Heroes
HEROES. It is commonly said that whereas in the twentieth century impersonal forces were believed to make history, in the nineteenth century heroic individuals were believed to make history.
The "Great Man" View of History
The epitome of this nineteenth-century outlook was the English writer Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881). His On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) celebrates eleven disparate figures grouped into six categories:
- the hero as divinity (Odin)
- the hero as prophet (Mahomet [Mohammed] Muḥammad)
- the hero as poet (Dante, Shakespeare)
- the hero as priest (Martin Luther, John Knox)
- the hero as man of letters (Samuel Johnson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Robert Burns)
- the hero as king (Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon).
Carlyle opens his book with a statement that has come to epitomize the "Great Man" view of history: "For, as I take it, Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here" (Carlyle, 1897, p. 1). Yet for Carlyle heroes are themselves at the mercy of history. He praises heroes for, above all, their insight into the course of society rather than for the direction they impose on it. Heroes ultimately subordinate themselves to history, the course of which is set by God.
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