It’s common here to criticize Great Man Theory, in that it’s not just one person that caused changes, it’s many. However, where I’m lost is where they further imply that things happening have absolutely nothing to do with individual choice, and material conditions are the only thing that matters. This really just sounds like predestination with extra steps, as in, your material conditions will choose whatever actions you take, which completely loses me.
The logical conclusion to this mindset is that organization and trying to do political action is pointless, after all, material conditions will either make it happen or not make it happen, which I don’t think anyone is trying to say.
https://allpoetry.com/Questions-From-A-Worker-Who-Reads
Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
In the books you will find the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
And Babylon, many times demolished
Who raised it up so many times? In what houses
of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live?
Where, the evening that the Wall of China was finished
Did the masons go? Great Rome
Is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Had Byzantium, much praised in song
Only palaces for its inhabitans? Even in fabled Atlantis
The night the ocean engulfed it
The drowning still bawled for their slaves.
The young Alexander conquered India.
Was he alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Did he not have even a cook with him?
Philip of Spain wept when his armada
Went down. Was he the only one to weep?
Frederick the Second won the Seven Year’s War. Who
Else won it?
Every page a victory.
Who cooked the feast for the victors?
Every ten years a great man?
Who paid the bill?
So many reports.
So many questions.
The individual choice only existed so far as the possibilities enabled by the subordinates of the great men and conditions of their times. Take away the army and any king is just a fancylad who had to have a servant to wipe their own ass. Take away the cook or the firewood chopper and great men starve in the forest. If Einstein is born a few centuries earlier and literacy is restricted by price and political structure, he doesn’t have his great ideas and they still just exist within the aether of observable phenomenon where someone else will inevitably classify them once material conditions culminate in a university lab.
