assumptions common to the different varieties of social determinism.
1. No individual makes history de novo. He is always limited by his times and his culture. His energy and intelligence may be unique but what he wants and what he sets himself to do, are rooted in what Hegel calls “objective Mind,” and what anthropologists to-day call culture—the superindividual institutions of speech, family, religion, law, art, and science. In a sense his activity must be understood not as the action of an individual versus his environment but as the interactive operation of one aspect of a culture in relation to others. The great man can do only what his culture permits but—and this is crucial—the culture permits of only one direction of development. There are no genuine alternatives.
2. There is a difference between what men, even great men, imagine they are doing and the objective meaning or significance of what they do. The meaning of their acts must be understood primarily in terms of historical trends that have begun in the past, embrace the present and point to the future. Moral righteousness before the stern deeds of history is the easy privilege of those who judge events one by one. But it is an illusion of finite perspective.
3. The world-shattering deed or thought which testifies to the presence of greatness is possible only when the culture is prepared or ripe for it. The hero must fit in at a certain stage in social development. Delivery may be forced, but the child must be ready to enter the world. A heaven-storming Promethean will is doomed to fail unless what it wills is already alive in germ in the conditions of the present. “The laurels of mere willing are dry leaves which have never been green.”[1]
4. The great man is therefore an “expression,” “a representative,” “a symbol,” “an instrument” of historical and social forces on whose currents he rides to renown and victory. If we want to grasp the source and reason of his greatness, his biography or purely personal traits are relatively unimportant. It is to the society and culture of his times that we must turn. For these are the fields over which great historical forces sweep in majestic sequences that challenge our understanding. Knowledge and mastery of these historical forces, the aim of “scientific” history and social theory, give man social control and human freedom. Here there is a variant depending upon
- ↑ Rechtsphilosophie, Lasson edition, p. 317.
