One factor here is how systems become more or less prone to creating great or mediocre men. Inbreeding, isolation, over romanticism of emotions, all these are factors that can make a dangerous inconsistent person more likely to appear in the halls of power
Reminds me a quote I heard recently about wealth inequality and how the very rich can do dumb things without consequences (to them anyway) and it was along the lines of 'we don't have a merit-based system, because our system does not need merit to function'.
I mean, yes everything has limits. I think the point is that the limit for how much merit is required for our system to run is much much lower then people would intuitively expect. Which is why its surprising when we see very clearly incompetent people thriving at the same time other very clearly competent and talented people are struggling, and wondering how that could possibly happen.
Of course mediocre and bad leaders make their mark on history. But Carlyle's Great Men theory is more about paradigm shifts that Great Men can will into existence, not just random noise they bring along. The problem with GM theory is that there is only a handful of examples to support it. Napoleon is one such example, and it was undoubtedly the inspiration why the theory was proposed in the first place. People were trying to come to terms with the fact that one leader can have such a dramatic impact on the entire world.
The historical setting at the moment of time matters a lot. Had the French Revolution not happened, he would've been yet another artillery lieutenant in the French army. In 1789 Jean Lannes was a dyer, Laurent de Gouvion Saint-Cyr was a paineter, Jean-Baptiste Jourdan worked in a clothing store, Jean-Baptiste Bessières was a barber, Guillaume Marie Anne Brune was a typesetter, Jean-Baptiste Kléber was an architect... et cetera, et cetera. But it happened, and lot of people got an impossible before chance to discover their dormant military talents.
Prior to the war, Robert Brovdi (Magyar) was a local businessman on a periphery of Ukraine. Now he is a commander of probably the strongest drone force in the world.
I think the wrinkle of "men (or maybe women) at a particular hingepoint had their personal foibles that shaped history" is valid. There were structural forces that led to WW2 but Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, Hitler et al being their particular personalities absolutely shaped how it unfolded.
This point of view implies that the revered "great men" should be stripped of their wealth and power as much as possible. They're not necessary for history, so no need to disproportionally allocate resources to them.
Organisations have evolved to deal with them. In fact, all the rules and procedures, checks and compliance procedures are there precisely to allow the organisation to survive despite its members.
When you look at white noise from up close, you see dramatic changes, periods of calm, and what seems like patterns.
Only when you step back, you realise all that drama you read is mostly inconsequential. What will be the impact of Napoleon 1000 years from now? Of Columbus? If instead of Hitler Germany had Rohm? It’s all monkeys and typewriters all the way down. What matters are the structural forces, the natural resources, the geography, and so on. Chances are it’ll be all forgotten in a billion years.
Now, on a more serious note, did anyone else, at some point, started wondering whether the article was really about Wilhelm II?
We still speak today of Charlemagne, Muhammed, Caesar, Alexander.
Napoleon and Columbus have secured for themselves their seats in the pantheon of history and it will take longer than a thousand years for mankind to forget about them.
What are a thousand years other than a couple of generations? What does it matter from further away?
We always forget about the past eventually. There are so many great civilisations we only have tiny shreds of knowledge about, and yet in their time, they also had great leaders and epic stories to tell. It’s all inconsequential once enough time has passed.
People love to mythologize. The truth is usually much more mundane. Columbus in particular has a combination of Mr. Magoo quality and nastiness that is will lead history to forcefully forget him in short order.
In short order after 500 years? You're not wrong about his qualities but he was still the guy who did it first, and it's still called the Columbian exchange.
When I was young Columbus was lionized in schools. Now young people I talk to demonize him more and more. He wasn't even first (Viking explorers beat him there by a lot), he was just first to brutally exploit. I'm sure the things that are named after him will be renamed eventually to honor more deserving figures.
That is a very US-ian perspective. AFAIK he is still lionized in Latin America, and likely will continue to be, as he is a sorta-kinda the ur-founder of all those nations.
Might be a stretch to imply that the Wilhelm II was a mediocre illiberal. HIM was (for a time) interested in protecting workers' rights. However great he was, Bismarck couldn't overpower a "mediocre" populist
I was making a general point, not specifically about Bismarck.
Assume every side has great individuals in positions of power (great being here evidently in relation to ability), greatness is thus evenly balanced and not so important to the final outcome.
