IV
SOCIAL DETERMINISM: HEGEL AND SPENCER
The reaction to the exaggerated “heroism” of Carlyle in the nineteenth century did not deny the existence, and even the necessity, of the hero and heroic action in history. What it maintained was that the events to which such action led were determined by historical laws or by the needs of the period in which the hero appeared. These compelling needs were characterized differently by different philosophers—they were “metaphysical,” “ideal,” “cultural,” “political,” “economic.” We shall use the term “social” to cover them all. These social forces would summon up when necessary from the deeps of mankind some hero whose “mission” it was to fulfil the historic tasks of the moment. The measure of his greatness consisted in his degree of awareness of what he was called upon to do.
For some philosophers heroes were not at all necessary to get the world’s work done. They believed that social needs “work themselves out” through the movements of the masses whose individual components, seen from a distance, could not be distinguished from each other. To them only the masses or classes were heroes. And in the writings of some of their disciples, production figures took the place of the masses.
During the nineteenth century all social determinists had in common the belief that whatever significant consequences seemed to result from the action of a hero could be antecedently inferred from a quite different set of considerations. But the inference was always made ad hoc, that is, after the hero’s work had been observed.
Even when it was held that an individual of a certain heroic stature was a necessary link in a necessary chain of a necessary historical pattern, it was rarely asserted before the events in which the hero proved himself that any particular individual fulfilled the specifications. Hegel was confident when he saw Napoleon near Jena that he was beholding “the world soul on horseback.” But he was even more convinced that if it had not
