The Hero in History/Chapter 4

by Sidney Hook

IV

SOCIAL DETERMINISM: HEGEL AND SPENCER

The reaction to the exaggerated “heroism” of Carlyle in the nineteenth century did not deny the existence, and even the necessity, of the hero and heroic action in history. What it maintained was that the events to which such action led were determined by historical laws or by the needs of the period in which the hero appeared. These compelling needs were characterized differently by different philosophers—they were “metaphysical,” “ideal,” “cultural,” “political,” “economic.” We shall use the term “social” to cover them all. These social forces would summon up when necessary from the deeps of mankind some hero whose “mission” it was to fulfil the historic tasks of the moment. The measure of his greatness consisted in his degree of awareness of what he was called upon to do.

For some philosophers heroes were not at all necessary to get the world’s work done. They believed that social needs “work themselves out” through the movements of the masses whose individual components, seen from a distance, could not be distinguished from each other. To them only the masses or classes were heroes. And in the writings of some of their disciples, production figures took the place of the masses.

During the nineteenth century all social determinists had in common the belief that whatever significant consequences seemed to result from the action of a hero could be antecedently inferred from a quite different set of considerations. But the inference was always made ad hoc, that is, after the hero’s work had been observed.

Even when it was held that an individual of a certain heroic stature was a necessary link in a necessary chain of a necessary historical pattern, it was rarely asserted before the events in which the hero proved himself that any particular individual fulfilled the specifications. Hegel was confident when he saw Napoleon near Jena that he was beholding “the world soul on horseback.” But he was even more convinced that if it had not been Napoleon it would have been someone else who would have carried out the dictates of “the cunning of reason”—and if not on horseback, then on foot.

The expression of dissent to the generic view of heroic determinism was not always a specific reply to the doctrine and its proponents. The Hegelian position, which was the most influential of all social determinisms, had already been crystallized before Carlyle acquired vogue. Hegel himself aimed his doctrines at the eighteenth-century rationalists who explained history in terms of personal psychology and good or bad luck. The Marxist position was presented as a corollary from a comprehensive philosophy of history. And although Spencer edged his criticism with a contemptuous eye on Carlyle (as did Buckle and Taine), there was nothing he wrote which did not flow naturally from his dogmas about the iron laws of social evolution.

It will be instructive to consider in some detail these three variations on the determinist theme in respect to the place of the hero.

For Hegel, as for Oswald Spengler who follows him in this respect, the great man is not the product of material conditions, social or biological, but primarily an expression of “the spirit” of his times or “the soul” of his culture. As a culture develops, certain objective needs arise which fulfil themselves through the subjective decisions of men. Men gratify their errant wishes, carry out their urgent duties, pit their intelligence and courage against the obstacles of nature and society—but all the time they are building something different from what they intend. In the dim fight of his understanding, each one weaves a strand in the web of destiny which is the Meaning or Reason of history. The great man is the one who is aware that the Reason of things speaks through his words and deeds. He has historical and divine justification in overriding other individuals, even entire peoples, who remain on the level of everyday understanding.

For Hegel every age gets “the great man” it deserves, but what it deserves depends not on its responsible choice between alternatives but on a predetermined pattern laid up in heaven, existing out of time and yet in some mysterious way pervading events in time. The tasks that confront an age, and to which the great man is called, do not arise from the daily problems of winning bread, peace, and freedom from oppression. They are implicit in the logical notion of man and in the organic necessities of social growth without which men could not become truly men, that is, free men, Hegel was convinced that he knew that the Germanic people were destined to become a unified nation and the final carriers of the torch of freedom. He did not base his knowledge, however, on the character of German economic or political history or on the heroic personal qualities of the Austrian Emperor or the King of Prussia, to whom he transferred his allegiance. His knowledge was derived from the dialectical necessity of the logical idea, of Freedom which seizes and is seized upon by the great men of action and thought. Similarly Spengler knows that each culture will have its Alexander, its Aristides, its Socrates, not because of any empirical evidence but in virtue of a metaphysical insight into the eternal life cycle of the social organism which cannot fulfil “the style of its soul” without men of this type.

On this view the greatness of any individual is apparent only after the event, when the consequences of what he has done have become plain and when judgment has become safe. Great men do not make history. They are evoked by “great times.” Great times are those transitional periods when mankind rises from one level of freedom and organization to another. The great man, therefore, will always be found, but whether he is found in the purple of royalty or in the beggar’s robe is relatively accidental.

