Who qualifies as a ‘world-historical individual’?
Who exactly qualifies as an ‘important’ historical figure? As the would-be founder of Eventrics, the study of events and their interactions, my answer is essentially based on estimating the number of ‘chains of events’ we can trace back to a certain figure, especially if he or she knowingly inaugurated these developments. This is not the same thing as assessing whether a figure is ‘exceptional’, even less whether he or she is admirable. For example, Hannibal does not, to my mind, qualify as an important historical figure though he is certainly a very impressive one — since he failed to make any lasting impact on the history of Rome while his own city, Carthage, never recovered its previous eminence. Gaius Marius, on the other hand, who is nothing like so well-known as Hannibal, had an importance in Roman history second to none simply because he changed the system of recruitment for the Roman army. Prior to Marius’s time, the Roman army was a militia: all fit male land-owners could be called upon to perform military service and only persons owning property or land were allowed to bear arms. Marius changed all that, making the Roman army a strictly professional body and, to the horror of the established families, recruited not only propertyless plebeians but even allowed freed slaves to enter the legions. By so doing he brought into being a completely new class whose members were loyal to their commander rather than to the state, since it was their commander who saw to it that they got paid, who distributed booty and, most important of all, provided them with land on their retirement and Roman citizenship if they did not already have it. This reform, despite being on the face of it eminently progressive, in practice led to interminable struggles over land during which many Italian smallholders, and even large landowners who had supported the ‘wrong side’ in the civil wars, were evicted in favour of ex-legionaries. Worse still, during the declining years of the empire, the legions decided who was to be emperor on the basis of promises made to them in advance, and they had no hesitation in assassinating their chosen candidate in favour of someone else, if he did not turn out to be quite so generous as they expected. Whether Marius actually intended to change Roman society in such a radical fashion is unclear, more likely he just wanted to create a more efficient army to save Rome from the onslaught of the Cimbri and to boost his own position.
Type Distinctions
From the cast of ‘world-historical characters’, it is, I think, useful to distinguish between:
(1) persons who achieved great power in their lifetimes and
(2) persons who left a rich and extensive legacy (of events).
Attila the Hun, Tamerlane and even Hitler fall strictly into class (1) since they left no legacy to speak of (apart from what to avoid). Important religious and cultural figures tend to belong to (2) rather than (1), while a few rare individuals fall into both categories, for example Napoleon and Peter the Great of Russia.
Secondly, it is also useful to distinguish between those figures who :
(a) ‘rode to power’ by virtue of institutions or forces that they did not themselves initiate; or
(b) initiated to a considerable extent the very forces that subsequently propelled them to success.
Hitler, for example, created the Nazi party from nothing while Stalin ‘inherited’ (or highjacked) a party that had been operative for some time and that Lenin had already fashioned into an effective political instrument.
Famous religious figures generally fall into the category (2) (b), that is, they do not achieve great power or even great celebrity in their own time, but, if remembered at all, leave a legacy that exerts far more subsequent influence than most men of action. Christ died as a common malefactor alongside two thieves, and it was only at the end of his life that Muhammed was accepted back into his native city, Mecca, to die without Islam spreading beyond the boundaries of an unimportant country, Arabia. Most great Western thinkers, writers and painters (but not composers) of recent centuries tend to belong to the class of posthumously influential failures, for example Keats and Shelley, Van Gogh, Marx, Nietzsche &c. while best-selling authors of their time tend to fizzle out. The strange and, in many ways, perverse cultural movement, Romanticism, actually glorifies failure provided it is done with style, since worldly success implies that the individual has ‘sold out’ to the corrupt and boring establishment. Thus the cult of the ‘noble rebel’ which goes right back to the myth of Prometheus, punished by the gods for benefiting mankind, likewise the cult of the ‘Beautiful Loser’. As 1066 and All That puts it, the Cavaliers were “Wrong but Wromantic” and the Roundheads “Right but Repulsive”. This preferential treatment is even applied to one’s own country’s wartime enemies: Rommel is by far the most renowned general of WWII even though he lost the Battle of Al Alamein, while his victor, Montgomery, perhaps unfairly, comes across as plodding.
