20 THE HERO IN HISTORY
most of the antecedent conditions of social conflict—political,
economic, ethnical—that were set off in 1914 attributable to the
acts or examples of an individual.
The rise of capitalism, the industrial revolution, the march of
•the barbarians from the east, the Renaissance—none, of course,
would have been possible without the acts or example of
individuals. But no matter what particular individuals are named
in connection with these movements, there is no evidence that
the individuals were indispensable in the sense that without
them these movements would not have got under way.
The easy contention that, had a "great man" been present,
the First World War, say, would never have taken place cannot
be upheld by any empirical evidence so far known. He would
have had to be a very special sort of "great man"—that is, of a
sort that has never appeared in comparable situations. Not
infrequently contentions that make much of the decisive in-
fluence a great man would exercise if only he had been there are
in principle not verifiable.1 This is the case when the hypo-
thetical great man who would have prevented the First World
War is identified not in virtue of independent traits but in terms
of his hypothetical success. This is tantamount to offering a
definition of what would constitute a great man in these circum-
stances. Our point here is not that the First World War was
Inevitable, but that the presence of a "great-man" on the order
of the great men of the past would probably not have altered
matters much. Some other events could have altered things to a
point of preventing the occurrence of the war, nor do we have
to go to the realm of natural catastrophes to find them. For
example, had the international socialist movement lived up to its
pledges made at the Basle Congress, war might have been
declared but it could not have been fought. But as far as the
particular problem is concerned, no matter what individuals had
occupied the chancelleries of Europe in 1914, the historical
upshot of commercial rivalries, Germany's challenge to British
sea power, chauvinist resentments in western Europe, the
seething kettle of Balkan intrigue, would very probably have
been much the same.
Fashions of - intetpretations have shuttled back and forth
between historians and philosophers of history during the last
hundred years. On the one hand we have sweeping forms of
social determinism according to which the great man is a
1 This is not true of all *TF* questions. See Chapter Seven.