The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

While all mankind may be the subject matter of history, “only some men [were] its
agents”. 48 These histories were premised on the intrinsic importance of “the great
creative thinkers, the makers of foreign policy, and the statesmen who promoted or
resisted constitutional change”. 49 In a restatement and defence of the value of narrative
political history ‘from above’ and an implicitly male‐centred, ‘great man’ approach to
history, Geoffrey Elton has argued:
Historians who deny that greatness in politics can exist, who
refuse to find overwhelming personalities in history and cannot
ever admire greatness in affairs, ought to look into their own
hearts. Men who do not recognise and respect greatness have no
business to write history. Naturally, greatness does not equal
goodness, and goodness is worth finding too: but impersonal
forces are the refuge of the feeble. 50
Beyond the mere emphasis on the individual as a unit of history, Arthur Marwick
has referred to the necessity of biography to the study of the past, claiming that
without the biographies that have been produced of Christopher Columbus, Martin
Luther, George Washington and Joseph Stalin, “vast areas of history would remain
totally obscure”. For Marwick, writing in the early 1970s, Alan Bullock’s biography
of Hitler was “one of the most important and authoritative works in the entire
bibliography of twentieth‐century British historiography”, while David Marquand
and Martin Gilbert were to be assured of important places in British historiography
with their biographical work on Ramsay MacDonald and Winston Churchill
respectively. The biography of Disraeli published in 1966 by Oxford don, Robert
Blake, one of the few academic historians to devote a substantial part of his career to
the field of political biography, was referred to by Marwick as “one of the great
publishing events of [that] decade”. 51
48 Geoffrey R Elton, Political History, p 68.
49 John Tosh, The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of Modern History
(London: Longman, 1984), p 71.
50 Geoffrey R Elton, Political History, p 71.
51 Arthur Marwick, The Nature of History, pp 203‐204. The works referred to here by Marwick, mostly
published after he cited them are: David Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald, London: Jonathan Cape, 1977
(903 pages); Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston Churchill, 1939‐1941, London: Heinemann, 1983 (1308
pages) and Never Despair: Winston Churchill, 1945‐1965, London: Heinemann, 1988 (1438 pages); Alan
Bullock, Hitler: a Study in Tyranny, London: Odhams Press, 1952 (776 pp), completely revised and
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