It's a big deficiency in the way history is taught, at least here in the US, it's mostly taught as Guy/Group X did Y in year ZZZZ and leaves out a lot of the context that shows how many people were often doing similar things before or simultaneously. It leads a lot of people to buy into the Great Man of History view point when there's rarely singular figures that the the principal cause, often they're just the one who won.
We had a history teacher in high school who noted that. He always tried to cover the factors that led up to an event happening. I always appreciated that.
Ultimately, there's only so much you can cover in a history class on a very broad topic like "Ancient History" or "American History".
My history teacher in middle school really liked to tell us the idea of "historical determinism" whenever an individual appeared to have changed the course of history. Of course that theory doesn't place enough emphasis on individual effort or even their free will. But I guess I appreciated the alternate viewpoint.
I have this complaint about a lot of more modern history, which is that the idea of the great man theory is so abhorrent that some historians have started to treat the concept of free will as non-existent where the forces of history are so powerful things were all but inevitable. People are driven by economic, environmental, and societal factors. But sometimes there is an individual that makes things move one way or another.
I usually like to take the example of WWI, it was probably going to happen regardless in Europe eventually. But King Wilhelm II was an individual that has specific psychological aspects that drove it to happen the way it did. A different king would not have created the alliance situation that made the specific powers fight on their specific side. If King Wilhelm didn't try and emulate and thus alienate England, we might have seen England and Germany against Russia and France.
It is a bit funny when some historians describe "great man theory" as blatantly false, while warning that specific individuals are uniquely dangerous when commenting on ongoing politics.
If "great man theory" is 100% false and each person is 100% replaceable with no change for historical events, why complain so much that $POLITICIAN is uniquely dangerous?
(my opinion is that both individuals and trends matter, there are people that changed history, but power of geography/economy/technology is also great - for example, once nuclear weapons were discovered it had some consequences. And no individual can uninvent nuclear weapons.)
$POLITICIAN is just the visible face of a much larger movement, specially in democracy. But by being the public face,it also means that defeating $POLITICIAN is defeating his backing movement by proxy.
One man dictators like Mao, Stalin or Hitler have huge impacts on history depending on their personal idiosyncrasies. Had any of those three died young, history would have been substantially different.
Wars can also be decided my random misfortunes. If the 1941 winter was mild instead of extremely cold, Hitler might have defeated Stalin, and we'd have a very different world.
At the same time the environment of the times and place (encompassing the political sphere here as well) they rose to power also tends to select particular types of people to rule. I'm not a pure structuralist for sure, there's a lot of room for randomness and individual quirks in history for sure I think structure is a lot more powerful in science/tech since you can generally have a lot more people working away at a scientific problem than you can have running France for example. It's also waaay harder to study because you don't get the counterfactual of who would wind ruling post WW2 USSR if not Stalin.
> If the 1941 winter was mild instead of extremely cold, Hitler might have defeated Stalin, and we'd have a very different world.
That's actually less true than it might seem. Warmer winters can be worse for highly mechanized armies like the Wehrmacht, really any army but tanks and mud are not friends. That part of the world especially in the early 40s where many of the roads were unpaved turns into a giant sucking mud pit during warmer winters. It's bad enough it's bogged down modern armies miles south in Ukraine when the weather warms up from the winter freezes and the mud season sets in. On top of that they needed a lightning victory because their fuel situation was already pretty bad in 41, part of the reason for going East in the first place was to get oil for the war machine.
I'm not saying it does, just thought it was an interesting aside to talk about, Barbarossa was pretty flawed from the very beginning.
Also I don't think it's a great pro-Great Man nor anti-Structuralist argument. Structuralist don't believe it's deterministic generally and if history is so down to random chance then how important are the "Great Men"? It's basically a wash for either side imo.
By "mild" I meant more that it's not so cold that tank engines can't start and tons of German soldiers freeze to death. Not that it matters for the bigger point.
FWIW, I asked Grok and it said that with better weather Germany might have taken Moscow, but they were probably (80%) doomed anyway because of several factors, including Hitler's incompetent military strategy.
If they had attacked in April instead, Grok gives it 50% chance that they defeat the Soviets before the winter and Lend-Lease equipment makes it hopeless.
I know, it's just a word predicting piece of mindless software...