There are, of course, bound to be certain unlucky individuals who should have achieved both power in their own time and left a legacy, but whose names are unknown except to a few historical specialists. Epaminondas arguably deserves to be as famous as Alexander the Great, since he devised the revolutionary battle tactics by which the Thebans defeated the Spartans who had been invincible on land for over four centuries. But, unfortunately for him, he died at his greatest triumph, the battle of Leuctra and the Thebans were subsequently overwhelmed by Alexander and their city more or less wiped off the map. In scientific matters fame can be even more unjust: someone who is too much ahead of his time is likely to be ignored or ridiculed, not applauded, in his own era. Aristarchus’s brilliant conjecture that the Earth orbits the Sun and turns on its axis went unheeded for over a thousand and a half years, and it was the forgotten medieval philosopher, Oresme, not Galileo, who first grasped the crucial difference between acceleration and velocity (velocitatio and velocitas) and went on to clearly distinguish between constant and variable acceleration, (velocitatio uniformis and velocitatio difformis). To most people at the time this must have sounded like pure scholastic mumbo-jumbo.
Signs of Future Greatness?
So, when all has been said, what, if anything have I gleaned from my examination of my handful of ‘world-historical figures?
Firstly, there seems little evidence that famous men and women have exceptional childhoods or that their lives are marked by early signs of future greatness. This is surprising since the formidable potential of a future Hitler or Cromwell must nonetheless have been there all along like a dormant volcano. One would have expected someone like Hitler to have at least exercised a certain fascination over a limited circle of acquaintances prior to stepping out onto a larger stage. There were one or two figures I came across in the Sixties and Seventies hanging around Soho and the Latin Quarter in Paris who definitely had charisma and possessed a small coterie of awed camp followers — an individual named Derek Dodd, who, with his long black ringlets and hooked nose, looked, and to a certain degree acted, like a highwayman, springs to mind especially. But Hitler does not even seem to have been a small-time ‘fascinating character’ amongst the habitués of Viennese coffee bars and Y.M.C.A’s of the time — most people seem to have regarded him as no more than an opinionated misfit with a giant chip on his shoulder.
The only slight caveat I have about the lack of visible or cosmic signs of future greatness during the childhood and youth of world-historical figures is this: a society which believed in augury, astrology and so forth would be much more likely to highlight and remember curious features that today would be automatically dismissed as unimportant or ‘coincidental’. Sulla’s supposed remark about the youthful Julius Caesar that “There is more than one Marius in that fellow” may well be historical: a big power player like Sulla would have developed a sort of ‘second sight’ concerning potential rivals and Julius Caesar’s features may well have had something, even as a teenager, that indicated a more than average ambition and a more than average ruthlessness. Some contemporary physical theories include the notion that an event can, as it were, ‘cast its shadow before it occurs’. This sort of talk makes me uneasy and is certainly quite as irrational as the ancients’ widespread belief in premonitions. But, who knows, there may be something in it.
Lucky or Unlucky?
So-called ‘great’ men and women certainly do not seem to have had luck on their side during the early stages of their careers, quite the reverse. If one insists on bringing fortune into the picture, Machiavelli’s belief that she deliberately tests to the extreme the candidates for supreme power in order to toughen them up, fits the data much better than the opposite view i.e. that the big names had it easy from the word go. Nonetheless, one can pinpoint key moments when the future Theodora, Napoleon or Hitler were given the chance of a lifetime which they then seized firmly with both hands. Those who do not grasp the nettle or the staff of power when proffered, generally live to regret it — unless they have already decided that it is preferable to be contented and obscure rather than fearful and powerful. The ‘big chance’ would seem more likely to come to those who were at least already ambitious, but not yet sure of their precise path (category (1)(b)), while the ‘drifters towards power’ like Cromwell and Prince Talleyrand tend to advance steadily without sudden abrupt changes of fortune. The ‘inspired opportunists’, a subsection of category (1)(b), are those persons indifferent to where they are heading, just so long as it is upwards, or simply onwards. Julius Caesar and Hitler were men who knew exactly where they wanted to end up, namely at the top, but who were completely opportunistic with respect to the means of getting there — a winning combination.
