THE GREAT MAN THEORY OF HISTORY. The ideological conflict between the “great man” school of history education and the “social history” school does nobody any good. The two “sides” are chosen primarily due to aesthetic sympathies, as far as I can tell–great man history, focused on certain towering individuals, feels individualistic and almost monarchic, while social history, focused on ordinary folks, feels communal and close to the People-with-a-capital-P. Social history can, but need not, sway into vaguely socialist territory, in which the Great Men are the capitalists or industrialists–so a social history of the transcontinental railroad would downplay Stanford in favor of the laborers who lost their lives building his dream. In that form of social history, the People can become stereotyped as the eternal victims of the upper classes. The “winners,” who wrote the history books in years past, are identified with the captains of industry. Social history really doesn’t need to assume that kind of antagonism, though; it’s just as possible to do a social history of midwestern entrepreneurs, abolitionists’ or slaveholders’ wives, children of industrial tycoons, or Mafiosi. The point is that social history focuses on the group and the ordinary guy, whereas great man history focuses on the individual and the extraordinary.

In my experience, though, these two schools shouldn’t really be in conflict. In general, great-man history is primary insofar as the great men lay out the rhetoric and philosophical aims of their time–they do most, though not all, of the work of framing the questions that we need to ask ourselves. So I would teach kids great-man-style history first.

But students will gain a deeper understanding of the great men themselves–and a much sharper sense of what the stakes are in historical debates–if they also study the lives of ordinary people. There’s no need for the study of ordinary people to be collectivist or anti-individual: The best social histories are illuminating precisely because they show distinctive, struggling human personalities trying to work within the historical circumstances that fence them around and define their choices. (Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made is a great example of this.) Moreover, social history often includes descriptions of “unknowns,” people you’ve never heard of, who performed truly heroic acts.

We tend to underestimate the importance of rhetoric and inspiration–not necessarily what the people need, but what the people love–in history, and great-man-style history places rhetoric and inspiration in the spotlight. We learn the Founding of the USA through the lives and especially the writings of the Founders; we learn slavery through the almost archetypal figures of Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and Robert E. Lee. Great-man history often reads something like an Ayn Rand novel (only more philosophically complex and realistic…), in which philosophical passions are as character-defining as cultural trends or self-interest. It’s only once students understand how those archetypal figures thought and spoke, in my experience, that they can really grapple with the effects of leaders’ rhetoric and actions on ordinary people. But, as I said above, learning about those effects on ordinary people deepens our understanding of the leaders themselves. Without the framing and philosophical edge provided by great-man history, social history can often seem (especially to students in intro courses) like a chaotic morass of random factoids, irrelevant to the present day. Without the everyday concreteness of social history, great-man history can become remote and simplistic.

If I were designing an intro course, I think my solution would be to teach in a mostly great-man-centered fashion (not that it’s necessary or even wise to think in these terms, since as I’m arguing, the great-man/social-history dichotomy is exaggerated), but dip into social history both to illuminate the effects of leaders on everybody else, and to show students how to apply philosophical concepts and rhetorical tropes to everyday life. What did John Randolph’s formulation, “I am a conservative–I love liberty, I hate equality,” mean to the people who heard it? How did that distinction play out through the twentieth century? How did understandings of liberty change; why; and where did this rhetoric pop up where you might not expect it–for example, in understandings of marriage? Stuff like that. I doubt that’s the world’s greatest example, but really, if you read any good biography you’ll get some sense of how non-famous people responded to and were shaped by the words and actions of the biography’s subject.