The Great Man or the Great Wave
Whether heroes ride the tide of an age, or the age merely makes them
There are two ways to tell any story, and the choice between them divides the whole guild of historians.
In the first, a single towering figure seizes the reins and bends his age to a private will.
In the second, no man is master; each is merely the foam thrown up by a vaster wave.
The great-man theory flatters us, for it promises that a single life can still redirect the tide.
Remove the conqueror, it whispers, and the empire he built would dissolve back into scattered provinces.
The rival theory answers coldly that the wave would have found another crest to break upon.
Kill Napoleon in his cradle, it says, and some other general rides the same revolutionary flood.
The , this theory insists, does not wait for heroes; it manufactures whatever hero it requires.
I confess a lifelong temptation toward the second view, with its refusal of comforting illusions.
has the of a cathedral: vast, impersonal, to the ant that admires it.
And yet the cathedral, I remind myself, was raised by countless hands that might have laid other stones.
Structure is real, but structure without is a machine with no one to press its levers.
The wave may be vast, yet waves are made of individual drops, each obeying and composing the whole.
Perhaps the honest formulation is not "man or wave" but "how much of each, and precisely when."
For structures set the range of the possible, while individuals decide which possibility is actually seized.
A river carves the valley long in advance, but a swimmer still chooses which bank to reach.
Grant the determinist all his structures: the forces of economy, of geography, and of slow .
Even so, within those iron walls a corridor of choices remains, narrow but never quite abolished.
The general cannot summon an army that the century has not yet made it possible to feed.
But which army marches, and where, and to what ruin, may still turn on one restless mind.
So I hold the two theories in each hand and refuse to let either close entirely.
that the age produces its men; and , equally, that certain men reshape the age itself.
The debate has raged for two centuries and will not be settled by another decade of shouting.
What advances us is not victory for either camp but a finer measurement of their border.
Where, exactly, does the wave end and the will begin? That is the historian's true country.
In the next case I shall press a single hinge harder than the last, and watch it strain.
I shall take a battle whose outcome, tradition says, hung upon a single afternoon of rain.
If mere weather could an empire, then the wave, perhaps, is thinner than we fear.