Thomas Carlyle and the history of the “great men”

By Ramon Oliver

the scotsman Thomas Carlyle He was one of the most outstanding writers and philosophers of the 19th century, but his name would rarely appear today in a hit parade of the great universal thinkers. And even though one of his favorite topics, leadership, is still today a trending topic of constant debate in any political, business, academic or journalistic forum. His ideas about the figure of the leader and what surrounds him, condensed in the “Great Man Theory”, continue to have enormous influence among a large part of the current ruling class (although they rarely recognize it).

The reason for this deliberate oblivion is probably the consideration that would be made today of the approaches of carlyle: outdated and politically incorrect, when not undesirable in some of their statements. For example, those that have clear racist overtones (Carlyle believed that the black race was inferior), slaveholders and supremacists (he affirmed the superiority of the Germanic nations). Ideas that make it especially unappetizing in intellectual terms.

Carlyle also had a strong contempt for egalitarian and democratic systems (“democracy is chaos provided with electoral ballot boxes”) or his admiration for authoritarian figures, such as William the Conqueror or Frederick the Great of Prussia, of whom he wrote an extensive biography. . According to this thinker, he should leave the reins of human evolution to these “strong men”, whom he considered superior in intelligence and abilities to the rest; only they, from his perspective, could save society. This is the reason why the British essayist affirmed that the history of all humanity is dictated by the actions of a handful of great men: society progresses thanks to the rudder changes of these heroes and their ability to drag wills.

You can read: Hegel: the absolute spirit, the dialectic, the master and the slave

Carlyle developed his theory of the great man in a series of lectures, later collected in a book: On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History. The thinker established six categories of heroes, exemplified in great figures: Odin (divinity); Muhammad (prophet); Dante and Shakespeare (poets); Luther and Knox (priests); Johnson, Rousseau and Burns (writers), and Napoleon and Cromwell (leaders).

It is not necessary to traverse centuries to find answers to Carlyle’s pronouncements. In his own time, his theories were refuted by the British Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), who thought that attributing the evolution of humanity to a few changes of direction given by a few heroes was an overly simplistic view of humanity. history. Those “great men” to whom Carlyle attached so much importance were nothing more than the coral or product of their times, Spencer argued. A few years later, collective psychology, represented by thinkers such as Gustave Le Bon or Scipio Sighele, also relativized the role of great men in the future of societies that defined their own leaders.

Today, the latest currents of leadership also follow a direction opposite to Thomas Carlyle, advocating banishing the type of unipersonal and messianic leadership to claim a more choral vision of it in which each member of the organization contributes with their contribution to the management of the project, whether it is a community of neighbors, a company or the Government of a nation.

His reasoning is that, in the face of solitary and fallible caudillos, a shared leadership in which all voices are heard and act as a counterbalance to each other is much more effective. In this way, possible dictatorial drifts are avoided, arbitrary decisions born of uncontrolled egos or inaction for fear of error that sometimes grips this type of leaders.

The hero myth, however, has been around long before Carlyle, making it hard to shake. It may not be very politically correct today to establish yourself as the leader of anything, but many current leaders still secretly aspire, as the Scottish author maintained, to change the course of history with a stroke of genius that guarantees them a page in it.

This nostalgia for leadership with heroic traits is especially evident in the political sphere, where the cult of the leader is openly practiced through massive acts and grandiose speeches (and where as the end of a legislature approaches the risk of a coup d’état grows). or decree that leaves a tangible mark of the passage of a certain administration), but it is also a reality –although more subtle– in companies. The official discourse will say that the organization is governed by a democratic decision-making system in which all its members are important and have the opportunity to contribute their ideas, but it is preferable not to be deceived: in the privacy of the office, many continue to have as Steve Jobs model, Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg; that is to say, that of genius-tyrants who, had they been contemporaries of Thomas Carlyle, would have delighted the author, providing him with a seventh category (that of “entrepreneurs”) for his taxonomy of heroes who chart the course of history.
(Source: Ethic digital magazine)