Still, I stick by my main point. The Spanish Armada example is better than mine.
I really hate this take because it implicitly ignores the baseline murderous-ness of the systems and situations these leaders inherit. Nelson Mandela wasn't gonna rise to the top of the pile in 1920s Russia.
Furthermore, the people who underpin various states and societies (and the cultures and movements that shape them) do ultimately choose who rules them. Leaders only have freedom of action within the window of what their political capitol affords them. The people, or even just the ones that call the shots (this should be a familiar concept if you've ever seen a TV show centered around a medieval royal family) very much do set that window. Grant and Eisenhower's "failure" to thoroughly exploit conquered territory would have made them unsuitable for further leadership in antiquity for that matter yet they were both more or less instantly elevated by the existing power structure and elected to the highest office.
This is a bad take because it comes from linguistic ignorance. The "great" here doesn't mean the person is wonderful with a kind soul and a benevolent impact. It's not "great" as an extra intense "good".
It's great like a Great White Shark is great. Great like Great Britain is great. Large, impactful, encompassing. A person is said to be a "Great Person" if they are seen to have a disproportionately large impact on the course of history. It is this premise, of some individuals being able to have such disproportionate impacts (rather than everything being a product of the times) that certain philosophers and historians have objected to. It wasn't out of concern that we might be glorifying nasty people with the term; if that were it then we could simply change the terminology to "Impactful People" or something like that. Those who've lodged serious objections to the premise of great people would not be placated by this change in words.
Incidentally I remember my history teacher commenting that even if Marx didn't exist at that time, communism would still be born around that time in history.
Marx himself would say so. Key to Marxism is studying history to come up with a scientific theory which predicts the future course of society. If individuals can change the course of history through shear force of their will, bending society in unpredictable ways to suit their individual fancy, that throws a wrench into it.
But can anybody seriously say that if not for Napoleon, there surely would have been some other French general, inspired by Julius Caesar to conquer everything he could, who was simultaneously also a master tactician with enough skill to get as far as Napoleon did? I can buy the premise that somebody else in that political environment might have tried, but to get so far and embroil most of the world in war as Napoleon did wasn't a deterministic predictable consequence of the circumstance. You can probably predict a civil war, but not the Napoleonic Wars.
There's definitely problems with a 100% structuralist view of history too make no mistake. Things like politics, battles and wars are more prone to the effects of outliers and random chance just by their nature, you can't have 1000 people try to conquer Italy with one of the least loved chunks of the French Army at the same time, unlike how you can have 1000 people working on radio or flight at a time. On the other side of the coin without the French Revolution which he had no part in creating or driving he would have likely stayed a minor artillery officer or less in the Acien regime.
Wilhelm II, as despicable as he was, really can't be majorly blamed for WWI. His ministers had arranged for him to be on vacation during the July crisis because they knew he wouldn't be tough enough, and when Serbia responded to the Austrian ultimatum, Wilhelm was convinced that this should be enough to avert a war.
WWI seems like more of a slow motion train wreck than WWII does. There were so many pieces in motion even if Archduke Ferdinand's assassination (which came very close to not happening) precipitated it. Whereas while the aftermath of WWI planted the seeds for WWII, it seems a lot less inevitable.
Total side-note, I've actually seen Serbia's basic FU response to Austro-Hungary in Serbia :-)
WW2 is also is what defined the lines of the modern geopolitical world so everyone brought up in that world has been fed a lifetime of establishment media that portrays ww2 as inevitable.
It's kind of like how every religious founding document has a huge element of "and the sinners/bad people were struck down as they inevitably would be because they did not live by god/he was not on their side" when when describing the origin of whoever is god's chosen people according to that religion.
I am not really referring to wilhelmn II in world war I itself but rather the 20 or so proceding years where his pursuit of naval and colonial supremacy alienated Germany from the British and French, undoing Bismark’s alliance system. WWI I think was almost inevitable.
Some war between Germany and France was probably inevitable, and that the Balkan situation would blow up someday was also almost a given, but that this happened simultaneously and led to a war of this magnitude was very much contingent on specific things happening in Summer of 1914.
I think there's a wide variety of ways this gets taught (in the US at least).
