“Great Man Theory” and A Quiz

This blog came really from 3 distinct but related chains of thoughts and events over the past couple of days. The first was a teacher mentioning the “Great Man Theory,” which finally gave a name to the thoughts I had on the historical canon of thinkers and how contemporaries view each epoch as intellectually led by the sole ideas of a peerless visionary. The second was my reflections on what the point of theory is and how I am supposed to even “practice” what it teaches. The third was a quiz I found and took this morning (October 23rd, 2024) on the supposedly top 100 greatest philosophers of our time. Here it is if you want to try: https://www.sporcle.com/games/Almasa/100_Greatest_Philosophers.1

From Wikipedia, the Great Man Theory:

This theory rests on two main assumptions, as pointed out by Villanova University:

  1. Every great leader is born already possessing certain traits that will enable them to rise and lead on instinct.

  2. The need for them has to be great for these traits to then arise, allowing them to lead.

This theory, and history, claims these great leaders as heroes that were able to rise against the odds to defeat rivals while inspiring followers along the way. Theorists say that these leaders were then born with a specific set of traits and attributes that make them ideal candidates for leadership and roles of authority and power. This theory relies then heavily on born rather than made, nature rather than nurture and cultivates the idea that those in power deserve to lead and shouldn’t be questioned because they have the unique traits that make them suited for the position.

Poststructuralism and The Theory Toolbox

I want to use the Poststructuralist framework to demonstrate how the peerless visionaries might be peerless visionaries and can be more apt to be called “the slaves of history” than anything else. That whatever we prescribe as “great” minds are caught up in the contemporary social, cultural, and political fabrics which are negotiated day-to-day. That the list of the top 100 greatest philosophers will definitely change, not even through a new edition of luminaries, but rather simply through a shift of the zeitgeist.

However, I’m not going at it in a way to just dunk and disregard any of the ideas, questions, and methods provided by any of these thinkers. After all, I myself, believe some of these developed and exposited ideas. What I want to do with the framework is the work of translating them to the contemporary moment. Adam Smith’s pin factory has become autonomous. Marx’s class distinctions have greatly changed. Bentham’s panopticon has become digital. Camus’s absurd is now found in the endless stream of information. Nietzsche’s ubermensch is now the cyborg.2

To explain poststructuralism, I will quote from The Theory Toolbox: Critical Concepts…:

“When your system breaks down, you see that the underlying structures of meaning (the contexts that render meaning) vary from place to place. The structures of meaning, like meaning itself, are not abstract or transcendental: The signified (the concept of breakfast, for example) is just as material (dependent on context for its meaning) as the signifier (“breakfast” in English or Frühstück in German); the seemingly abstract and universal grammar (what you’re ordering) is just as concrete and changeable as the sentence or word that refers to it.”

At the core of the quote is that when you encounter the ideas from a forgone time and react with ?????, it means that the meaning systems, signifier, signified, and referent, have drastically changed.3 For example, take Adam Smith’s idea of the invisible hand. The idea of the invisible hand still has a profound impact on the cultural backbone of the markets and is one of its primary justifications. Signals from buyers and sellers coordinate an equilibrium where goods are priced “perfectly.”4 To me, that idea has never been mapped out cleanly in the current context. Take now how buyers and sellers interact in the digital marketplace. What coordinates buyers and sellers are no longer the abstract forces but algorithms in so-called digital marketplaces.

This insight is the merit I see in poststructuralism. It allows translations from the past, specifically for these “great thinkers,” to provide insight into the current world and generate more relevant theories. The breaks in clarity and understanding of these thinkers are not just you failing to understand what they said5. The break itself opens up space to renegotiate meaning within the contemporary fabric. And to that, I say I cheers! Better to be “dumb” than an ideologue.

Editors Note: The reason I failed to grapple with this idea is because of my constant use of the word great. Think on this yourself. There is this sort of subtle/subversive linguistic object preference when we use the word great. Great usually denotes or qualifies for a singular noun. Which is directly orthogonal for the point I was trying to make in this blog. That is, what is great is actually the plurality of people behind the thinker.

