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 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.