GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

420 • EPILOGUE
in time to avoid running over Hitler's car and crushing him. Because of
the degree to which Hitler's psychopathology determined Nazi policy and
success, the form of an eventual World War II would probably have been
quite different if the truck driver had braked one second later.
One can think of other individuals whose idiosyncrasies apparently
influenced history as did Hitler's: Alexander the Great, Augustus, Buddha,
Christ, Lenin, Martin Luther, the Inca emperor Pachacuti, Mohammed,
William the Conqueror, and the Zulu king Shaka, to name a few. To what
extent did each really change events, as opposed to "just" happening to be
the right person in the right place at the right time? At the one extreme is
the view of the historian Thomas Carlyle: "Universal history, the history
of what man [sic] has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History
of the Great Men who have worked here." At the opposite extreme is the
view of the Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck, who unlike Carlyle
had long firsthand experience of politics' inner workings: "The statesman's
task is to hear God's footsteps marching through history, and to try to
catch on to His coattails as He marches past."
Like cultural idiosyncrasies, individual idiosyncrasies throw wild cards
into the course of history. They may make history inexplicable in terms of
environmental forces, or indeed of any generalizable causes. For the purposes
of this book, however, they are scarcely relevant, because even the
most ardent proponent of the Great Man theory would find it difficult to
interpret history's broadest pattern in terms of a few Great Men. Perhaps
Alexander the Great did nudge the course of western Eurasia's already
literate, food-producing, iron-equipped states, but he had nothing to do
with the fact that western Eurasia already supported literate, food-producing,
iron-equipped states at a time when Australia still supported only nonliterate
hunter-gatherer tribes lacking metal tools. Nevertheless, it remains
an open question how wide and lasting the effects of idiosyncratic individuals
on history really are.
THE DISCIPLINE OF history is generally not considered to be a science,
but something closer to the humanities. At best, history is classified among
the social sciences, of which it rates as the least scientific. While the field
of government is often termed "political science" and the Nobel Prize in
economics refers to "economic science," history departments rarely if ever