I leave this section off with a quote from a rugby player:

These days people seek knowledge, not wisdom.

100 Great Philosophers Quiz

The quiz was the catalyst for this post. It made me think back and connect these thoughts.

Again from the book:

“As we’ve already suggested, this question of how someone who authors becomes an author (or how “author” changes from a verb to a noun) is intimately tied to the question of canonicity, which involves the list of accepted “great” works that are deemed worthy of continued scholarly attention. To be an author in the canonical sense is to be invested literally with author/ity, to be taken seriously and even revered for your accomplishments. Canonicity not only establishes “authority” through the designation of “genius” or “greatness,” it also establishes a particular relationship to authority, one based on honor and reverence as opposed to critical questioning and challenge.”

What it means to be a “great” philosopher on the list is something heavily in contention. A question I asked myself throughout the entirety of the quiz was just why is this person considered “great”? From the above discussion, their ideas apparently have been seen to stand “the test of time,” but I don’t think that is it either. The reason some are there is seemingly as a mascot for the culture and social forces of the time.

That is why I alluded to some of these thinkers as “slaves to history,” as they are cherry-picked and interpreted for a hegemonic narrative instead of fundamentally grappling with the theories purported by them.6 But, I see this in myself as well. I view some of the philosophers up there as “Great.” Their ideas have a profound relevance in the world and how I view it. Again, BUT, the point of the blog was to highlight that we shouldn’t view any of them as peerless and, along with that, also consider why we view them as great in the first place.

If Newton hadn’t found calculus, Leibniz would have been on his tail, but let’s also not treat either of them as intellectual idols.

Closing Thoughts

A point I feel like I failed to make because it was lost in asking, “How do we adapt the theories of these great thinkers?” and “What makes a great thinker?” is that maybe we shouldn’t even be looking at them as great thinkers. That is because language isn’t private, because meaning is cultural -> all knowledge is social. This argument is what I interpret social constructivism as. The notion of applying “greatness” itself is then problematic because the implication is that there are necessarily people who transcend their social context and generate a hierarchy of knowledge production.

However, a question I asked myself was, “Then what is the agency of the individual? Doesn’t it seem obvious that individuals produce knowledge through hypothesis, through experience, and through thinking (positivism, empiricism, and rationalism)? 7 But, this is not a contradiction because what social constructivism says is that it increasingly values the agency of personal subjects and their perspectives. People have the agency to think, reason, and discover, but their ideas are part of an ongoing conversation with the social world around them.

To quote Newton:8

“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,”


Citations

Nealon, Jeffrey T., and Susan Searls Giroux. “The Theory Toolbox: Critical Concepts for the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.” Choice Reviews Online, vol. 49, no. 04, Dec. 2011, pp. 49–1799. https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.49-1799.

Wikipedia contributors. “Great Man Theory.” Wikipedia, 21 Oct. 2024, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory.


  1. I got 65/100, the ones I missed were ethicists, theologists, politicists (if that’s a word), and the super old people. ↩

  2. I find it interesting how the ways these theorists’ theories have changed insofar as technology has restructured and reconfigured the very ways people interact. I look at Heidegger’s concept of “enframing (Gestell),” specifically in technology, to quite literally “box” our worldview. Of course, not to be technologically deterministic, there is a clear tension between tool and being, being and tool. ↩

  3. It seems pretty meta to talk about what post-structuralism means ↩

  4. Even then, the idea of the invisible hand in how it is applied to only people as economic beings (“homo economicus”) is already pretty reductive. ↩

  5. Though, sometimes it definitely is. ↩

  6. Adam Smith, Plato/Socrates are some that come to immediate mind ↩

  7. The general critique levied against these -isms is that they are rigid. I agree that the domains they work in have proven successful, but there is so much that “logical” thinking, measurement, and models can’t get you to. cough human experience. ↩

  8. Is my own quoting of these writers reinforcing this in a bad way? ↩