But if you go to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum where the Wright Flyer is currently on display, maybe a third of the room's displays document the achievements of the wide array of pioneers of flight besides the Wright Brothers, followed by maybe another third of the room documenting the fast followers who competed with the Wright Brothers (and many of their tragic deaths).
It's not impossible to find of course, it's not like it's being suppressed, but if you just go through high school, and a lot of colleges depending on their general education requirements, your main history education will be very Great Person oriented.
To discount individual achievement is such a disservice to humanity. There is absolutely an environmental benefit but i take issue with the totally BS if they didn't do it someone else would on all things is such a knee cap to individual merit and ability.
Merit and ability sit atop of the works of all humanity but without it nothing would be accomplished.
It's not about wiping out individual achievements it's just about recognizing that no one does it alone and that some ideas were just ready to explode. Radio, Calculus, the Steam Engine, etc all had simultaneous inventions in many areas or get commonly attributed to one particular person are actually just built up to a point they can be successful through the work of dozens of people.
I'm also not saying it's 100% structural or economic just the education tends to highlight individuals instead of fully covering all the others that were just behind the person who's getting the lion's share of the credit historically.
It is fundamentally about taking away individual achievement.
Of course other people are involved - stating the obvious isn't enlightening. Individual merit, insight and achievement should absolutely be celebrated. This whole effort to say we'd be where we are as humans scientifically regardless of individual effort and intellect is shades of cultural revolution and 100% rewriting history.
It's the equivalent of saying individuality isn't needed and it's 100% wrong. Recognize other contributors of course, but don't discount individuals.
You're arguing against an imaginary position, no one is really arguing that people don't and didn't have to work for the things they managed to do just that there are structural and historical forces that made what they do possible and in many cases others were right on their heels (or actually succeeded first but didn't commercialize or document their successes).
I'd be very surprised if it were unique to the US although there's probably some cultural element. There is a tendency to ascribe invention to an individual even if the real answer is an individual's lab/team or really a more complex story. E.g. James Watt didn't invent the steam engine although he came up with an innovation that made it significantly more efficient. Look at almost any significant invention and its history is... complicated. But ask who invented something and "complicated" isn't a very satisfactory answer.
Fits the whole pull yourself up by the bootstraps mindset. I can imagine income inequality would be less disparate if people realized how much society actually contributes.
FWIW when I was an aerospace major, one of the first lessons in “fundamentals of flight” as the class was named, was about the race to flight that was heating up around the time of the Wright brothers. But this was in an aerospace class, so I guess it’s less relevant. Never heard about the Brazilian guys though
In 1906, Santos-Dumont flew 220 meters for less than half a minute. In 1905, Wilbur Wright flew 38.9 km for more than 39 minutes.
This isn't one of those cases, like light bulbs, where it can be reasonably debated who was first. The Wrights were in front of the competition by literal miles.
Also is a deficiency in patents. Instead of giving a temporary monopoly on a genuine original idea and solution, it becomes a land rush to who can get to a newly obvious idea the fastest.
That's not how I remember learning it in grade school. There was a whole chapter on people trying and failing to achieve flight and many close calls. Then there was yet more history about other groups who achieved it after the Wright Bros.
I agree that simultaneous invention is an important concept, but I view it separately from Great Man Theory of History. GMTH is invariably trying to capture the idea that when you have a person who has a lot power, then their successes or failures can have a large impact on the rest of society. I don't dispute that they can be part of the zeitgeist of forces that are driving society, but sometimes what one person in power says matters a lot. I think it probably matters less for scientific pursuits where a lot of people are thinking about something and one person happens to be the person who got there first (not that this doesn't deserve praise either).
This applies to "negative" inventions, too: Eugenics was a pretty favorably and openly discussed concept in the early 1900s (e.g. Winston Churchill was a pretty vocal proponent), but Hitler basically gets all the credit for the whole idea.
A lot of the world was hot for eugenics at the time the US in particular, a lot of the pre-Final Solution laws were systematizing things that were happening in the US on an basis ranging from ad-hoc to legal; sterilization of people with mental issues, miscegenation laws, etc.
I mean, I'm pretty sure Eugenics was invented by Eugene, thus the name. Or it was a way to avoid needing to know people's names, because everyone would be named Eugene. :P
I didn't realize that you spoke for everyone. Maybe you were taught that info by your instructor, but that doesn't mean everyone followed a similar format.
