What is History / by Edward Hallett Carr - Universal History Library

WHAT IS HISTORY
been merely that, the historian would never have heard of them. They owe their role in
history to the mass of their followers, and are significant as social phenomena, or not at
all. Or let us take an outstanding rebel and individualist at a more sophisticated level. Few
people have reacted more violently and more radically against the society of their day and
country than Nietzsche. Yet Nietzsche was a direct product of European, and more
specifically of German, society - a phenomenon which could not have occurred in China
or Peru. A generation after Nietzsche's death it became clearer than it had been to his
contemporaries how strong were the European, and specifically German, social forces of
which this individual had been the expression; and Nietzsche became a more significant
figure for posterity than for his own generation.
The role of the rebel in history has some analogies with that of the great man. The greatman
theory of history - a particular example of the Good Queen Bess school - has gone
out of fashion in recent years, though it still occasionally rears its ungainly bead. The
editor of a series of popular history text-books, started after the Second World War,
invited his authors 'to open up a significant historical theme by way of a biography of a
great: man'; and Mr A. J. P. Taylor told us in one of his minor essays that 'the history of
modern Europe can be written in terms of three titans: Napoleon, Bismarck, and Lenin',
though in his more serious writings he has undertaken no such rash project. What is the
role of the great man in history? The great man is an individual, and, being an outstanding
individual, is also a social phenomenon of outstanding importance. 'It is an obvious truth',
observed Gibbon, 'that the times must be suited to extraordinary characters, and that the
genius of Cromwell or Retz might now expire in obscurity.' Marx, in The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, diagnosed the converse phenomenon: 'The class war in
France created circumstances and relations which enabled a gross mediocrity to strut about
in a hero's garb.' Had Bismarck been born in the eighteenth century - an absurd hypothesis,
since he would not then have been Bismarck - he would not have united Germany and
might not have been a great man at all. But one need not, I think, as Tolstoy does, deny
great men as no more than 'labels giving names to events'. Sometimes of course the cult of
the great man may have sinister implications. Nietzsche's superman is a repellent figure. It
is not necessary for me to recall the case of Hitler, or the grim consequences of the 'cult of
personality' in the Soviet Union. But it is not my purpose to deflate the greatness of great
men: nor do I want to subscribe to the thesis that 'great men are almost always bad men'.
The view which I would hope to discourage is the view which places great men outside
history and sees them as imposing themselves on history in virtue of their greatness, as
'lack-in-the-boxes who emerge miraculously from the unknown to interrupt the real
continuity of history'.' Even today I do not know that we can better Hegel's classic
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