Editing Philosophy of history (section)

=== Thomas Carlyle ===
[[File:Thomas Carlyle, 1795 - 1881. Historian and essayist.jpg|left|thumb|[[Thomas Carlyle]], Scottish essayist, historian and philosopher of the [[great man theory]]]]
After Hegel, who insisted on the role of ''[[Great man theory|great men]]'' in history, with his famous statement about [[Napoleon]], "I saw the Spirit on his horse", [[Thomas Carlyle]] argued that history was the biography of a few central individuals, [[hero]]es, such as [[Oliver Cromwell]] or [[Frederick the Great]], writing that "The History of the world is but the Biography of great men." His view of heroes included not only political and military figures, the founders or topplers of states, but artists, poets, theologians and other cultural leaders. His history of great men, of geniuses, sought to organize change in the advent of [[greatness]].

Explicit defenses of Carlyle's position have been rare since the late twentieth century. Most philosophers of history contend that the motive forces in history can best be described only with a wider lens than the one he used for his portraits. A.C. Danto, for example, wrote of the importance of the individual in history, but extended his definition to include ''social individuals'', defined as "individuals we may provisionally characterize as containing individual human beings amongst their parts. Examples of social individuals might be social classes [. . .], national groups [. . .], religious organizations [. . .], large-scale events [. . .], large-scale social movements [. . .], etc."<ref>Danto, "The Historical Individual", 266, in ''Philosophical Analysis and History,'' edited by Williman H. Dray, Rainbow-Bridge Book Co., 1966</ref> The great man theory of history was most popular with professional historians in the nineteenth century; a popular work of this school is the ''[[Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition]]'' (1911), which contains lengthy and detailed biographies about the great men of history.{{notetag|See, for example, the biography of [[Attila the Hun]] of the [[Migrations Period]].}}

After [[Marx]]'s [[historical materialism|conception of a materialist history]] based on the [[class struggle]], which raised attention for the first time to the importance of social factors such as economics in the unfolding of history, [[Herbert Spencer]] wrote "You must admit that the genesis of the great man depends on the long series of complex influences which has produced the race in which he appears, and the social state into which that race has slowly grown. . . . Before he can remake his society, his society must make him."