The Hero in History/Introduction
INTRODUCTION
The title of this book indicates its subject matter, not a special philosophy of history. It could with as much justice have been entitled “The Limits of the Hero in History.” That, too, would tell what the book is about and not what we believe about it. What we believe about it is detailed in the book. The reader is begged not to infer it from the title alone.
That history is made by men and women is no longer denied except by some theologians and mystical metaphysicians. And even, they are compelled indirectly to acknowledge this commonplace truth, for they speak of historical personages as “instruments” of Providence, Justice, Reason, Dialectic, the Zeitgeist, or Spirit of the Times. Men agree more readily about the consequences of the use of “instruments” in history than they do about the ultimate ends “instruments” allegedly serve, or the first causes by which they are allegedly determined.
Consequences are difficult to establish; human intentions more so. In principle, where there is a desire to know the truth, we can intelligently answer questions about our intentions. But there can be no scientific agreement about the intentions of capitalized abstractions and the determinations of first causes, for in respect to them we cannot make the same assumptions about meaning, evidence, and truth.
We know that the ravages of Attila accelerated the decline of the Roman Empire. We cannot be so sure as some of his pious victims that he was “the scourge of God;” nor altogether convinced, like some modern scholars, that he was the end effect of a chain of causes whose first link was forged in the climatic variations of China.
We know that Hitler gave the signal which plunged all the six continents of the world into war. It is doubtful that, as one initiate in God’s mysteries recently proclaimed. Hitler and other tyrants are “instruments of Divine Justice, chastening a people who had departed from the way of truth;” or, as others have it, that he is merely the result of the basic cause of our time of troubles—the failure to bring the social relations of production into line with the expanding forces of production.
Let men be instruments, if the metaphor is pleasing. But let it also be remembered that instruments may be used for various 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.