"Understandably, there has been much speculation as to [leader]’s mental fitness.
It has been marked that [leader] possessed a perpetual immaturity. He had great difficulty in taking matters seriously, and tended to fixate on surface level details that caught his fancy to the neglect of the heart of the matter. He spoke without preparation or consideration, seemingly unaware of the consequences this brought about.<p>However, the influence of the [leader] on [country] politics made [country]’s isolation inevitable. A byzantine system where promotions were based on the favor of a man who did not have the character to set a consistent policy made for a state that was not a credible partner."
Of course mediocre and bad leaders make their mark on history. But Carlyle's Great Men theory is more about paradigm shifts that Great Men can will into existence, not just random noise they bring along. The problem with GM theory is that there is only a handful of examples to support it. Napoleon is one such example, and it was undoubtedly the inspiration why the theory was proposed in the first place. People were trying to come to terms with the fact that one leader can have such a dramatic impact on the entire world.
What is a historical theory anyway? These things aren’t for making predictions. So it seems hard to judge them the same way we’d judge a scientific theory, based on their predictive ability (too easy to cheat, since all the experiments you can make using history are concluded already, other than current events, which are only a tiny slice of history and we don’t really know which ones will be deemed memorable by the record).
The historical setting at the moment of time matters a lot. Had the French Revolution not happened, he would've been yet another artillery lieutenant in the French army. In 1789 Jean Lannes was a dyer, Laurent de Gouvion Saint-Cyr was a paineter, Jean-Baptiste Jourdan worked in a clothing store, Jean-Baptiste Bessières was a barber, Guillaume Marie Anne Brune was a typesetter, Jean-Baptiste Kléber was an architect... et cetera, et cetera. But it happened, and lot of people got an impossible before chance to discover their dormant military talents.
I think the wrinkle of "men (or maybe women) at a particular hingepoint had their personal foibles that shaped history" is valid. There were structural forces that led to WW2 but Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, Hitler et al being their particular personalities absolutely shaped how it unfolded.
This point of view implies that the revered "great men" should be stripped of their wealth and power as much as possible. They're not necessary for history, so no need to disproportionally allocate resources to them.
I am uncomfortable with describing folks as "great," or "mediocre." I feel that simplifies people too much. We're all ongoing epic sagas; even the most banal people in the world.<p>One example is incompetent people with extreme willpower. They can Make Shit Happen; even if it is not good stuff. I think we've all had bosses like that. Some folks will just jam beans into their noses[0], and, for whatever reason, they are in a position to impose this on others. Sometimes, the bad stuff is actually a trigger for growth. I doubt we'd have much of what we have now, if not for a couple of genocidal wars, last century.<p>Others can be insanely competent, but are never in a position to apply that competence to cause any meaningful change.<p>Also, never underestimate the power of personal insecurity. This can be a <i>huge</i> driver, and substitute for willpower. People spend millions, trying to salve personal insecurity, and, likely, many tyrants (and great leaders) have been driven by personal insecurity.<p>[0] <a href="https://archive.uie.com/brainsparks/2011/07/08/beans-and-noses/" rel="nofollow">https://archive.uie.com/brainsparks/2011/07/08/beans-and-nos...</a>
One factor here is how systems become more or less prone to creating great or mediocre men. Inbreeding, isolation, over romanticism of emotions, all these are factors that can make a dangerous inconsistent person more likely to appear in the halls of power
Reminds me a quote I heard recently about wealth inequality and how the very rich can do dumb things without consequences (to them anyway) and it was along the lines of 'we don't have a merit-based system, because our system does not need merit to function'.
You could fit in most senior directors, consultants and sales VPs into that bucket comfortably.
Organisations have evolved to deal with them. In fact, all the rules and procedures, checks and compliance procedures are there precisely to allow the organisation to survive <i>despite</i> its members.
Ok, I’ll bite - why sales VPs?
Good read, interesting choice as there are a lot of such examples
Reflect on this in the context of the US right now. Makuthink.
>[...] where promotions were based on the favor of a man who did not have the character to set a consistent policy made for a state that was not a credible partner.<p>>Germany’s interests were incomprehensible and thus there was no option other than to balance against this rogue state in the heart of Europe<p>>There was a saying of the Kaiser in Vienna, that Wilhelm wished to be “the stag at every hunt, the bride at every wedding, and the corpse at every funeral.”<p>Indeed, indeed.
It was filed under “unintentional allegory”. Or intentional, it’s hard to say.
Probably greatness is most powerful if there are enough powerful mediocrities to work against.
Bismarck? Or<p>>his liberal father<p>Might be a stretch to imply that the Wilhelm II was a mediocre illiberal. HIM was (for a time) interested in protecting workers' rights. However great he was, Bismarck couldn't overpower a "mediocre" populist<p><a href="https://germanhistorydocs.org/en/forging-an-empire-bismarckian-germany-1866-1890/kaiser-wilhelm-ii-s-decree-to-bismarck-on-workers-protection-and-social-policy-february-4-1890" rel="nofollow">https://germanhistorydocs.org/en/forging-an-empire-bismarcki...</a>
I was making a general point, not specifically about Bismarck.<p>Assume every side has great individuals in positions of power (great being here evidently in relation to ability), greatness is thus evenly balanced and not so important to the final outcome.