This entire article tries to make a point that it's not just "great men" or "structural forces" alone being responsible for the course of history, but then completely misses the point again by labeling someone in power as mediocre and arguing that that mediocrity caused much of the events of the 20th century.
This once again causes oversimplifies history to a few people and some nebulous "structural forces", and provides an attractive but wrong model of how history developed. In software terms we would call this a "leaky abstraction", and this particular abstraction leaks so much it's barely useful at all.
The world is much too complex to be understood by examining less than at least a few hundred million people. That this is beyond the capability of humans is not the world's problem.
>[...] where promotions were based on the favor of a man who did not have the character to set a consistent policy made for a state that was not a credible partner.
>Germany’s interests were incomprehensible and thus there was no option other than to balance against this rogue state in the heart of Europe
>There was a saying of the Kaiser in Vienna, that Wilhelm wished to be “the stag at every hunt, the bride at every wedding, and the corpse at every funeral.”
> If it was the social and political forces of the French Revolution that made Napoleon successful, the logical conclusion is that it would have made no difference to the course of history should he have, say, suffered a fatal stroke in 1801, a premise few would accept. It is clearly untrue when applied to specific cases. Not only who ends up in power, but the specific decisions they make are deeply consequential. Who would really contend that the 20th century would remain unchanged had Hitler been killed in WWI?
Isn't the idea more that the large-scale political forces are what allow those supposedly "great men" to become "great" in the first place? Yes, once Napoleon was in power, a lot of the details of history were dependent on his individual decisions - but the forces that led to the French Revolution were what gave him that power in the first place. An if he had actually died of a stroke, or if Hitler had been killed in WWI, then the specifics of history would have been different, but probably not the large-scale trajectory: Post-revolutionary France would still have been there and the deep divisions, senses of injustice and reactionary and capitalist influence in post-WWI Germany that gave rise to the Nazi movement would also still have been there. And chances are, other "great men" would have emerged and captured those forces.
As such, I see the relationship more like the one between lightning strikes and wildfires: Yes, a particular wildfire might have been caused by that particular lightning strike (or careless hiker or whatever), but the reason why that particular local event could spiral into a blaze that burns down acres and acres were the larger environmental conditions, i.e. hot weather, wind and dryness. And if firefighters could take a time machine and prevent that particular cause, then it's likely another random event would trigger a slightly different but still extremely similar wildfire - so not much would have been won.
Quite enlightening, I propose one of us writes a novel about it, about how Napoleon just precipitated what was already there, enabled of course by those around him. It should show the impact it had on everyone involved. Oh, and let's make it from a Russian perspective, showing a few intertwined families and the hardship the wars brings to them. Sounds like a great read!
Oh, yeah, and make it like 1000 pages long.
> The synthesis position is what I call here the “mediocre man” theory of history. The idea of this mediocre man theory is that history is not just shaped by great men or by mass sociological forces that make individual irrelevant. Instead, while it is shaped by structural forces, it is also shaped by ordinary people who end in positions of extraordinary importance.
This synthesis has already been done as early as at least 1898, see G.V. Plekhanov, "On the Role of the Individual in History" [0].
When thinking about this from the perspective of rulers and war, Putin is the ultimate mediocre man of our times. He wanted to be the next Great Tsar - Expander of the Realm, forever mentioned in history textbook as the one who put the Russian World together again after Gorbachev let it collapse.
But career spooks like him and his inner silovik circe don't
really understand war and, at the same time, don't trust the army enough to actually build it up to strength. And so he started something that he cannot finish.
LLM? Any verbose, struggling to focus article now looks generated rather than the work of somebody with better ideas than technique. Or they’re being paid by the word. I wonder whether there is a jargon problem with the word “great”…. These’s no way Trump or Cameron would be considered “great” but the world changed through their direct actions. One could argue that they just happen to be there when underlying forces interact and that the lone actor model of history is naive.
Many of us have written the “was Hitler inevitable” paper at uni and elsewhere. His particular phobias were extensive, but that time and place was ripe for such rule to appear.
Any story that rests on the disaster that was Wilhelm II, but does not make a single reference to the “Eulenberg Affair” (i.e. elite closetgay club), is an utter waste of time.
The elites in the gayclub had many ties — personal and/or blood — to Britain, and pushed Wilhelm toward moderation in his foreign policy. Once the scandal hit the papers, gayclub dissolved, leaving (forcing, even) Wilhelm II entirely to the counsel of his generals.
