The Role of the Individual in History
History's hidden architects
Description
In 1898, a Russian Marxist living in exile in Geneva published a slim book with a plain title: The Role of the Individual in History. His name was Georgi Plekhanov, and he signed it under a pseudonym, because the ideas inside it were illegal back home. The book was short, closer to a long pamphlet than a treatise, and it was written into a quarrel that was raging among Russian revolutionaries at the time. On one side stood those who believed history was made by heroes, by conspirators, by a handful of determined people willing to strike. On the other stood Plekhanov, who had spent two decades arguing that history obeyed deeper laws than the will of any one person.
The question underneath the quarrel was not academic. It decided what a revolutionary should actually do with a life. If a few resolute individuals could bend the course of a nation, then the sensible thing was to organize a small elite and act. If, instead, history moved according to economic conditions that no individual controlled, then throwing yourself against those conditions was theater — noble, maybe, but futile. Plekhanov had watched the Russian populists gamble everything on the second reading, on assassinations and heroic gestures, and he had watched it fail.
So he set out to answer a deceptively simple question, one that anyone who has ever wondered whether a single person can change the world has felt in some form. Do the Napoleons and the Caesars and the Robespierres make history, or does history make them? Plekhanov refused both of the easy answers, and the way he threaded between them is what has kept the little book alive for well over a century.
The question we’re asking : Does the great individual bend the course of history, or does history throw up whoever it needs?What we’ll see : How a Russian exile tried to reconcile the weight of impersonal forces with the undeniable mark left by particular people.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — The pamphlet that answered a Russian argument
To understand why Plekhanov bothered writing the book, we have to know where he was standing when he wrote it. Born in 1856, he had come up through Russian populism, the movement that believed the peasant commune could carry Russia straight to socialism without passing through capitalism. As a young man he had shared the faith. But by the time he emigrated to Western Europe in 1880, he had turned decisively toward Marx, and in 1883, with Pavel Axelrod, he founded the Group for the Liberation of Labor, the first Russian social-democratic organization. He had become, in effect, the man who imported Marxism into the Russian revolutionary imagination.
That conversion set him against his own former comrades. The populists, and the terrorists who splintered off from them, held a theory of history in which the decisive factor was the willed act of the committed individual. Kill the right official, organize the right conspiracy, and the machine would lurch onto a new track. Plekhanov thought this was both a political error and a philosophical one, and the two were connected. A wrong idea about how history works, he believed, produced a wrong idea about what to do.
02Chapter 2 — When the accident dies, the type survives
Plekhanov's central move is a distinction that sounds abstract but does an enormous amount of work. He asks us to separate the general causes of a historical development from the particular ones, and both of those from what he calls the individual or accidental causes. The general causes are the deep economic conditions, the level of development of a society's productive forces. The particular causes are the specific national and historical circumstances layered on top. And the accidental causes are the traits of the individuals who happen to be present — their talents, their tempers, even the shape of their noses.
The famous illustration is Pascal's remark that if Cleopatra's nose had been shorter, the whole face of the world would have changed. Plekhanov concedes the point, up to a point. Yes, individual peculiarities are real causes, and yes, they leave their imprint on events. Chance is not an illusion. But the imprint is limited to details, to the how and the when, not to the fundamental direction. The general course of a river is set by its bed; the accidental gust of wind ruffles the surface without reversing the flow.
03Chapter 3 — The great man as an expression of his moment
From this Plekhanov builds his positive definition of the great individual, and it is more generous than his materialism might lead us to expect. A great man, he writes, is great not because his personal qualities give individual features to great historical events, but because he possesses qualities that make him most capable of serving the great social needs of his time. He begins something because he sees further, or wants more strongly, than his contemporaries. He is a beginner, an initiator — but what he initiates has been made possible, even necessary, by the movement of society around him.
The image Plekhanov reaches for is that the great man is like a spark thrown into a store of accumulated powder. He does not create the powder. The economic and social development has already piled it up. But without the spark, the explosion might come later, or in a less useful form, and here the individual makes a real difference. This is why Plekhanov insists that recognizing the primacy of conditions does not diminish great figures. It relocates their greatness. Their power is real; it is simply borrowed from the moment that called them forward.
04Chapter 4 — The freedom that comes from knowing the necessity
The step that lifts Plekhanov's little book above a technical dispute among revolutionaries is the twist he gives to the word necessity. A reader who has followed the argument this far might reasonably conclude that it counsels resignation. If conditions decide everything of importance, why act at all? Why not sit back and wait for the productive forces to do their work? This is exactly the objection Plekhanov anticipates, and his answer is the heart of the book.
He argues that the conviction that a given outcome is necessary, far from weakening the will, is the greatest possible spur to action. The person who believes deeply in the inevitability of a cause does not stand aside; he throws himself into it with more energy, not less, precisely because he feels himself to be an instrument of something larger than his own preferences. Plekhanov points to religious history for evidence — the Calvinists, certain that everything was predestined, were among the most active and combative people of their age. Certainty of the direction did not produce passivity. It produced fanatical engagement.
05Conclusion
Plekhanov had begun with a quarrel among Russian revolutionaries about whether a few resolute people could seize the wheel of history. He ended somewhere more subtle than either side of that quarrel had reached. The individual, in his account, neither commands events nor stands helpless before them.
