Great men?

The “great man theory” of history, often ascribed to the 19th-century philosopher and historian Thomas Carlyle, has a lot at least superficially going for it.

The concept posits that “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. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators,” as Carlyle puts it.

Examples are not hard to find. The writer Aldo Matteucci states: “Arguably … Genghis Khan and the Mongols were the dominant force that shaped … the modern world. Not for what they destroyed – though they wrought much destruction all over the continent – but for what they built. They came close to uniting Eurasia into a world empire, and in so doing they spread throughout it technologies like paper, gunpowder, paper money, or the compass – and trousers.”