Abstract
The “Great Man” View of HistoryIt is commonly said that where in the twentieth-century impersonal forces were believed to make history, in the nineteenth century, heroic individuals were believed to make history. The epitome of this nineteenth-century outlook was the English man of letters Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881). Carlyle opens his On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) with a statement that has come to epitomize the “Great Man” view of history: “For, as I take it, 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” (p. 1).Carlyle’s concern with outward accomplishment sharply distinguishes his conception of heroism from that of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885) (see part 1). The achievement of Nietzsche’s übermensch, or “overman,” is personal, not societal. Rather than praising the übermensch for changing his society ...