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I find the denialism around the great man theory somewhat baffling. Does anyone really believe, just for one example, that Apple computer would be what it is to

• cykros 3y ago
  No, only someone so narcissistic and divorced from reality could have come up with the Fisher-Price computers they make.
• boomboomsubban 3y ago
  No, but I bet we would still have personal computers and smart phones without Steve Jobs. That's the argument against the "great man" idea. Sure, specific events would not have happened without that person, but the overall state of the world would not be drastically different.
  • mongol 3y ago
    I think it can depend a lot. Political figures can have long lasting impact. Consider Jesus. Or Napoleon, without him Europe may have looked entirely different today. But for general scientific progress I agree. Scientific breakthroughs are bound to happen if enough people work on them.
    • mFixman 3y ago
      The introduction of the potato and the invention of the steam engine changed Europe several orders of magnitude more than Napoleon or any other great man.
      • mongol 3y ago
        Yes sure, but that is not a counter argument. If James Watt et al did not invent the steam engine, someone else would
        • tmtvl 3y ago
          Didn't someone invent the telephone at roughly the same time as A. G. Bell? For another example, in Japan Soddy's Hexlet was described in 1822, while in the West it was introduced in England in 1937.
    • DoughnutHole 3y ago
      The French were thrashing the coalition forces for 2 years before Napoleon led a major campaign. Napoleon was a military genius, but what shifted the revolutionary wars in the favour of the French was the revolutionary goverments' innovation of total war - directing the entire economy and population of the nation towards the war with mass conscription and modern organisation. That would have happened with or without Napolean, and it was the social forces of the Revolution that made it possible for a Corsican nobody to even become a general in the first place. Honestly the biggest argument for great man theory in the French Revolution is Louis XVI - if he hadn't been quite so indecisive and incompetent maybe the revolution would have fizzled out or been crushed instead of spiralling out of control.
      • mongol 3y ago
        > That would have happened with or without Napolean I am not convinced
        • DoughnutHole 3y ago
          It’s pretty hard to dispute that it happened before Napoleon. The leveé en masse was implemented in 1793. Napoleon only rose to prominence in 1796, by which point France had already conquered the Low Countries and the Rhineland. Napoleon wasn’t running the show until 1799. Revolutionary France was smashing the armies of the monarchies of Europe for years before Napoleon seized power.
      • isk517 3y ago
        I've heard talk of the great idiot theory of history, and I think it has merit. As many have pointed out, the great men of history more often than not are channeling the historical momentum of the time period, where there are many chases of a extremely stable status quote being shattered to pieces because one idiot couldn't keep it running.
  • positr0n 3y ago
    I agree that most technological innovations, scientific discoveries, and broad historical events associated with a "great man" would have happened anyway if that person did not exist. Even Napoleon was very much a product of the times he lived through as a young man. But one specific person that in my opinion personally changed world history in a drastic way was Lenin. The history of the Bolsheviks rise to power is pretty insane. Nobody thought they could seize power, and once they got it, which was pretty much solely because of Lenin browbeating them to commit at the moment they committed, nobody thought they could hold on to it. And for good reason. If just a few things had gone slightly differently Russia would have been governed by groups with different belief systems than the communists. Disclaimer: 100% armchair historian who's knowledge mostly comes from a handful of podcasts. Hopefully someone will correct me :)
    • boomboomsubban 3y ago
      Trying to "what if" Russian history without Lenin is impossible, but I doubt Russia's overall century would be drastically different without a Leninist government. Even if you view the system as completely bad, spending 70 years under it still saw them develop at a similar rate to the rest of Europe.
      • qwytw 3y ago
        > would be drastically different without a Leninist government It probably would've been drastically different had the socialist-liberal coalition held on to power. It likely would've been overthrown in a couple of years politically/socially it would have still played out quite differently (bolsheviks were pretty unique amongst socialist group in their single mindedness, hatred of democracy and support of totalitarianism and mass terror). > develop at a similar rate to the rest of Europe Unless you were one of the subjugated Central/Eastern European countries. Economically the gap between Czechoslovakia, Poland, Estonia, Latvia etc. and Western European countries considerably wider in 1990 than it was in the 1930s.
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• avgcorrection 3y ago
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• jhbadger 3y ago
  The issue with the "Great Man" idea of history is that it doesn't take into account that people are created by history more than they create history. the microcomputer revolution was already going before Jobs and Wozniak showed up at the Homebrew Computer Club. Somebody was going to turn this hobby into a big business. If not them, somebody else.
  • decentomyous 3y ago
    Well, maybe. We just don't know how things would have played out. The safest assumption seems to be that people like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak very significantly accelerated progress. But because of the way acceleration seems to kick of revolutionary changes, it does seem fair to say they were pretty 'Great' in terms of their impact. For example, without them, maybe we would be in the 1990s era of personal computing now, thirty years later. Or maybe someone else would have done even better than them, and we would be further along, but the latter is harder to believe. We'll simply never know the answer to these questions because we can't run the counter-factual.
  • adventured 3y ago
    The "if not them, then somebody else" premise is a fallacy of guaranteed progress, when history overwhelmingly demonstrates that progress is anything but guaranteed. The computer revolution happened because a string of great men and women made it happen. Unix and Linux very clearly didn't have to happen (as they have) for example, and certainly didn't have to happen in a way that was so dramatically beneficial to the open source community.
  • philwelch 3y ago
    The problem with this theory is that all of the “somebody elses” were also there at the time, so if “somebody else” was going to do it, why didn’t they?
    • jhbadger 3y ago
      Well, they kind of did. We don't think much about Commodore these days because it died in the early 1990s (mostly from competition with IBM PC and compatibles, not so much Apple), but the Commodore 64 was the best-selling computer of the 1980s. And in Britain (and in many parts of Continental Europe) Sinclair and Amstrad were huge but people from the US hardly recognize the names.
• thsksbd 3y ago
  Apple wouldn't exist, but what of it? They didn't really invent very much did they? They just implemented it very well for a price point.