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The counterargument to “great man theory” is that it’s ahistorical (in that most great advancements have multiple independent discoverers), and unduly emphasiz

The counterargument to “great man theory” is that it’s ahistorical (in that most great advancements have multiple independent discoverers), and unduly emphasizes individuals rather than circumstances. In other words: it’s hard to believe that there’s something intrinsic about Newton, Galileo, etc. that would have fundamentally prevented the arc of human history and knowledge had they not done what they did. The much more parsimonious explanation is that “great men” were in the right place at the right time to apply their (undisputed!) talents.

kubb 3y ago
And that we are genetically predisposed towards worshipping individual human-like figures. Think for a second about Gilgamesh (one of the oldest known works of literature!), Prometheus (gave humans fire, where would we be without him), Hercules (killed a menacing beast, thank god for that), the Olympic gods, Gaius Julius Cesar, Napoleon, Lenin, modern celebrities (they're so talented and totally deserve their success). Is it surprising that we want to believe in "great men"?
gniv 3y ago
> The much more parsimonious explanation is that “great men” were in the right place at the right time to apply their (undisputed!) talents. But isn’t this part of the point? How many times did we not get the right person in the right place? How much further would we be if we had gotten, say, a Galileo during Rome’s heyday?
- woodruffw 3y ago
  > How much further would we be if we had gotten, say, a Galileo during Rome’s heyday? Who says we didn’t? There isn’t a single point in human history that wasn’t covered by exceptional intelligence; the observation is that this doesn’t make discoveries fungible over time. Discovery, innovation, invention, etc. are instead all compounding processes.
  - gniv 3y ago
    Yes, of course. What I meant was we could have had all the stuff that lead to Galileo before the great reset that was the fall of Rome, so maybe civilization would have been ahead a few hundred years.
    - woodruffw 3y ago
      This doesn’t require belief in the great man theory: progress can ebb and flow under any theory of history. Besides: there is no point in history that’s identifiable as “the fall of Rome.” The Western Empire declined over the course of three centuries; the Eastern Empire arguably never fell at all. The idea of the “fall” comes from the same period of historical theorization as the “great man” framework; it’s not widely accepted as a useful milestone today.
      - gniv 3y ago
        We’re splitting hairs now. Let me rephrase again. There was a period when Rome was ridiculously wealthy (gold from Spain etc). It was a time when science could have advanced rapidly but didn’t. My point was that a few “great men” there might have changed history.
        zanellato19 3y ago
        > It was a time when science could have advanced rapidly but didn’t. I don't think this is accepted anymore. The material conditions for the Industrial Revolution were pretty specific and didn't show up in the age of Rome, despite all their riches.
- mongol 3y ago
  A Galileo during Rome's heyday could not have taken advantage of the telescope, like Galileo Galilei could. It was not invented yet.
- lll-o-lll 3y ago
  > How many times did we not get the right person in the right place? How much further would we be if we had gotten, say, a Galileo during Rome’s heyday? As psychohistory rigorously proves; individuals are of no consequence to the thrusting arc of history. It is not Galileo that created history, but rather history that created Galileo.
  - dmn322 3y ago
    psychohistory is from "the foundation" and last time I checked is fictional. If someone has a new theory of sociology which they've named after the field in the book, you might link it and introduce it as if it's a new unknown field, rather than some established thing that everyone should know about and agree with. If it were truly rigorously proved and were able to make quantitative predictions, it would have some pretty significant implications for policy, finance, politics, etc.. However if the creator was brash enough to name their pet theory after the theory in the book, I'm skeptical that they were careful enough to get it right.
keiferski 3y ago
The Great Man Theory is not primarily about scientific discoveries or inventions. It’s more about political figures: Napoleon, Muhammad, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory
- woodruffw 3y ago
  Could you elaborate on why you think this? Individual forms of the GMT focus on heroism, religious charisma, etc., but the theory in the context of historical analysis is widely understood to apply to any form of “greatness,” with scientific advancements being one form. Your own link to Wikipedia points this out, with Einstein as the example.
  - keiferski 3y ago
    From Wikipedia: > The theory is primarily attributed to the Scottish essayist, historian, and philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who gave a series of lectures on heroism in 1840, later published as On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History. From that series of lectures: 1. (5 May) The Hero as Divinity. Odin. Paganism: Scandinavian Mythology 2. (8 May) The Hero as Prophet. Mahomet: Islam 3. (12 May) The Hero as Poet. Dante; Shakspeare 4. (15 May) The Hero as Priest. Luther; Reformation: Knox; Puritanism 5. (19 May) The Hero as Man of Letters. Johnson, Rousseau, Burns 6. (22 May) The Hero as King. Cromwell. Napoleon: Modern Revolutionism Are any of those people scientists? Carlyle is talking about political and cultural influence, not technological development. Using scientists that made great discoveries as a counter-example to the theory is a straw man argument.
    - woodruffw 3y ago
      Carlyle is the progenitor of GMT; making him the ultimate authority on how GMT is applied as a historical analysis is a bit like making Newtown the ultimate authority on gravity. And note: the fixation on science as a category isn’t coherent from Carlyle’s 18th century perspective. (But how does any of this make the original post a straw man? You can replace the figures in it with Mohammed and Shakespeare without meaningfully altering the claim.)
6yh7 3y ago
[dead]
nine_k 3y ago
A particular person may be not the unique one to try and achieve something. But there should exist some number of "candidate great men", else there'd be nobody to take advantage of the circumstances. It looks like this number is not very large in any particular area. If not Einstein, maybe a handful other physicists could come up with, say, special relativity, but likely not hundreds, and maybe not even dozens.
- lordnacho 3y ago
  But that's actually not great man theory? The natural conclusion of what you're describing is that there's some sort of continuum or spectrum of people who might take up some opportunity. Those people are also generated by dice rolls: some have genuinely better brain chemistry, some are nurtured well by family, some find a mentor who puts a lot of effort into them, some grow up next to a training ground. If you look at any kind of excellence, there's a bunch of sliding doors moments. What if Michael Jordan dropped basketball after getting cut from the team? What if the scout decides Messi is too small? On the science side, just about anyone can not get along with their prospective supervisor, or they don't find funding, or they get offered a job doing something else. The way to think about a few people being within reach of SR is not to just scroll back a few years before it happened. There were a bunch of kids born in that generation who were interested in physics, and chances are a re-do of their lives would have turned up some different outcomes individually, but why would we think that SR wouldn't have come out eventually? It's clear people were thinking about it, and it's clear people got it once the discovery was published. The other thing to look at is cases of where the great man is lost. Does all progress grind to a halt once the guy dies? Do we have a lot of examples of that?
  - dmn322 3y ago
    After alexander the great, greek kingdoms were left scattered along the path he went, some lasting for 100s of years. IMO he spread a system of logistics and trade required to sustain armies over that many thousands of miles, which was also could be used as the basis of a society. That system of logistics came from his father but also thousands of years of greek society before that. No offense to them, but I wouldn't say Michael Jordan or Messi have significantly impacted history. They impacted the trajectory of their sports teams, and I would think it's pretty easy for an individual to have an influence on something over that scale, but for a "great man" to be given credit for significantly shaping borders for hundreds or thousands of years, or for certain innovations that were funded by institutions that could have just as easily paid someone else... I think there's something else going on.

