, but at the end of the day, it is the individual that must act within this tension. That said, there is an important caveat to all of this. Carlyle is not advocating blind worship of power, and he does admit these men are flawed. In his treatment of Napoleon, he admires his energy and clarity and genius, but he also says to us that injustice eventually recoils upon the man who commits it. He points to Napoleon's execution of German bookseller Johann Philippe Pham in 1806 as an act that burned deeply into European opinion. Injustice, Carlyle writes, pays itself with frightful compound interest. In Carlyle's telling, Napoleon ultimately loses contact with reality, begins to mistake himself for the embodiment of France itself, and then destroys himself under that illusion. He wasn't infallible, and of course he lost in the end, but in the moments that mattered, particularly early on, he saw openings others would have missed. So is there a way you can use these ideas to unlock your full potential as a man? And can it even be done within the constraints of our modern society? The modern world operates under international law, nuclear deterrence, and complex institutional constraints that rule out territorial conquest. Obviously enough, you can't simply march an army across borders without catastrophic consequences. But while the arena has changed, the idea, and what we can learn, hasn't vanished entirely. When opportunity appears, who will recognize it? And who acts? So what can we learn from this without falling into the hero worship or complete and utter fantasy? First of all, great men take responsibility when others try to escape from it. They act decisively in moments where hesitation feels like the safer option. And they also accept the weight of the consequences of their actions rather than dispersing blame to others. Napoleon, Caesar, Alexander the Great, Da Vinci, Henry V, these were men of agency. For us, that starts with taking personal responsibility for our own circumstances. I came to this realization myself several years ago. I had to accept to myself that the place I was in in life was as a result of the decisions that I had made, nobody else. I had to accept this simple truth and just take radical ownership of my life. I had to suppress that nagging victim mindset that it wasn't my fault because it's easy to blame other things for your situation. This ultimately did not serve me. It was essentially disempowering. And although bad things can happen that are outside one's control, it is still up to that individual person to take responsibility and decide how they act and perceive those events going forward. The second thing is that these men align themselves with reality. They had lofty ambitions, which is probably the understatement of the century, but a goal without a plan is just a dream. Napoleon studied logistics and strategy obsessively. Caesar understood that he had to go into death, secure patronage, and gain positive public perception to further his political ambition. They didn't operate on wishful thinking because they assessed the conditions honestly that they were in, and then they acted accordingly. The third thing is that they act when opportunity appears. Like I said earlier, structures will open the door, yes, but most people won't walk through it. When these men saw an opportunity, they acted fast and decisively. Indecision can be worse than imperfect action, and if you do decide to do nothing, it must be a strategic decision in itself, not a passive one. In any case, our perception of good or bad will happen in the moment, and it is possible that it will change in the future. In other words, when a door is closed, sometimes a window opens. What may seem like a bad decision in the moment may turn out to be a stroke of brilliance in the future. The lesson is whatever you do, decide, or others will decide for you. And finally, they were not narrow specialists alone. Carlisle writes, I confess, I have no notion of a truly great man that could not be all sorts of men. Caesar was a general, a politician, but also a writer who was praised by Cicero, who had no great love for him. Napoleon was a soldier, yes, and an administrator, but he was also a legal reformer who left behind the Napoleonic Code. Marcus Aurelius was an emperor and a philosopher. Goethe was a poet and a statesman. Widen your field of expertise because you just never know what's going to come in handy. Of course, none of this guarantees greatness. Carlisle himself believed that certain qualities are innate, but things like discipline, skill acquisition, responsibility, and cultivation of a strong character are not mystical gifts. These are habits and attributes that you can cultivate over time. Now, however, with all this being said, there is a cost to this. Greatness has always demanded a sacrifice that most people simply do not want to pay. Carlisle's heroes were not particularly balanced men. They were highly driven, but they were obsessive, unyielding, often isolated, frequently misunderstood, and even hated. Napoleon died in exile, and Julius Caesar was assassinated by the very men he granted mercy to. The aesthetic ideal of greatness is attractive, but the burden one must carry alongside it isn't all that glamorous. With all that being said, I like to follow the ideals of the great man theory, and I choose to try and live my life taking inspiration from these men while also trying to learn from their mistakes. Will I achieve something truly great in my life? Who knows, but the true joy is in the pursuit. In some strands of modern historiography and social history, the great men are seen as tyrants and oppressors, but I personally disdain this view of history as it gives me nothing to aspire to. It turns history into nothing but oppressors and victims because it stops being an education and it starts becoming a bloody sermon. The great man theory is not entirely right, and I don't think it's entirely wrong either. What it does offer us is some inspiration while simultaneously highlighting the dangers of greatness if one does not try to overcome their own personal character flaws. We do not have to emulate them in every aspect, but simply use them as a guide. So next time life presents you with an opportunity, and it will, will you have required the necessary skills to recognize it, grab it with two hands, and make the most of it? But I'd love to know what you think of the great man theory. I've linked Karla's work for you to read in the description. And if you enjoyed it and have a buddy who'd be interested in this topic, feel free to send it over to them. As always, don't forget to subscribe to the channel. God bless, and we'll see you in the next one.