now assert that the victory of Fascism was “inevitable” are compelled to acknowledge that among the reasons for its inevitability was the absence of a leadership great enough to unify the movement of millions against it. Indeed, it requires only a slight twist to picture Hitler, on Engels’ theory, as the “great man” produced by dialectical necessity to fill the necessary needs of the hour. Engels might shudder at such a conclusion but he could hardly disown the method by which it was reached without abandoning his own position.
Writing in 1880, William James banteringly asked Herbert Spencer whether he believed that if William Shakespeare had not been born at Stratford-on-Avon on April 26, 1564, the convergence of social and economic forces would have produced him elsewhere; and whether, if Shakespeare had died in infancy, another mother in Stratford-on-Avon would have delivered “a duplicate copy” of him? “Or,” he teasingly continues, “might the substitute arise at Stratford-atte-Bowe.” Fourteen years later Engels answers all these questions affirmatively for Napoleon and other great historical figures. In principle he answers them affirmatively for Shakespeare, too. The sole qualification he insists on is that the substitute might be a little better or worse rather than an exact replica.
One final word and we may leave Engels dangling on this reductio ad absurdum of his position. If “social need” is more narrowly defined, so that it is not true to say that it is present in all historical periods, we may question whether a social need invariably precedes the appearance of a great man. The citizens of Thebes and of the other cities he razed to the ground were not conscious of any social need when Alexander appeared outside their walls. Or the masses may be aware of a social need which the hero may frustrate rather than fulfil. They may want peace or socialism. He may give them war and dictatorship—in the name of their “deeper” needs. They may want long lives and merry ones. He may send them to heaven in droves for the salvation of their souls. And, where “a social need” is met by the activity of the outstanding leader may it not sometimes be that the social need is the consequence of his earlier work? It may take a hero to undo his own mischief. ····· George Plechanov was the best oriented philosophical intelligence among the orthodox Marxists of his generation.