kubb 3y ago

And that we are genetically predisposed towards worshipping individual human-like figures. Think for a second about Gilgamesh (one of the oldest known works of literature!), Prometheus (gave humans fire, where would we be without him), Hercules (killed a menacing beast, thank god for that), the Olympic gods, Gaius Julius Cesar, Napoleon, Lenin, modern celebrities (they're so talented and totally deserve their success). Is it surprising that we want to believe in "great men"?

gniv 3y ago

> The much more parsimonious explanation is that “great men” were in the right place at the right time to apply their (undisputed!) talents. But isn’t this part of the point? How many times did we not get the right person in the right place? How much further would we be if we had gotten, say, a Galileo during Rome’s heyday?

woodruffw 3y ago
> How much further would we be if we had gotten, say, a Galileo during Rome’s heyday? Who says we didn’t? There isn’t a single point in human history that wasn’t covered by exceptional intelligence; the observation is that this doesn’t make discoveries fungible over time. Discovery, innovation, invention, etc. are instead all compounding processes.
- gniv 3y ago
  Yes, of course. What I meant was we could have had all the stuff that lead to Galileo before the great reset that was the fall of Rome, so maybe civilization would have been ahead a few hundred years.
  - woodruffw 3y ago
    This doesn’t require belief in the great man theory: progress can ebb and flow under any theory of history. Besides: there is no point in history that’s identifiable as “the fall of Rome.” The Western Empire declined over the course of three centuries; the Eastern Empire arguably never fell at all. The idea of the “fall” comes from the same period of historical theorization as the “great man” framework; it’s not widely accepted as a useful milestone today.
    - gniv 3y ago
      We’re splitting hairs now. Let me rephrase again. There was a period when Rome was ridiculously wealthy (gold from Spain etc). It was a time when science could have advanced rapidly but didn’t. My point was that a few “great men” there might have changed history.
      - zanellato19 3y ago
        > It was a time when science could have advanced rapidly but didn’t. I don't think this is accepted anymore. The material conditions for the Industrial Revolution were pretty specific and didn't show up in the age of Rome, despite all their riches.
mongol 3y ago
A Galileo during Rome's heyday could not have taken advantage of the telescope, like Galileo Galilei could. It was not invented yet.
lll-o-lll 3y ago
> How many times did we not get the right person in the right place? How much further would we be if we had gotten, say, a Galileo during Rome’s heyday? As psychohistory rigorously proves; individuals are of no consequence to the thrusting arc of history. It is not Galileo that created history, but rather history that created Galileo.
- dmn322 3y ago
  psychohistory is from "the foundation" and last time I checked is fictional. If someone has a new theory of sociology which they've named after the field in the book, you might link it and introduce it as if it's a new unknown field, rather than some established thing that everyone should know about and agree with. If it were truly rigorously proved and were able to make quantitative predictions, it would have some pretty significant implications for policy, finance, politics, etc.. However if the creator was brash enough to name their pet theory after the theory in the book, I'm skeptical that they were careful enough to get it right.

