was one of enterprise and discovery. Here, then, we can again say that there were “determining” tendencies in the social and economic history of Europe, in contradistinction to the social and economic history of the Indian tribes already living in America, which resulted in the discovery of the new world. The remarkable exploits of a Columbus, a Vespucci, a da Gama, a Magellan were not historically necessary; but what they did was. They themselves were colourful incidents in a course of development whose configuration cannot be explained by the activity of particular individuals no matter how gifted. They were not historical heroes in the sense of eventful or event-making figures because they cannot be considered as having been indispensable to the discoveries with which their names are linked.[1]
These “determining tendencies” are not disembodied forces, spectral or physical, that compel events to happen. They are all reducible to the behaviour patterns of groups of individual men living under determinate historical conditions and traditions. Their responses to the challenges and threats of their environment are sufficiently similar to enable us to predict how they will act in the face of similar challenges and threats. When we rely on determining tendencies to predict the turn of events over a given period or to justify a judgment about the past, our confidence is based upon the assumption that variations in detail may be disregarded in charting what will take place or what would have taken place. What the social determinists assert is that the “heroes” of history are always variations in detail. This, we have seen, is wrong. But it is of tremendous importance to realize that sometimes “heroes” are variations in detail, if only because it may cure us of the illusion that a great man or leader can always save a situation or obviate the accumulated consequences of past folly. One of the tragedies of historical life is that men cannot undo the consequences of an
- ↑ For the meaning of eventful and event-making, see Chapter Nine. There is another sense of “hero,” of course, in which it is perfectly legitimate to speak of Columbus as a hero even if we admit that America would have been discovered had Columbus died in his cradle. Jacob Burckhardt, for example, who grants that Columbus was not indispensable to the discovery of America, writes: “Among the discoverers of distant lands only Columbus is great, but very great, because he staked his life and an enormous willpower on a postulate which brings him into the same rank as that of the greatest philosophers.” Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, Gesamtausgabe, Bd. VII., р. 165.
