The “Great Man Hypothesis” Briefly Debunked

If you have much interest in history, you have probably heard of the so-called “Great Man hypothesis,” which holds that history is completely—or at least primarily—shaped by the deeds of a small number of so-called “Great Men.” If you have heard of this hypothesis, chances are you have probably heard why most modern historians reject it. In case you haven’t, though, here is a quick look at the so-called “Great Man hypothesis” and a few of its shortcomings.

Carlyle’s famous statement of the hypothesis

The so-called “Great Man hypothesis” was famously summed up by the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle (lived 1795 – 1881) in a lecture he delivered on 5 May 1840 titled “The Hero as Divinity,” in which he declared:

“Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realization and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world’s history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these.”

Later in the same lecture, Carlyle proclaimed, “No great man lives in vain. The History of the world is but the Biography of great men.” This idea that all of human history has been primarily shaped by the deeds and words of a few great men was practically the foundation of nineteenth-century western historiography. If you read through nineteenth-century history books, they mostly tend to focus on great kings and generals, Popes and bishops, lords and knights, and so forth.

ABOVE: Photograph of the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle taken in the 1860s. Carlyle is closely associated with the “Great Man hypothesis.”

All “Great Men” are products of their societies

Nowadays, the Great Man hypothesis is rejected by nearly all historians. Quite simply, if you closely examine the personalities, aspirations, words, and deeds of so-called “Great Men,” you will find that all “Great Men” are shaped by their societies. I will use Alexander the Great as an example, since he is often cited as an archetypal example of a “Great Man.”

Alexander is famous today for having conquered the Achaemenid Empire, but the idea of someone from Greece conquering the Achaemenid Empire originated at least a century before Alexander was even born and no one knows who it was that first thought of it. Likewise, Alexander was only able to accomplish what he did because he happened to have been born into a position of power. If Alexander had been born the son of an impoverished Macedonian shepherd rather than the son of a Macedonian king, it is highly unlikely anyone today would have ever heard of him.

Furthermore, in nearly all cases, the accomplishments of so-called “Great Men” were only possible thanks to the cooperation of at least some of the so-called “ordinary masses.” If no one had followed Alexander the Great on his expedition to conquer the Achaemenid Empire, he never would have conquered anything and most people today would probably have never heard of him. Alexander’s soldiers, generals, and other supporters were every bit responsible for his conquests as the man himself.

ABOVE: Detail of the iconic first-century AD Roman mosaic of Alexander in the Battle of the Issos from the House of the Faun in Pompeii. Alexander is often cited as an archetypal example of a “Great Man.”

Other people who matter

Finally, focusing on the so-called “Great Men” draws attention away from the other people who matter: the ordinary soldiers, the common farmers, the merchants, the people living in poverty, the wives, the mothers, the daughters, the resident foreigners, the slaves, the peoples being conquered.

If you lump all these people together as nothing more than “the ordinary masses,” then you are doing them all a disservice. Really, there are no “ordinary masses,” because each individual is unique and extraordinary in their own way. Many men and women whose names we will never know have shaped history in extraordinary ways that we will never understand, because they have been left out of the historical narrative.

The “Great Man hypothesis” is often appealed to in order to discount and discredit the study of anyone from history who was not a wealthy, powerful man. For instance, a person who believes in the “Great Man hypothesis” might respond to the study of ordinary women’s lives in the ancient world by saying something like, “Who cares what ordinary women’s lives were like? Women weren’t important, so they aren’t worth studying.” Making this kind of statement, however, would reveal the speaker’s own deeply biased perspective on history.

ABOVE: Fresco of Macedonian soldiers from an ancient tomb in Agios Athanasios, Thessaloniki. Alexander the Great only conquered Persia with the cooperation of his soldiers.

If you are so preoccupied with the deeds of Alexander the Great that you forget about the people he actually conquered, you are not doing a very good job at writing history. Likewise, if you are so concerned with Perikles’s initiation of the building of the Parthenon that you forget about the architects who actually designed it and the workmen who actually built it, you are leaving out something rather important.

To be very clear, I am not necessarily saying that Alexander, Perikles, Plato, Napoleon, or any of the other iconic “Great Men” of history were not great; all I am saying is that “Great Men” do not drive the course of history. They may influence history in important ways, but they do not drive it all on their own.

Everyone who has ever lived has had some role to play in the course of history, because history is the story of everyone, both large and small. My case, then, is not that Great Men do not matter, but rather that other people—the people whom a supporter of the “Great Man hypothesis” might refer to as “the common masses”—often matter at least just as much.

ABOVE: Photograph of the Parthenon, a temple to the goddess Athena on the Athenian Akropolis, built at the initiation of Perikles between 447 and 432 BC, designed by the architects Iktinos and Kallikrates, with sculptures carved by the sculptors Pheidias and his students. We do not know the names of the workmen who built this thing, but they are just as responsible for it as Perikles.