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Cometh The Hour, Cometh The Man?
Why the age-old dichotomy between a deterministic view of history and a biographical view is misleading
As we witness the end of Western civilization it’s worth pondering the question: if a patriot had managed to execute Trump back in 2024, would the Western world now be in a position whereby it could stumble along for another decade or two, or maybe even three, before collapsing?
Or to go back further, if Trump’s father had looked at his mentally defective and emotionally empty young son over the breakfast table one day and ordered the nanny to strangle him, would the US Republican Party have become the blatantly fascist organization it is today?
In other words, how much of what happens is attributable to vast impersonal Marxist forces and how much is attributable to the random chance of individual personality?
Historians continue to debate this topic hotly, and the consensus flips back and forth every decade or so without any real wisdom being gleaned from anything. And that’s not surprising, because the “great man versus historical inevitability” argument is very similar to the “nature versus nurture” argument wherein the influence of genetics versus the influence of one’s exogenous environment on personal development was for a considerable time equally hotly contested. Science, unlike history however, can explore such questions methodically whereas historians are left sitting in their armchairs like philosophers before them: endlessly debating but never reaching any worthwhile conclusion because their fundamental premise is mistaken and they have no empirical means whereby to discover their errors.
Which is odd, because history does give us quite a number of clues as to the probable answer to the supposed dichotomy.
We need only go back as far as the 1930s to see how personality and circumstance interact.
After Hitler’s Nazi Party was democratically elected as the largest Party in the German Reichstag in 1932 there was no doubt whatsoever about the direction in which Hitler would take Germany. His poorly-written rant Mein Kampf spelled out clearly every single thing Hitler had set himself to impose on the nation. So we can’t pretend those…
