History is often imagined as the story of exceptional individuals whose brilliance and courage bend the course of events. From Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History in the nineteenth century to Karl Marx’s materialist conception of history, debates over the roles of individuals versus collective forces have shaped how we understand power, agency, and change.
Popular culture, especially cinema, has overwhelmingly sided with Carlyle, presenting heroes as the engines of history, while professional historians have repeatedly challenged this view, arguing that such narratives distort reality, erase collective labour, and turn ordinary people into passive spectators rather than active agents of history.
This fascination with heroic individuals is hardly new. Greek epics hinge on Achilles’ wrath and Odysseus’ cunning; Roman tradition venerates founders like Romulus and Aeneas. Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh celebrates Rustam defending Persia against chaos, while in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, Arjuna’s valour and Rama’s adherence to dharma shape the fate of kingdoms. Norse sagas elevate gods and warriors like Thor or Sigurd as arbiters of destiny.
These narratives naturalised the belief that civilisations rise and fall on the will of singular men. Even when such figures embodied collective ideals, the structure of the story suggested that history was intelligible through persons rather than peoples, laying the groundwork for Carlyle’s “Great Man” theory.
Carlyle famously declared that the history of the world is “but the biography of great men,” portraying leaders as world-historical forces whose insight and will reshape society. Yet even his contemporaries challenged this vision. Herbert Spencer observed that before a great man can remake society, society must first make him. Exceptional individuals arise from specific conditions—institutions, cultural norms, economic structures, and historical circumstances. To credit them alone with transformation is to mistake effect for cause.
Leo Tolstoy advanced this critique with unusual clarity and force. In War and Peace, he explicitly dismantles the cult of the lone hero, not only through Napoleon but also through Tsar Alexander I. Both figures, celebrated in conventional histories as architects of Europe’s fate, are stripped of mythic stature. Napoleon, often portrayed as the embodiment of military genius and indomitable will, appears self-dramatising and constrained, mistaking vast social forces for personal command. Yet Tolstoy does not counter him with a heroic Russian sovereign.
Alexander I is likewise shown as limited, shaped by advisers, court politics, and circumstances beyond his control. Neither emperor truly directs history; both are carried by it. In the novel’s philosophical reflections, Tolstoy argues openly that historians err when they attribute events to the decisions of rulers.
History is not the biography of conquerors; it is the record of societies struggling, organising, resisting, and imagining new possibilities
What appears as the will of a “great man” is in fact the convergence of innumerable small actions, fears, calculations, and necessities. By placing conqueror and tsar on the same plane of historical limitation, Tolstoy exposes the Great Man as a retrospective illusion rather than the engine of events.
Marx formulated a parallel argument in systematic terms. Humans make their own history, he wrote, but not under circumstances of their own choosing. Individuals act within inherited economic and social structures. Leaders matter only insofar as they articulate and concentrate collective struggles. Revolutions are not the achievements of solitary geniuses; they are the work of masses shaped by material conditions.
Despite these critiques, mass culture continues to glorify the lone hero. Modern cinema repackages ancient myths for an industrial age, turning Carlyle’s thesis into visual common sense. Superheroes from Superman to Captain America reshape global events through individual brilliance while institutions falter. Action franchises like James Bond and Rambo portray the courage and violence of a single figure as a decisive historical force.
Bollywood mirrors this pattern: in Sholay, a village’s fate rests on two heroic outsiders; in Dabangg, a lone policeman overwhelms corruption through personal strength. Turkish historical dramas such as Diriliş: Ertuğrul similarly frame political transformation around the moral clarity and martial courage of a founding hero, presenting Ertuğrul Gazi as the pioneering figure whose vision lays the foundations of the Ottoman Empire.
In each case, complex social processes are condensed into the will of one extraordinary individual. These narratives encourage audiences to expect salvation from exceptional leaders rather than collective action. What myth once did for kings, cinema now does for modern authority: it converts structural power into personal spectacle.
Twentieth-century historiography deepened the challenge to heroic explanation. Fernand Braudel and the Annales School emphasised the longue durée—geography, climate, trade routes, and social habits evolving over centuries—as the true engines of historical change, with rulers appearing as surface disturbances upon deeper currents.
Though transformative, this structural approach risked minimising human agency. Marxist historians such as Eric Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson therefore insisted that history is made by living men and women acting collectively within and against structures. Agency belongs not to isolated figures but to organised peoples.
Even the most celebrated “Great Men” depended on collective foundations. Ashoka’s moral transformation shaped imperial ideology, yet the spread of Buddhism relied on monastic networks and popular participation. Akbar’s reforms reshaped the Mughal state, but they required administrative systems and regional elites.
Frederick the Great’s military achievements rested on disciplined armies and efficient bureaucracies. Alexander without the phalanx, Akbar without administration, Frederick without the Prussian state apparatus would not have been “great” in practice. Their elevation reflects historical memory and political need as much as individual achievement.
Modern historiography thus understands greatness not as intrinsic but as socially constructed. Societies elevate certain figures to legitimise values—conquest, tolerance, nationalism, piety—and hero worship becomes an instrument of collective memory and power. Historical evidence reinforces this understanding.
Lincoln’s emancipation rested on abolitionist agitation; Gandhi’s leadership drew strength from decades of anti-colonial mobilisation; Martin Luther King Jr. voiced a mass civil rights movement; Lenin and Ho Chi Minh emerged as symbols of revolutions already underway. Literature and art often grasp this truth intuitively: Tolstoy, Steinbeck, Gorky, and Ngũgĩ celebrate collective struggle; Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy, Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s Hum Dekhenge, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and Pablo Neruda’s Canto General envision history as the rising of the multitude. In Sindhi poetry, Shaikh Ayaz’s Ranni Kot jaa Dhaarel captures this spirit in the lines:
سڄو ڏيھ ڏاٽا اُڀا جي ڪري، سوين عيد جا چنڊ اُڀري پون
(If the whole land stands in defiance, countless moons of celebration would blossom across the sky.)
Visual art echoes the same insight. Diego Rivera’s Man at the Crossroads (1933), later recreated as Man, Controller of the Universe in Mexico City, centred workers and industrial labour rather than heroic rulers, monumentalising collective effort as the true engine of history. Socialist realist and nationalist artistic traditions have similarly celebrated collective labour over solitary glory.
The persistence of the Great Man narrative from Achilles to Napoleon to the modern screen hero reflects a deep human desire for saviours. Yet history repeatedly demonstrates that lasting change comes from ordinary people acting together.
Leaders matter, but not as isolated geniuses. They are expressions, symbols, and sometimes catalysts of collective forces. History is not the biography of conquerors; it is the record of societies struggling, organising, resisting, and imagining new possibilities. The myth of the lone saviour is not only inaccurate—it is politically dangerous.
Encouraging passivity, it reinforces domination. The lesson is clear: history is not the biography of rulers, but the living record of the people—whose courage, labour, and collective will truly move the world.