By “forcing,” I mean the fellow elites in gayclub were widely known to hold pro-Britain sentiments, so Wilhelm was somewhat forced into a 180 to not go down with them in the court of public opinion.
Prior to the war, Robert Brovdi (Magyar) was a local businessman on a periphery of Ukraine. Now he is a commander of probably the strongest drone force in the world.
If revolution is the old answer to oppressive organizations together with its tragic loss of life, then… where’s our cure for cancer?
Only when you step back, you realise all that drama you read is mostly inconsequential. What will be the impact of Napoleon 1000 years from now? Of Columbus? If instead of Hitler Germany had Rohm? It’s all monkeys and typewriters all the way down. What matters are the structural forces, the natural resources, the geography, and so on. Chances are it’ll be all forgotten in a billion years.
Now, on a more serious note, did anyone else, at some point, started wondering whether the article was really about Wilhelm II?
Napoleon and Columbus have secured for themselves their seats in the pantheon of history and it will take longer than a thousand years for mankind to forget about them.
All these men built our world.
>his liberal father
Might be a stretch to imply that the Wilhelm II was a mediocre illiberal. HIM was (for a time) interested in protecting workers' rights. However great he was, Bismarck couldn't overpower a "mediocre" populist
https://germanhistorydocs.org/en/forging-an-empire-bismarcki...
Assume every side has great individuals in positions of power (great being here evidently in relation to ability), greatness is thus evenly balanced and not so important to the final outcome.
This once again causes oversimplifies history to a few people and some nebulous "structural forces", and provides an attractive but wrong model of how history developed. In software terms we would call this a "leaky abstraction", and this particular abstraction leaks so much it's barely useful at all.
The world is much too complex to be understood by examining less than at least a few hundred million people. That this is beyond the capability of humans is not the world's problem.
>Germany’s interests were incomprehensible and thus there was no option other than to balance against this rogue state in the heart of Europe
>There was a saying of the Kaiser in Vienna, that Wilhelm wished to be “the stag at every hunt, the bride at every wedding, and the corpse at every funeral.”
Indeed, indeed.
Isn't the idea more that the large-scale political forces are what allow those supposedly "great men" to become "great" in the first place? Yes, once Napoleon was in power, a lot of the details of history were dependent on his individual decisions - but the forces that led to the French Revolution were what gave him that power in the first place. An if he had actually died of a stroke, or if Hitler had been killed in WWI, then the specifics of history would have been different, but probably not the large-scale trajectory: Post-revolutionary France would still have been there and the deep divisions, senses of injustice and reactionary and capitalist influence in post-WWI Germany that gave rise to the Nazi movement would also still have been there. And chances are, other "great men" would have emerged and captured those forces.
As such, I see the relationship more like the one between lightning strikes and wildfires: Yes, a particular wildfire might have been caused by that particular lightning strike (or careless hiker or whatever), but the reason why that particular local event could spiral into a blaze that burns down acres and acres were the larger environmental conditions, i.e. hot weather, wind and dryness. And if firefighters could take a time machine and prevent that particular cause, then it's likely another random event would trigger a slightly different but still extremely similar wildfire - so not much would have been won.
This synthesis has already been done as early as at least 1898, see G.V. Plekhanov, "On the Role of the Individual in History" [0].
[0] https://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1898/xx/individua...
But career spooks like him and his inner silovik circe don't really understand war and, at the same time, don't trust the army enough to actually build it up to strength. And so he started something that he cannot finish.
Many of us have written the “was Hitler inevitable” paper at uni and elsewhere. His particular phobias were extensive, but that time and place was ripe for such rule to appear.
There are various repetitions of the Tower of Babel as individuals come and go.
Or, instead of analysis, we could nail Jell-O to the wall.
The elites in the gayclub had many ties — personal and/or blood — to Britain, and pushed Wilhelm toward moderation in his foreign policy. Once the scandal hit the papers, gayclub dissolved, leaving (forcing, even) Wilhelm II entirely to the counsel of his generals.
By “forcing,” I mean the fellow elites in gayclub were widely known to hold pro-Britain sentiments, so Wilhelm was somewhat forced into a 180 to not go down with them in the court of public opinion.
In some small way, WWI was a “beard.”