In what then does greatness exist for Hegel? In some dim perception, translated ultimately into political action, of what the world order is to be. Great men like Cæsar, Alexander, and Napoleon are touched by the divine Reason which seems like madness to their sober contemporaries:

It was not his [Cæsar’s] private gaia merely but an unconscious impulse that occasioned the accomplishment of that for which the time is ripe. Such are all great historical men—whose own particular aims involve these large issues which are the will of the world-spirit. They may be called Heroes, inasmuch as they have derived their purposes and their vocation, not from the calm, regular course of things, sanctioned by the existing order; but from a concealed fount—one which has not attained to phenomenal, present existence—from that inner Spirit, still hidden beneath the surface, which impinging on the outer world as a shell, bursts it in pieces because it is another kernel than that which belonged to the shell in question. They are men, therefore, who appear to draw the impulse of their life from themselves…. Such individuals had no consciousness of the general Idea they were unfolding, while prosecuting those aims of theirs; on the contrary, they were practical, political men. But at the same time, they were thinking men, who had an insight into the requirements of the time—what was ripe for development. This was the very Truth of their age, for their world; the species next in order, so to speak, and which was already formed in the womb of time…. World historical men—the Heroes of an epoch—must, therefore, be recognized as its clear-sighted ones; their deeds, their words are the best of that time.^[1]

We can now understand why Hegel refuses to allow ordinary mortals to apply their moral yardsticks to the work of great men and the chosen nations to whom they belong. For these heroes are not responsible for their ruthless deeds. They are the instruments of the morality of to-morrow—unhappy instruments discarded by the historical process when their work is done. “Their whole life is labour and trouble…. They die early, like Alexander; they are murdered like Cæsar; transported to St. Helena like Napoleon.” This is the price of greatness. The hero may die or appear to suffer defeat, but “history” will always vindicate him.

But we are not deceived by Hegel’s plea. His whole philosophy is an elaborate attempt to shift moral responsibility from the individual acts of individual men to the impersonal whole of nature and history. His heroes, he would have us believe, cannot help themselves. Their acts are necessitated by the same logic that necessitates their times. He commits the double blasphemy of asserting whatever is, is right and whatever is, is divinely ordained. The chosen heroic few like the unchosen many do not initiate anything; they play out roles distributed in advance. World history would have been the same even if all the world heroes, per impossible, had never existed.

A careful study of the passage cited from Hegel will show, once we strip it of its spiritualism, that it contains all the assumptions common to the different varieties of social determinism.

1. No individual makes history de novo. He is always limited by his times and his culture. His energy and intelligence may be unique but what he wants and what he sets himself to do, are rooted in what Hegel calls “objective Mind,” and what anthropologists to-day call culture—the superindividual institutions of speech, family, religion, law, art, and science. In a sense his activity must be understood not as the action of an individual versus his environment but as the interactive operation of one aspect of a culture in relation to others. The great man can do only what his culture permits but—and this is crucial—the culture permits of only one direction of development. There are no genuine alternatives.

2. There is a difference between what men, even great men, imagine they are doing and the objective meaning or significance of what they do. The meaning of their acts must be understood primarily in terms of historical trends that have begun in the past, embrace the present and point to the future. Moral righteousness before the stern deeds of history is the easy privilege of those who judge events one by one. But it is an illusion of finite perspective.

3. The world-shattering deed or thought which testifies to the presence of greatness is possible only when the culture is prepared or ripe for it. The hero must fit in at a certain stage in social development. Delivery may be forced, but the child must be ready to enter the world. A heaven-storming Promethean will is doomed to fail unless what it wills is already alive in germ in the conditions of the present. “The laurels of mere willing are dry leaves which have never been green.”^[2]

4. The great man is therefore an “expression,” “a representative,” “a symbol,” “an instrument” of historical and social forces on whose currents he rides to renown and victory. If we want to grasp the source and reason of his greatness, his biography or purely personal traits are relatively unimportant. It is to the society and culture of his times that we must turn. For these are the fields over which great historical forces sweep in majestic sequences that challenge our understanding. Knowledge and mastery of these historical forces, the aim of “scientific” history and social theory, give man social control and human freedom. Here there is a variant depending upon how the term “scientific” is interpreted, whether empirically or metaphysically. ••••• In different language and from different metaphysical premises, Herbert Spencer and the host of popular writers whom he influenced reached similar conclusions. Spencer arrives at his conviction about the historical importance of great men not by an empirical canvass of world history but by a simple deduction from his theory of social evolution. The theory of social evolution assumed that all societies developed in a uniform, gradual, and progressive fashion. If an errant genius or adventurer could send society spinning outside of its determined paths, there could be no expectation of uniformity in development, and, even more alarming, no assurance of gradualness. Revolution might rear its head to interrupt the slow cumulative changes of evolution.

