and sometimes totally different purposes. And man is also an instrument who has something to say about what these purposes shall be. The Purpose he presumably serves is to be construed from the purposes he himself sets and realizes. For men make history only when they have purposes.
Whatever men make, their making is always subject to certain conditions—whether it be a gun or a book, a war or revolution, another society or another man. Even most of the gods conceived by men create under the limitations of materials existing at the time they act. Any other kind of creation is a mystery to the credulous and an incoherent myth to the critical.
Every philosophy of history which recognizes that men can and do make their own history also concerns itself with the conditions under which it is made. It assesses in a broad and general way the relative weight, for a certain period, of the conditions under which men act and of their ideals, plans, and purposes. These ideals, plans, and purposes are causally rooted in the complex of conditions, but they take their meaning from some proposed reworking of conditions to bring them closer to human desire. The same theme is also involved in the specific inquiries of scientific historians. It is difficult to give a satisfactory account of what happened, how it happened, and why, without striking a plausible balance between the part men played and the conditioning scene which provided the materials, sometimes the rules, but never the plots of the dramas of human history. Philosophers have treated this question in the large; historians, in the small. The first have offered wholesale solutions usually in the interest of programmes of action or hopes of salvation. The second have eschewed large-scale generalizations and cautiously gone from case to case. This is pre-eminently true of the role of the “great man” or “hero” in history.
What the analysis in the subsequent pages aims at is primarily a fruitful formulation of this fascinating problem. An attempt will be made to work out some generalizations of the types of situations and conditions in which we can justifiably attribute or deny casual influence to outstanding personalities. We are offering not a theory of history but a contribution to a theory of history, one which must be taken note of in any adequate account of human history.
S. H.
