how the term “scientific” is interpreted, whether empirically or metaphysically. ••••• In different language and from different metaphysical premises, Herbert Spencer and the host of popular writers whom he influenced reached similar conclusions. Spencer arrives at his conviction about the historical importance of great men not by an empirical canvass of world history but by a simple deduction from his theory of social evolution. The theory of social evolution assumed that all societies developed in a uniform, gradual, and progressive fashion. If an errant genius or adventurer could send society spinning outside of its determined paths, there could be no expectation of uniformity in development, and, even more alarming, no assurance of gradualness. Revolution might rear its head to interrupt the slow cumulative changes of evolution.
Although he was no great reader of historical biography, Spencer was confident that “if you wish to understand these phenomena of social evolution, you will not do it though you should read yourself blind over the biographies of all the great rulers on record, down to Napoleon the Greedy and Frederick the Treacherous.”[1] Spencer did not go to the absurd extremes of Buckle, who first maintained that kings, generals, statesmen, and their like hampered the development of culture, and then called them “puppets” without any historical significance. Great men, if we were interested in labelling these picturesque figures of the past, abounded in history. But to attribute any epochal event to any individual at any time was to lose oneself in a blind alley of misunderstanding. The scientific historian may note in passing that the individual was the proximate or immediate cause of a decisive happening, but he must go on to an investigation of what produced the individual in question and determined him to act as he did. “Before he [the great man] can remake his society, his society must make him.”[2]
- ↑ The Study of Sociology, American edition, p. 37, 1912.
- ↑ The extent to which Spencer’s views have influenced modern social thought on the subject of the great man and his environment can hardly be exaggerated. Cf., for example, “The Great Man versus Social Force,” by W. F. Ogburn, in Social Forces, vol. 5 (1926–7), pp. 225 ff. Although more attention is paid to the fact of biological variation than in Spencer, the upshot of the position is much the same. “If one wishes to contrast Lincoln