When you look at white noise from up close, you see dramatic changes, periods of calm, and what seems like patterns.<p>Only when you step back, you realise all that drama you read is mostly inconsequential. What will be the impact of Napoleon 1000 years from now? Of Columbus? If instead of Hitler Germany had Rohm? It’s all monkeys and typewriters all the way down. What matters are the structural forces, the natural resources, the geography, and so on. Chances are it’ll be all forgotten in a billion years.<p>Now, on a more serious note, did anyone else, at some point, started wondering whether the article was really about Wilhelm II?
They both matter. All of the typewriters in the world doesn’t produce a play until you find the right monkey.
We still speak today of Charlemagne, Muhammed, Caesar, Alexander.<p>Napoleon and Columbus have secured for themselves their seats in the pantheon of history and it will take longer than a thousand years for mankind to forget about them.<p>All these men built our world.
What are a thousand years other than a couple of generations? What does it matter from further away?
We always forget about the past eventually. There are so many great civilisations we only have tiny shreds of knowledge about, and yet in their time, they also had great leaders and epic stories to tell. It’s all inconsequential once enough time has passed.
People love to mythologize. The truth is usually much more mundane. Columbus in particular has a combination of Mr. Magoo quality and nastiness that is will lead history to forcefully forget him in short order.
Na, all it will take is a shift in perspective. As humanity becomes more and more Asian, those names will trigger a "who?"
It'll then just be Confucius, Cao Cao, Oda Nobunaga. Doesn't really refute the point.
Mohammed was Asian. Julius Caesar had huge bits of his Empire in Asia. Most of Alexander the Great's empire was in Asia.
This entire article tries to make a point that it's not just "great men" or "structural forces" alone being responsible for the course of history, but then completely misses the point again by labeling someone in power as mediocre and arguing that that mediocrity caused much of the events of the 20th century.<p>This once again causes oversimplifies history to a few people and some nebulous "structural forces", and provides an attractive but wrong model of how history developed. In software terms we would call this a "leaky abstraction", and this particular abstraction leaks so much it's barely useful at all.<p>The world is much too complex to be understood by examining less than at least a few hundred million people. That this is beyond the capability of humans is not the world's problem.
> <i>If it was the social and political forces of the French Revolution that made Napoleon successful, the logical conclusion is that it would have made no difference to the course of history should he have, say, suffered a fatal stroke in 1801, a premise few would accept. It is clearly untrue when applied to specific cases. Not only who ends up in power, but the specific decisions they make are deeply consequential. Who would really contend that the 20th century would remain unchanged had Hitler been killed in WWI?</i><p>Isn't the idea more that the large-scale political forces are what allow those supposedly "great men" to become "great" in the first place? Yes, once Napoleon was in power, a lot of the details of history were dependent on his individual decisions - but the forces that led to the French Revolution were what gave him that power in the first place. An if he had actually died of a stroke, or if Hitler had been killed in WWI, then the specifics of history would have been different, but probably not the large-scale trajectory: Post-revolutionary France would still have been there and the deep divisions, senses of injustice and reactionary and capitalist influence in post-WWI Germany that gave rise to the Nazi movement would also still have been there. And chances are, other "great men" would have emerged and captured those forces.<p>As such, I see the relationship more like the one between lightning strikes and wildfires: Yes, a particular wildfire might have been caused by that particular lightning strike (or careless hiker or whatever), but the reason <i>why</i> that particular local event could spiral into a blaze that burns down acres and acres were the larger environmental conditions, i.e. hot weather, wind and dryness. And if firefighters could take a time machine and prevent that particular cause, then it's likely another random event would trigger a slightly different but still extremely similar wildfire - so not much would have been won.
> The synthesis position is what I call here the “mediocre man” theory of history. The idea of this mediocre man theory is that history is not just shaped by great men or by mass sociological forces that make individual irrelevant. Instead, while it is shaped by structural forces, it is also shaped by ordinary people who end in positions of extraordinary importance.<p>This synthesis has already been done as early as at least 1898, see G.V. Plekhanov, "On the Role of the Individual in History" [0].<p>[0] <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1898/xx/individual.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1898/xx/individua...</a>
Any story that rests on the disaster that was Wilhelm II, but does not make a single reference to the “Eulenberg Affair” (i.e. elite closetgay club), is an utter waste of time.<p>The elites in the gayclub had many ties — personal and/or blood — to Britain, and pushed Wilhelm toward moderation in his foreign policy. Once the scandal hit the papers, gayclub dissolved, leaving (forcing, even) Wilhelm II entirely to the counsel of his generals.<p>By “forcing,” I mean the fellow elites in gayclub were widely known to hold pro-Britain sentiments, so Wilhelm was somewhat forced into a 180 to not go down with them in the court of public opinion.<p>In some small way, WWI was a “beard.”
some interesting ideas but something feels off with the language used.
When thinking about this from the perspective of rulers and war, Putin is the ultimate mediocre man of our times. He wanted to be the next Great Tsar - Expander of the Realm, forever mentioned in history textbook as the one who put the Russian World together again after Gorbachev let it collapse.<p>But career spooks like him and his inner silovik circe don't
really understand war and, at the same time, don't trust the army enough to actually build it up to strength. And so he started something that he cannot finish.