And so I boarded the C1 once more, armed with a new question for the commuting masses: who is your favorite historical figure?
I received the ostensibly broad range of answers you would expect from a bus full of bleary-eyed college students trying to align their geography with their schedule. There were a smattering of confusedly ironic Che Guevaras, a fair few defiant Bernie Sanderses and about a dozen George Washingtons. (These last were uttered with a tone that conveyed a desperate desire to give a safe answer in order to be left alone with one’s thoughts on the bus for a few moments of blissful peace before Econ 101.)
There were Musks for the modernists, Platos for the classicists and Rands for the onanists.
Teslas and Edisons chased each other in historical narrative circles. Obviously, Tesla was a visionary beleaguered by the madness of genius and unscrupulous businessmen whose greed for his beautiful mind is the reason we don’t have free electricity today. Equally obviously, Edison was a much maligned patron of innovation whose genius for business led him to success while other, less practically-minded individuals died in painful and stagnant obscurity.
There were Currys and Curies for athletes and physicists; Russels and Rousseaus for philosophers and political scientists.
Faced with such a varied spread, I came to an new line of questioning: what unites these people? What makes a historical figure?
I’ll skip the well-worded navel gazing (for now) and get right to what I think is the answer. A historical figure is defined by their causation of change, whether political, philosophical, or technological: historical figures are people of consequences.
Or are they?
Let’s talk about War and Peace—the book, not the aspects of the human condition. Most well-known for, at nearly six hundred thousand words, its potential for use as a weapon, Leo Tolstoy’s magnum opus has also garnered some moderate amount of acclaim for its historical approach to the Napoleonic invasion of Russia. While it is framed as a narrative, long sections of it are simply historical philosophy or explanations of Freemasonry. Tolstoy described it as “not a novel.” Instead, it can be thought of as a rebuttal to the Great man theory of history.
First espoused by Thomas Carlyle, Great man theory was the idea that, in Carlyle’s words, “The history of the world is but the biography of great men.” In other words, historical change is primarily affected by the action of historical figures. Musk ignites an electric transportation revolution. Parks refuses to move. Napoleon creates a European empire.
This view of history is tempting in that it is comprehensible. History is the story of the world, and great man theory lets us divide it into chapters that can be read in a single sitting: we’re used to narratives that feature a protagonist and their actions changing the world. But as detractors of the theory have repeatedly pointed out, this sacrifices fidelity for ease of understanding. History isn’t the story of individuals so much as a vast battleground of economic, social and technological forces occasionally figurehead-ed by an individual.
Without the scaling up over time of lithium battery technology, the electric transportation revolution doesn’t happen. Without complex shifts in Democratic power in the South during the Civil Rights era, Parks’ boldness comes to naught. This is the argument Tolstoy applies to Napoleon: neither his rise nor his eventual defeat on the Russian front can be attributed to him personally. Instead, the short lived empire was the product of supply lines and seasons, coincidence and collective action. Tolstoy argued over 1,225 pages or so that Napoleon's victories and defeats were the product of people, certainly, but not individuals, and certainly not a single individual.
Tolstoy wrote that “kings are the slaves of history,” that history was “the unconscious, swarmlike life of mankind.” And yet, as much sense as this rebuttal makes given our contextual knowledge of the behind-the-scenes forces that shape history, the ones that don’t fit into neat chapters, it feels empty somehow. There’s a part of us that desperately wants to believe in our heroes, in individuals, in Musk’s incisivity, in Parks’ defiance. And perhaps that desire is not entirely displaced. Tolstoy rightly calls history a swarm.
But to borrow from the final lines of Cloud Atlas, what is a swarm but a multitude of individuals?
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Mihir Bellamkonda is a Trinity junior and a Managing Editor of the Editorial page. His column, "small questions," runs on alternate Tuesdays.