keiferski 3y ago

The Great Man Theory is not primarily about scientific discoveries or inventions. It’s more about political figures: Napoleon, Muhammad, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory

woodruffw 3y ago
Could you elaborate on why you think this? Individual forms of the GMT focus on heroism, religious charisma, etc., but the theory in the context of historical analysis is widely understood to apply to any form of “greatness,” with scientific advancements being one form. Your own link to Wikipedia points this out, with Einstein as the example.
- keiferski 3y ago
  From Wikipedia: > The theory is primarily attributed to the Scottish essayist, historian, and philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who gave a series of lectures on heroism in 1840, later published as On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History. From that series of lectures: 1. (5 May) The Hero as Divinity. Odin. Paganism: Scandinavian Mythology 2. (8 May) The Hero as Prophet. Mahomet: Islam 3. (12 May) The Hero as Poet. Dante; Shakspeare 4. (15 May) The Hero as Priest. Luther; Reformation: Knox; Puritanism 5. (19 May) The Hero as Man of Letters. Johnson, Rousseau, Burns 6. (22 May) The Hero as King. Cromwell. Napoleon: Modern Revolutionism Are any of those people scientists? Carlyle is talking about political and cultural influence, not technological development. Using scientists that made great discoveries as a counter-example to the theory is a straw man argument.
  - woodruffw 3y ago
    Carlyle is the progenitor of GMT; making him the ultimate authority on how GMT is applied as a historical analysis is a bit like making Newtown the ultimate authority on gravity. And note: the fixation on science as a category isn’t coherent from Carlyle’s 18th century perspective. (But how does any of this make the original post a straw man? You can replace the figures in it with Mohammed and Shakespeare without meaningfully altering the claim.)

6yh7 3y ago

[dead]

nine_k 3y ago

A particular person may be not the unique one to try and achieve something. But there should exist some number of "candidate great men", else there'd be nobody to take advantage of the circumstances. It looks like this number is not very large in any particular area. If not Einstein, maybe a handful other physicists could come up with, say, special relativity, but likely not hundreds, and maybe not even dozens.

lordnacho 3y ago
But that's actually not great man theory? The natural conclusion of what you're describing is that there's some sort of continuum or spectrum of people who might take up some opportunity. Those people are also generated by dice rolls: some have genuinely better brain chemistry, some are nurtured well by family, some find a mentor who puts a lot of effort into them, some grow up next to a training ground. If you look at any kind of excellence, there's a bunch of sliding doors moments. What if Michael Jordan dropped basketball after getting cut from the team? What if the scout decides Messi is too small? On the science side, just about anyone can not get along with their prospective supervisor, or they don't find funding, or they get offered a job doing something else. The way to think about a few people being within reach of SR is not to just scroll back a few years before it happened. There were a bunch of kids born in that generation who were interested in physics, and chances are a re-do of their lives would have turned up some different outcomes individually, but why would we think that SR wouldn't have come out eventually? It's clear people were thinking about it, and it's clear people got it once the discovery was published. The other thing to look at is cases of where the great man is lost. Does all progress grind to a halt once the guy dies? Do we have a lot of examples of that?
- dmn322 3y ago
  After alexander the great, greek kingdoms were left scattered along the path he went, some lasting for 100s of years. IMO he spread a system of logistics and trade required to sustain armies over that many thousands of miles, which was also could be used as the basis of a society. That system of logistics came from his father but also thousands of years of greek society before that. No offense to them, but I wouldn't say Michael Jordan or Messi have significantly impacted history. They impacted the trajectory of their sports teams, and I would think it's pretty easy for an individual to have an influence on something over that scale, but for a "great man" to be given credit for significantly shaping borders for hundreds or thousands of years, or for certain innovations that were funded by institutions that could have just as easily paid someone else... I think there's something else going on.