Expressing the will of an age
Hegel’s position has been usefully summarised by Buchanan as follows:
“What makes an individual notable and ‘great’ is his or her ability to unleash pent-up forces — the will of an age — and so enable those immeasurably greater forces to have their effect”
I used to believe this sort of thing but there are so many exceptions to the rule that one ends up doubting that it is a rule at all. Inasmuch as it is correct, it would seem to apply more readily to artists, philosophers and poets, i.e. cultural figures, rather than to military or political figures. What does seem to happen in many cases is that the individual who eventually emerges as a leading figure was not, in his or her own time, representative of the principal ‘mood’ or ‘will’ of the age, but rather represented a powerful counter-current that only triumphed later. Often, there will be a pioneer/initiator who will not attain supreme power but will prepare the way for a successor who does and who subsequently has greater influence than the pioneer figure. It was, as it turned out, not Julius Caesar who hit upon the social system that was to replace the Roman republic, but his immediate successor, Augustus, who inaugurated the Principate as he called it ― he scrupulously avoided the terms ‘Empire’ and ‘Emperor’. Julius Caesar himself angered the senators by his high-handedness and he planned to carry out various social reforms, especially with regard to land redistribution, that were much more radical than anything Augustus brought into being. The senators were, in point of fact, entirely justified (from their point of view) in getting rid of Julius Caesar since he really was a threat to their vested interests. Augustus, a ‘centrist’ but a clever and ambitious one, managed to draft a social system that did not openly take power away from the Senate ― but he nonetheless concentrated all that was needed in the position of Princeps (‘Leader’). He also inaugurated a civil service, subsequently much expanded by Claudius, that owed loyalty to him rather than to the Senate or the Popular Assembly. Without Julius Caesar, no Augustus, but it was the latter who more nearly expressed the Hegelian ‘temper of the times’ and who, I would argue, has had a far greater impact on history than the former. And, jumping to modern times, it was not, as it transpired, Chairman Mao who discovered and imposed the most suitable politico-economic model for the awakening giant, China, but rather Deng Xiaoping who realized, as Mao did not, that to ‘make China great again’ it was necessary to re-introduce the profit motive while nevertheless keeping it a one-party police state.
In such cases, and there are plenty more, the ‘great man or woman’ laid the foundations for the future of a country, but did not himself live to see that future, while it was the follower who succeeded because more nearly aligned to the ‘underlying tendencies’ of his age. Some people have even argued that Saint Paul, though inconceivable without Christ, has had a greater impact on history than Christ himself, since it was Paul who freed Christianity unequivocally from its strictly Jewish context and inaugurated its brilliant future as a world religion.
The ‘will of the age’ hypothesis is attractive, occasionally relevant as an explanation for the rise of certain figures, but it does not even remotely approach being a physical law, as Hegel seems to have viewed it. In extreme cases, it is quite possible for a single individual, or a very small power group, to go completely against the whole tenor of an age and enforce a radically different model of society. There were certain ‘Westernizing’ elements in Russian society in the late 17th and early 18thcentury but they were hardly dominant: it was basically one man, Peter the Great, who had the will and the means to coerce, not lead, Russia towards a Europeanization that neither the Russian Church nor the peasantry, nor even most of the nobles actually wanted.
Ambition
Acting in reaction to the Victorian ‘great man’ theory of history, 20th century historians, whatever their politics, were agreed that, as someone put it, “Good biography makes bad history”. But if the person being highlighted was really powerful, he or she was in a position to make history and their quirks of character were, or could be, very important indeed. Those who stress underlying geographical, social or demographic explanations, are unable to make a compelling case for really big changes like the sudden outbreak of wars or new religions like Islam sweeping across half the known world. We don’t know enough about the Mongolian birth rate or local climatic changes to satisfactorily ‘explain’ the extraordinary, and extraordinarily rapid, Mongol expansion under Genghis Khan which created, albeit for a fairly short time, the largest land empire the world has ever seen.
We do know enough about Alexander the Great and his times, however, to state that the Macedonian surge across Asia was due to one person alone, Alexander, and to his overweening ambition. Wishing to emulate the fame of Achilles, he certainly succeeded since practically everyone in the world has heard of Alexander the Great while not everyone has heard of Achilles. Alexander had no particular need to invade Asia Minor, since he had already established himself as the leading power in Greece itself and Persia was no longer a serious threat. Indeed, when he first crossed over to Asia Minor it was not clear (even to himself) where he was heading, he was a sort of rolling cannon with the known world as his rolling-scape, giving anyone on his path the choice of submission or destruction. And once he had conquered Persia he certainly had no need to push on to India where he was only stopped in his eastward path by the mutiny of his own soldiers, surely a very rare event in ancient times. It would seem that he intended to keep going east until he reached the edge of the world, a desire that apparently his fellow Macedonians did not share. The explanation for such a venture, which coincidentally brought certain features of Greek culture to India and vice-versa, was simply ambition perhaps laced with a certain curiosity to see how far man could actually go before the gods stopped him. Practically all the famous characters, Greek and Roman, biographed by Plutarch are presented as men driven by an overwhelming urge for fame and glory — so why not accept this as a completely adequate explanation instead of searching for the effects of climate change and over-population? An individual like Alexander or Peter the Great can, by virtue of his position, if it is eminent enough, simply ignore or override the ‘zeitgeist’, in effect saying, “Le zeitgeist, c’est moi”.
