Page:The Hero in History.djvu/20

20 most of the antecedent conditions of social conflict—political, economic, ethnical—that were set off in 1914 attributable to the acts or examples of an individual.

The rise of capitalism, the industrial revolution, the march of the barbarians from the east, the Renaissance—none, of course, would have been possible without the acts or example of individuals. But no matter what particular individuals are named in connection with these movements, there is no evidence that the individuals were indispensable in the sense that without them these movements would not have got under way.

The easy contention that, had a “great man” been present, the First World War, say, would never have taken place cannot be upheld by any empirical evidence so far known. He would have had to be a very special sort of “great man”—that is, of a sort that has never appeared in comparable situations. Not infrequently contentions that make much of the decisive influence a great man would exercise if only he had been there are in principle not verifiable. This is the case when the hypothetical great man who would have prevented the First World War is identified not in virtue of independent traits but in terms of his hypothetical success. This is tantamount to offering a definition of what would constitute a great man in these circumstances. Our point here is not that the First World War was inevitable, but that the presence of a “great man” on the order of the great men of the past would probably not have altered matters much. Some other events could have altered things to a point of preventing the occurrence of the war, nor do we have to go to the realm of natural catastrophes to find them. For example, had the international socialist movement lived up to its pledges made at the Basle Congress, war might have been declared but it could not have been fought. But as far as the particular problem is concerned, no matter what individuals had occupied the chancelleries of Europe in 1914, the historical upshot of commercial rivalries, Germany’s challenge to British sea power, chauvinist resentments in western Europe, the seething kettle of Balkan intrigue, would very probably have been, much the same.

Fashions of interpretations have shuttled back and forth between historians and philosophers of history during the last hundred years. On the one hand we have sweeping forms of social determinism according to which the great man is a