the "great person" view of history

I’ve been listening to a course called “A History of Freedom,” and even though I like the content and appreciate the professor’s ability as a storyteller, I’m nearing the end and I’m a little sick of his constant hammering on the idea that history is made by “great people,” not anonymous forces.

It’s ironic, because even though the professor seems to place a lot of importance on the individual, his view of history actually robs the individuals who influenced these “great people” of their agency and their place in history. I get tired of hearing people talk about political leaders as if they’re superhuman forces of nature. That’s not to say there are no “great people,” but they’re still just people, and like all people they are flawed, dynamic, capable of change, and influenced by other people and circumstances.

Take Lincoln as an example. I love Lincoln! I consider him a personal hero! But to view him as a superhuman figure who single-handedly won the war and freed the slaves is to oversimplify things. It robs people like Frederick Douglass, Horace Greeley, Elijah Parish Lovejoy, and probably thousands of other individual abolitionists of their place in history, and their roles in influencing Lincoln’s evolving political thought.

On this note, I learned a couple of things about Martin Luther King Jr. recently that I hadn’t known before. One was how the “I Have a Dream” speech was actually not the scripted speech he had prepared, and how he started improvising it after gospel singer Mahalia Jackson shouted “tell them about the dream, Martin!” Another is how MLK’s interest in Gandhi was sparked partly by a librarian named Juliette Hampton Morgan, who wrote a letter in support of the Montgomery bus boycott to the local paper.

While it’s important not to view history as a sequence of events that were somehow destined to happen, it’s also important not to view the great people of history as towers of intellect that moved mobs of anonymous people in one direction or another. Churchill was great, and the Spitfire pilots in the Battle of Britain were great, but there are probably hundreds if not thousands of other great people from that time and place whose stories are forgotten, buried, or untold. Hell, during the blitz, getting up and going to your job at the grocery store was an act of greatness as far as I’m concerned. I find those stories a lot more interesting than what kind of scotch the prime minister had with breakfast every morning.