Alternatively, it is possible, but much rarer, for individuals who have achieved a position of great power, to voluntarily withdraw from the fray to cultivate the arts and sciences or simply the pleasures of the senses. Lucullus was an extremely successful Roman general who, after several campaigns in the East in which he amassed a vast fortune, found on returning to Rome that various younger men, amongst them the future Pompey the Great, were out to belittle him and they did in fact prevent him from holding a triumph (for three years). Now, Lucullus could have taken this very badly, as Julius Caesar certainly would have done, and the rift could easily enough have led to civil war as rivalry between generals often did at the time. However, Lucullus instead opted to retire from public life to establish amongst other things a beautiful garden and gain a reputation as the leading gastronome of his time. There were no more ‘tendencies of the age’ directing Lucullus to retire than there were ‘tendencies of the age’ directing Julius Caesar to challenge Pompey for supremacy: the differences were mainly, or even solely, due to the varying characters of Julius Caesar and Lucullus respectively. Julius Caesar himself, vaguely aware of the plot to kill him and certainly aware of his unpopularity with the conservative party of the day, could have simply left Rome for good to live it up for the rest of his days with Cleopatra in Egypt as Mark Antony did. Instead, although in his mid-fifties and not in good health, he was already planning a new campaign against the Parthians when he was murdered.
Nor are the ‘explanations’ offered by ‘Darwinist’ historians any more satisfactory. Evolution is essentially geared towards two things: survival and reproduction. Anyone with means in Roman society could, and often did, find a much less dangerous way to survive than enlisting in the army, and far easier ways to reproductive success than through politics via socializing and seduction. But the same does not go for status — for status is not compatible with retirement. A person like Crassus, who was the richest man of his time and doubtless had, or could have had, more female slaves than he could possibly inseminate, nonetheless felt inferior to Pompey and so got himself appointed as the commander in the Parthian war where he promptly lost his life. I have not read Adler, and don’t intend to, but if his main point is that what motivates people, especially young males (at least in the past), is a desperate search for status, he strikes me as being a better psychologist than both Freud and Jung combined. Abraham Maslow (of whom I know nothing) apparently once said that “man is swayed by three basic appetites: for security, sex, and self-respect” and that “all three produce irrational behaviour, but the appetite for self-esteem causes more damage than the other two together.” This sounds to me to be very true, though I would replace the term ‘self-respect‘ by ‘status‘. It is the esteem of others not oneself that motivates most people. The whole thrust of both Epicureanism and Stoicism was towards self-reliance and against the lure of public opinion, but the ancient historians found very few individuals, if any, who actually practised what the philosophers preached. The trouble with the search for status is that it has no physiological basis and thus no upper limit — while the successful enjoyment of food, drink and sex obviously does have an upper limit. Have things changed that much since the days of the ancient Romans? I leave that to you to answer.
Control over the media
One feature that crops up again and again in the lives of very celebrated people (and one that I did not expect to be so important) is their ‘command over the available means of mass communication’. In the ancient world, this meant public speaking or ‘rhetoric’ as it was called, by far the most important ‘subject’ in the education of a Roman male of good family. It is not generally known that Julius Caesar was regarded as (very nearly) the greatest orator of his day, that is, second only to Cicero, the most celebrated of all Roman public speakers. The Roman political system during the Republic associated public speaking with military command, since the Consul automatically became overall commander of the army during his term of office. And it was customary for Roman parents who could afford it to send their sons to study oratory under Greek teachers at Athens or the island of Rhodes; the young Octavian (future Augustus) was studying rhetoric at Rhodes when he heard that his adopted father, Julius Caesar, had been murdered.
