A common debate on the philosophy of history dwells on the driver of historical events. To what extent do individuals (with the talent to effect change and in the right place at the right time) make history and to what extent is history the play of deterministic social forces. To which side (or other position) do you lean and why?
Are social forces not caused by individuals? Take the Civil Rights movement. Yes, it was a social force that changed history but prominent individuals were behind it, lead it and pushed for it. I personally think individuals drive change.
I think there has to be a perfect combination for truly significant social changes. Had Martin Luther King, Jr. been doing his thing in 1885, or heck, 1900, he would never have been as effective as he was. If women like Alice Paul, Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Catt, etc. had been born 150 years earlier, they would have never been able to leave the imprint on suffrage that they did.
most social movements seems to be caused by a few reasons. lack of resorces/lack of freedom, or want of more resources, want of more freedom.
People, sure, but individuals? Change can be a mere statistical exercise. The individulaity of the participants may not matter. The beginning of the French Revolution, for example, doesn't have any particularly famous agitators. If you had taken all the individuals in France at the time and replaced them with others, but given them the same history, culture, and circumstances, wouldn't you still get the French Revolution?
This genre makes for exponentially better threads than the usual childish partisan squabbling that characterizes most of the D&D.
A good case can be made that the French Revolution was the direct result of the American revolution. Maybe I'm biased, but there were a lot of great people there. You could say the French elite were just as smart and capable, but they weren't in a position to lead or be listened. With a power as strong as France, it does create conditions for greatness. The Emperor who rose after the revolution proved quite capable. Hindsight is 20/20. A president like Hoover couldn't rise up to the task. The Great Compromiser was responsible for holding off South Carolina's secession for almost 40 years. So there is a lot left to chance and opportunity, but I think the truly effective leaders realize that social forces aren't truly deterministic. They only appear so after the fact. It's a nice break from celebrity gossip threads on Obama.
Napoleon is an interesting case because he does fit the Great Man mold. If he had happened to be kicked in the head by a horse as a child, would France have attempted to conquer Europe after the Revolution? At the same time, he wasn't in any way responsible for the Revolution itself. It would have started just the same if he never existed. And, I think you could same the same about every other individual in France. No single person had a measurable impact on the start of the Revolution. In a free market, a price-taker is someone who can buy and sell a product without having any measurable impact on the market price, and yet the market price is determined by the aggregation of the acitivities of all buyers and sellers. The French Revolution is the same, with individual revolutionaries having no measurable impact, but all together they change the world. I can see a case made for social forces tearing things down and great leaders building things up. The French Revolution couldn't have created a democracy or a republic without someone like Napoleon. Likewise, Napoleon could not have taken down the monarchy on his own.
Napoleon is a very interesting example. Had he been born a few years earlier, he would have been an Italian citizen instead of a French one (Corsica was swapped between the two). If anyone has read Outliers, by Malcom Gladwell, this is the type of question he deals with. The answer I got from it is that it's a combination of a great man blended with great opportunity. So that's a rather unsatisfying answer, but seems to be the most logical, especially given some of his very good examples.
