This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Carlyle's six lectures of May 1840, published the next year as On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, make a single claim across six very different kinds of greatness: that universal history is at bottom the history of great men, and that the state of the world at any time is the outer expression of what its great men had thought and done. His examples range from the god as hero, Odin among the Norse, through the prophet Muhammad, the poet Dante and Shakespeare, the priest and reformer Luther and Knox, the man of letters Johnson, Rousseau and Burns, to the king as hero, Cromwell and Napoleon. The claim did not go unanswered for long. Herbert Spencer, writing within Carlyle's own lifetime, argued that a great man is himself a product of the society that produced him, shaped by antecedent social conditions before he can shape anything in turn, a line of argument that runs straight into the twentieth century social history Carlyle would have found unrecognizable as history at all. Later historians writing about the causes of large events, wars, revolutions, economic change, have mostly built their explanations from impersonal forces, institutions and social groups rather than from the will of exceptional individuals, and Great Man is now more often a label historians reach for to describe and reject a way of explaining the past than a method any of them practice straight. What survives from Carlyle's argument is less the theory than the case for taking biography seriously as a mode of historical explanation at all, a case later cultural and intellectual historians have returned to on their own terms.