Although he was no great reader of historical biography, Spencer was confident that “if you wish to understand these phenomena of social evolution, you will not do it though you should read yourself blind over the biographies of all the great rulers on record, down to Napoleon the Greedy and Frederick the Treacherous.”^[3] Spencer did not go to the absurd extremes of Buckle, who first maintained that kings, generals, statesmen, and their like hampered the development of culture, and then called them “puppets” without any historical significance. Great men, if we were interested in labelling these picturesque figures of the past, abounded in history. But to attribute any epochal event to any individual at any time was to lose oneself in a blind alley of misunderstanding. The scientific historian may note in passing that the individual was the proximate or immediate cause of a decisive happening, but he must go on to an investigation of what produced the individual in question and determined him to act as he did. “Before he [the great man] can remake his society, his society must make him.”^[4]

Let us dwell for a moment on this sentence of Spencer’s. It seems to state a commonplace truth. But, like so much of the language of social and political theory, it is pervaded by an unconscious and, therefore, misleading analogy. Strictly speaking an individual is “made” biologically. Before his social environment and education begin to mould his personality, he must at least exist. We can never separate the individual from the personality he begins to take on shortly after he is born, but we can distinguish between certain powers and capacities that differentiate individuals in the same or similar social environments, We know that individuals subjected to similar environmental conditions sometimes react very differently. The very impact of the environment is not always similar, because different individuals may meet it differendy. Sometimes an enormous disparity is found in the achievements of those who begin with equal or similar opportunities. It is at least an open question whether this disparity may not be due to the presence or absence of certain strong biological capacities, or to something which is not part of the environing culture. But the use of the term “makes” or “produces” in Spencer’s account prevents a nicer discrimination between the indissoluble but distinguishable features of original nature and acquired culture in human beings.

Despite his misleading language, Spencer has admitted enough to compel him to come closer to the problem of heroic action in history. Granted that before the great man can remake his society, society must “make” him, whatever that means. This implies at least the possibility that some men can remake society. All men are “made” by society, but only a few can “remake” it. More than this the heroic determinist does not require as a fair recognition of a fact and problem. Spencer has to go further. The words with which he pronounced a blithe dismissal of the hero indicate that the hero is a force to be reckoned with—or at any rate that he is not yet explained away. So far all Spencer has told us is that before a Frankenstein monster can kill a man, he must be made by a man. But the man who creates the monster does not create the things the monster takes it into his head to do. We would hardly say that Frankenstein, if slain by the monster, had committed suicide.

Spencer’s biological interests did lead him to the perception that a great man might differ from other men in ways not reducible to differences in social opportunity. When he meets the heroic theory head on, he maintains that the resultant of “a long series of complex influences which has produced the race in which he appears and the social state into which that race has slowly grown.” On the basis of his theory of the hero as a resultant, Spencer proposes that, instead of attributing a decisive event to the great man who seems to have been its immediate occasion, we seek for the ultimate (Spencer’s “real”) explanation in “that aggregate of conditions out of which both he and they have arisen.”

Put in its simplest form, Spencer proposes that, instead or explaining the great man in terms of his immediate environment or the environment in terms of the activities of the great man, both the great man and his environment should be explained in terms of the total state of the world which preceded them. In one sense this is innocent enough; what the world is at any period is explained by what the world was at a period directly preceding it. But scientifically, it is not very fruitful. As William James showed in his trenchant comments on Spencer, this is comparable to explaining occurrences by God’s will. Whether the sparrow falls or flies we can always say it was caused by God’s will; and no matter what the historical scene is at any moment, with or without a great man, we can always say that it is a natural outgrowth of what the world was at an antecedent moment.

In so far as Spencer restricts himself to the field of history, his position begs the question at issue. To make this more apparent let us recast his view in the following way: Let C represent the cultural environment of any heroic figure, P his innate powers and capacities, C¹ the historically preceding cultural environment, and P¹ the ancestral line of the man in question. What Spencer is asserting is (1) that every question about the work or significance of an individual is a question about C+P; and (2) that C+P can always be explained by C¹+P¹. The second assertion is a non sequitur. C+P may be the consequence of C¹+P¹+X, where X designates any event which has historical effects but neither cultural nor biological causes, like fire, earthquake, plague, or accident. If the causes of the latter be included in what Spencer means by “the aggregate of conditions,” then his idea runs foul of James’s criticism. All he is saying is that to-day has grown out of yesterday and that to-morrow will develop out of to-day. At this juncture Spencer must embrace either a tautology or an absurdity.

It is on the first point that Spencer begs the whole question by ruling out the possibility of genuine interaction between personality and culture (C and P or C¹ and P¹.), In his earlier formulations he had asserted that great men were made by their cultures and admitted that great men could remake culture. But his insistence upon taking the great man and his environment together, not as a problem for analysis, but as a situation to be explained by an earlier situation, likewise unanalysed, simply by-passes the issue. The issue will not be by-passed. It crops up at every turn in our historical experience.