As we know, even in the rational 20th century, Hitler held audiences spellbound by his oratory reinforced by the spectacular staging of the Nuremburg Rallies, while Goebbels made sure the Nazi Party controlled the German radio and film industries, both of which were relatively new means of mass communication at the time. Winston Churchill for his part rallied Great Britain by his radio speeches prefaced by the opening of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony; Eva Perón was by all accounts an extremely effective speaker, while the Ayatollah Khomeini used to great effect the late 20th century invention of portable cassettes for the dissemination of propaganda. Napoleon was not renowned for his oratory but he put together an impressive team of first-rate painters to promote his romantic military image. Mao’s Little Red Book was derided by intellectuals in the West, but it suited the Chinese public who could recognize in their Chairman’s unpretentious communications something of the proverbial folk wisdom to which they were accustomed. Mao was also a tolerably good poet, as was Ho Chih Minh, in countries where, at the time, poetry (of a certain kind) was still popular.
This leads on naturally to the present era.
1st Postscript
Economic power relies on possessing, or readily obtaining, the raw materials required by the prevailing leading technology. When human beings were the main energy source, economic power was almost inevitably based on slavery as in ancient Greece and Rome. In the 19th century, possession of abundant coal resources and the ability to make steel cheaply by the Bessemer process, made Britain dominant world-wide; in the 20th century the big fortunes have tended to be made in oil and gas. According to current economic thinking, it is now data and its efficient processing that is the chief source of economic power; instead of control over the movement of humanity via railways and roads, it is now control over the dissemination of speech that typifies the new era. With the exception of Musk, the only engineer, and Buffett, the only ‘money-man’, the richest men in the world are all in information technology.
Control over what people say and read in earlier eras was exercised by the Church, hence the banning of certain books (including translations of the Bible) and the restrictions placed on preaching by unlicensed individuals. No one really anticipated the arrival of the email, something quite different from both speech and the printed word. The spoken word is transmitted locally — even someone with a good voice in ancient times could only hope to reach a few hundred people at most — and the words were transmitted at the speed of sound; but an email, though coming from a single person, can be transmitted globally at the speed of light. Moreover, an email, though usually quite trivial in content, is frequently recorded for all time, something that rarely happened to the speeches of the greatest orators of the past. To close down someone’s email account is today the equivalent of the Church banning someone from preaching and it is notable that Facebook (or was it Twitter?) actually dared to close the account of a serving American President (Trump during his first term). ‘Cancelling’ is the contemporary equivalent of excommunication.
Although not all big power figures in the past possessed charisma, most did, but what is striking about the current IT ‘masters of the universe’, if that is what they are, is their eagerness to show that they are ‘ordinary figures’ which is why they get themselves photographed in T-shirts rather than expensive suits or monarchical robes. Also, the means to power today would seem to be via the closed Board meeting rather than public places or the refined intimacy of a court. Very different techniques are required to impress people around a conference table than were needed to successfully harangue the hoi polloi from a balcony, or charm them individually at a state banquet. I do not know what these techniques are, never having been present at a Board meeting, but undoubtedly the colossal fortunes amassed by IT figures demonstrate not only a good eye for the coming economic chance but consummate skill at impressing people at meetings.
Successful human communication has always been important but, during previous eras, in the last resort it came second (or third) to military or financial means of coercion. But for the present generation the ability to go online and send emails or text messages seems to be more important than everything else in life. And the winners in the new power game are not those who have mastered the relevant skills in the way that great orators or writers mastered the transmission of the spoken or written word in the past: power lies with those who can, via the new technology, offer, or, if they feel so inclined, withhold, the means of mass communication from anyone and everyone. The only thing that the big IT power figures currently lack is direct control over public finances — but if Google or Amazon (or Alibaba) ever gain control of the market for bitcoin they would be unstoppable, possibly they already are.
2nd Postscript
The previous postscript was written some six or seven years ago, but things move so fast that it has itself become outdated. Currently, ‘big figures’ have returned to the forefront of history, notably Trump in his second term, Elon Musk, Putin and Netanyahu — while the much less charismatic IT bosses who dominated the world a few years ago have bowed their heads in mock or genuine submission. I regard myself as a good psychologist but a poor prophet — if by ‘prophet’ we mean someone who correctly predicts the future. Nonetheless, my feeling is that the era of the dominant individual and the particular Western culture that favoured him (and more rarely her), is over and that the future lies with societies like China where the ‘group’ takes precedence over the individual — even though the masses still seem to need a permanent single ruler such as the colourless but capable President Xi.
3rd Postscript
As a succinct summary of what all power figures either possess or must acquire, the following list from Neuro-Linguistic Programming can hardly be bettered:
CLARITY OF AIM
ATTENTIVENESS
FLEXIBILITY
Sebastian Hayes 25/09/2025
Sebastian Hayes 
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