“The history of the world is but the biography of great men.”¹ – Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle is a Scottish historian and philosopher from the nineteenth century. He is called the “Sage of Chelsea” because he lived in the Chelsea neighborhood of London for much of his life and he became famous as a kind of wise, prophetic figure. His reflections on society, politics, history, and morality resembled that of an Old Testament prophet, with an added dash of pessimistic gruff.

It’s not accurate to say that Carlyle invented the “Great Man Theory of History,” as that would ignore the influence of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives and even thinkers like Machiavelli, who emphasized the role of powerful leaders in shaping events. Carlyle’s historiography says that history is primarily shaped not by impersonal forces, ideas, or masses of people, but by outstanding individuals—leaders, prophets, reformers, warriors, poets—who possess a special kind of insight, energy, and courage.

These “great men” act as the driving forces of historical change, embodying the spirit of their age and sometimes dragging reluctant societies forward. These “great men” don’t just luck their way into significance. Rather, in Carlyle’s theory, they are divinely equipped to shape the course of human events, for ill or for good. Carlyle’s great men are not just powerful people, they were necessary revelations of divine truth, the agents through whom humanity advanced. Carlyle wrote, “We all love great men; love, venerate and bow down submissive before great men: nay, can we honestly bow down to anything else?”² Carlyle’s great men are not just Generals who lead armies and kill the weak. It is religious leaders like Muhammad, Luther, and Knox; poets such as Dante and Shakespeare; intellectuals such as Johnson and Rousseau; and kings such as Cromwell and Napoleon.

The “Great Man Theory of History” has not been without challengers over the years. Herbert Spenser (1820-1903), for example, pushed back against Carlyle’s ideas in a proto-Darwinist sort of way. Spenser argued that the “great men,” indeed all people, are shaped by social conditions. Of course, this is partly right. People are shaped in certain ways by their environment. In War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) pushed back against Carlyle by arguing that broad social movements and masses of people truly make history. Of course, this is partly right too, that people—the masses—lived and breathed in the past, which means the story of the past can’t be told without them. Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) also offered a correction to the “great man” theory. He believed that while individuals do profoundly influence history, the “great man” theory is misleading because it encourages uncritical hero-worship and ignores the complex, flawed realities of human nature. True greatness, in his view, must be judged with skepticism and moral scrutiny, not blind admiration. Hitchens wrote, “The search for a pure hero is worse than futile. It is self-defeating.”³

These criticisms teach us that some issues need to be liberated from a binary, two-proposition dichotomy. Human history consists of both formative figures and masses of souls whose names are long forgotten. The past consists of billions of people wobbling back and forth between tolerably cheerful and reasonably unhappy. These billions never learned to read and never observed any scientific breakthroughs. From the always enlightened position of the present, the obscure mass of mankind appears ignorant, which makes it easy to avoid them. Our history shouldn’t forget the bulk of human beings just because they were uneducated in the things people now take for granted.

Yet the study of human history consists of only a select few. This calls for a special reminder that just because someone’s name is in a history book doesn’t make them a great person. For example, it’s a mistake to assign virtue to a leader who physically conquered effete victims for the sake of adding to his coffers. Those are egotistical men rather than honorable ones. We can learn something from them without celebrating the brutality of how they crush and obscure people who are minding their own business. In the entanglement of such accomplishments, conquerors find a place in the history books by abandoning the outstretched arms of virtue. They become so-called great men by martyring others, whereas Jesus became a great man by receiving martyrdom.

This is where René Girard provides a clarifying note. Girard’s mimetic theory taught that human beings desire by imitation. This imitation leads to rivalry, conflict, and eventually violence, which societies manage by scapegoating a victim and restoring peace. Girard encourages paying close attention to exceptional individuals because great men, in his definition, are the ones who break the cycle of imitative violence and rivalry. The great men are those who aren’t trapped by the conflict and scapegoating pattern. They are the ones that redirect and heal society. Girard wrote, “Violence is not the result of a single individual’s actions but of the mimetic process itself. However, certain individuals, by their very difference, can interrupt or redirect the mimetic contagion.”⁴ In the Girardian interpretation, the great men are not those who are dominant conquerors, but those who live out a sacrificial vision that others mimic. Girard said, “True greatness does not consist in domination or violence but in the revelation of what violence is and in the refusal to participate in it.”⁵ This definition is surely right because it means the greatest Great Man in the history of the world is Jesus Christ.

Since Jesus Christ is “the head of the body, the church” (Col. 1:18), we follow where he leads. Jesus forges a path forward to seize control of the definition of “great men” if we would but follow. Great men can be those who show unexpected independence in the face of a devilish upheaval, or those with creative power to renew the elementary and absolute doctrines, or those who invent edifying wonders no one has ever dreamed of before, or those who prove more courageously self-sacrificial than the wisdom of the world.

The implications of this Christian definition of “great men” are many, especially on how to educate covenant children. Studying ideas is useful for students. Studying ideas in dense old books can even be useful. But studying great men is not merely necessary; it is one of the few necessary things. For in an age that believes only in crowds and currents, it is a kind of rebellion to believe in the God-Man who embodies all that will be right with the world and all that will be right with man.

Jason Cherry is an elder at Trinity Reformed Church in Huntsville, Alabama, as well as a teacher and lecturer of literature, history, and economics at Providence Classical School in Huntsville. He graduated from Reformed Theological Seminary with an MA in Religion and is the author of the books The Culture of Conversionism and the History of the Altar Call and The Making of Evangelical Spirituality.

Footnotes

¹ Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, ed. Michael K. Goldberg, Joel J. Brattin, and Mark Engel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 21.

² Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, ed. Michael K. Goldberg, Joel J. Brattin, and Mark Engel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 6

³ Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 125

⁴ René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 295.

⁵ René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), 251.