That strategically placed men are subjected to certain pressures, that they sometimes falter and break under them or ride them out and master them, is undeniable. Whether the leading men or the conjecture of circumstances are more decisive in explaining some specific event of momentous consequence, is an inescapable question. Was Hitler responsible for the anti-Semitic obsession of German Nazidom, an obsession that hindered not helped the Nazi international programme of fraud and conquest, or did the cultural environment and history of Germany make it obligatory upon Hitler to presecute the Jews?^[5] Granted, although there is no reason to believe it, that Hitler could not have raised his consuming mania to the level of state policy unless the early apostles of anti-Semitism, Chamberlain, Stocker, and the Austrian Lueger, had preceded him. Still, why were the Jews as a group made the scapegoats, when other groups, actually just as guiltless but politically more active could have served his cunning purposes even more effectively? Nazism without anti-Semitism is conceivable, though it would be just as abominable as the one we know.

From the fact that we can trace the rise of Nazi belief in social conditions, it does not at all follow that arose out of these or other social conditions and not out of the hysterical animosity of Hitler. Most of the adherents of Nazism in Germany began by deprecating its anti-Semitism as incident and transitory—threatening rhetorical bombast, so they said, to force a capimlation without a struggle. But having bet on Hitler and become his willing hostages after he received power, they ended up by accepting and defending anti-Semitism when Hitler showed himself fanatically intransigent on the question. A faithful Spencerian would have us believe that both Hitler and the persecution of the Jews could have been predicted from the state of German culture in the nineteenth century and from Hitler’s hereditary antecedents. This is not true and would be irrelevant even if it were true.

Were Spencer writing to-day, without doubt he would contemptuously add Hitler the Bestial to Napoleon the Greedy and Frederick the Treacherous as another illustration of a ruling figure whose biography explains nothing of the march of events. This follows readily enough from the First Principles of Spencer’s Synthetic Philosophy but not from a critical study of historical facts. And it is no more true, in the bald, unqualified way that Spencer holds it, of Napoleon and of Frederick than of Hitler. For example, suppose we want to understand why Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, an act that, as he later declared, was the greatest error in his life. Or why, when he had reached Vilna, he refused to accept Czar Alexander’s offer of peace which would have plugged the last leaks in the Continental blockade. It may be that the history of Europe would have been the same even if Napoleon had kept the peace and saved the army of a half million men he lost in Russia. (A prima facie case can easily be made out for an opposite conclusion.) But—and this is the crux of the matter—once it is granted that Napoleon could have done other than he did, it is the sheerest dogmatism to rule out in advance the possibility that the key to his decision might be found in the personality of “Napoleon the Wicked.” What Spencer and Hegel really believe is that neither Napoleon nor any other figure in history could have acted differently in any important respect. This tendency toward historical fatalism, from whose explicit implications they shrink and which they sometimes deny, is at the core of their approach to history. Like all fatalism it cannot be supported by any evidence, but it can be held in the teeth of any evidence marshalled against it. The position is irrefutable because it does not risk anything by venturing specific predictions. It represents the triumph of metaphysics over empirical method in the study of history.

1. Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Introduction, English translation by Sibree, p. 30, New York, 1900.
2. Rechtsphilosophie, Lasson edition, p. 317.
3. The Study of Sociology, American edition, p. 37, 1912.
4. The extent to which Spencer’s views have influenced modern social thought on the subject of the great man and his environment can hardly be exaggerated. Cf., for example, “The Great Man versus Social Force,” by W. F. Ogburn, in Social Forces, vol. 5 (1926–7), pp. 225 ff. Although more attention is paid to the fact of biological variation than in Spencer, the upshot of the position is much the same. “If one wishes to contrast Lincoln as a great man with the social forces of his times, one must remember that Lincoln, the adult man, represents a part of the social forces (since they helped to produce him) with which it is desired to contrast him.” “Great men are thus the products of their times, that is, their achievements influence the times. The great man is thus a medium in social change.” The study concludes: “The great man and his work appear therefore as only a step in a process, largely dependent upon other factors.” There is no admission at any point of the possibility that “the step” may ever redetermine the direction of the process. A false step may kill a man. Why may not a false step or a timely one spell great disaster or victory for a culture?
5. According to Mr. James G. Macdonald of the New York Times (November 29, 1942), Hitler told him in an interview in the spring of 1933 that he intended “to use anti-Semitism as a means toward world domination.” Nonetheless, although Hitler’s anti-Semitism was an important factor in arousing world public opinion against him, especially in countries he hoped to neutralize temporarily, he intensified his persecutions of the Jews. Only countries he has subdued by force of arms, excepting his original allies, have “adopted” his anti-Semitic decrees.