Carlyle's theory about history being the biographies of men is iron solid.
What other theories hit the nail on the head? Or any random theories about any period of history.

>Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realisation and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world's history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these.
- Carlyle, Thomas (1841). "Lecture I: The Hero as Divinity. Odin. Paganism: Scandinavian Mythology.". On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History: Six Lectures. London: James Fraser. pp. 1–2.

>>17832898 (OP)
>Carlyle's theory about history being the biographies of men is iron solid.
Let's consider that for a moment.
>Lincoln was a boxer
>But he didn't punch enough negros, which is why the South decided to secede

>Napoleon grew up on Corsica
>this triggered the French Revolution

>Churchill got married
>so WW2 became inevitable

Clearly, they weren't just there by grace of their birth, their biographies were actually intimately intertwined with contemporary historic events and we can't understand one without the other.

>>17832898 (OP)
AJP Taylor had the opposite view, that bumbling idiots made history. There's also the postmodern theories that Hayden White and Michel Foucault say that historical discourse is controlled by ideology and institutions and a "value-free" history is unattainable. then there's Marxist and Annales cultural history "history from below".and German "historicism" where all concepts like "nationalism, liberty,, etc" are time-bound. everything from Rankean near-objectivity to Durantian moral history.

I'd say Foucault's "postmodern discourses" and Hegelian dialectical history are probably the most true, though. and I'm far from a leftist.

>>17832898 (OP)
Marxs' theory of history as evolution of social/economic processes is pretty spot on. Communism is still gay though

>>17832942
The progression from feudalism to capitalism only happened in the West, it has no meaning for the Chinese or Romans

>>17832938
Carl Sagan was right. The baseline is mindless brutality that evolves toward greater consciousness in a linear direction. Drawbacks -such as accidentally discarding useful branches of knowledge, more generally the destruction of everything beautiful in the past to create new- are tragic but inevitable. In this sense, history reflects an emotional progression of entire societies, feeling out what works and trying to start higher cognition rather than planning ahead from our current understanding. That leaves you simultaneously at the mercy of "great men" (anyone with a large contribution to the psyche) yet only choosing what path to take to highly probable conclusions.

The challenge is a simple one: how do you bring any community from point A to point B in history? Considering only 50% want to go and people reset every 60 years. Somehow the human superorganism and its great agents have to walk everyone forward in small enough steps until they reach a better future, all while people are dying and multiplying and insisting on dignity for their special individual lives. The difficulty is such that emotions and morals, great representations of the as-yet-undescribed, are still our best guiding light on a large scale.

>>17832898 (OP) History is like a movie. Look into it.

>>17832898 (OP)
>in a wide sense creators
>of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain
>that the general mass contrived
>contrived
>but the """great men""" were the creators
He can't even stop himself from openly contradicting himself in the same sentence. Only low IQ retards who don't know what basic words like "contrive" means would fall for this horseshit

>>17832898 (OP)
Theories of history are made up bullshit. You can't test or disprove history in a lab like you can with a physical science. It's literally fiction. Opinion. It's a waste of time to try to explain why one historical event lead to another. Its only objective value is literary. Academic history knows this by now so there are no historians today crafting big Theories anymore, now they're all just obsessed with documenting 16th century Irish agricultural reform laws instead. God I hate history.

it's all the result of blind chance

>>17835135
So what does it mean?

>>17832942
>Marxs' theory of history as evolution of social/economic processes
Marxs "theory" of history is akin to some hick who lived near the Alamogordo bombing range all his life, saw the mushroom cloud which was the result of the first atom bomb test, pointed at it and said, "Look! I did that!"

>>17836535
It means the great men are the tool the mob uses to make their dearest idea real.

>>17834469
just came back to apologize for that second paragraph.

>>17832898 (OP)
One of the issues people have with GMT is that they haven't read Carlyle. You can tell it easily because the moment it gets brought up people start talking about Alexander the Great and I don't think Carlyle even mentioned him in "On Heroes...". Instead he writes about for instance Martin Luther, great conqueror we all know and William Shakespeare, a warlord second to Genghis Khan only.
If you look at his other work you'll also notice that the great man is more than just a world-famous person. For instance in Past and Present he describes the career of Abbot Samson who uplifted his Abbey from half-bankrupt dilapidated shithole where all the monks did was drink as the buildings were falling apart into a well-run enterprise with harsh discipline among monks. The thing is this reality only affected the abbey and lands given to it, on global scale, it's very little. In fact that Abbot Samson of Edmundsbury - he's only mentioned in a single chronicle written at that abbey, if it was destroyed we wouldn't have known he existed. The Carlylean Great Man is more of a Little Great Man, his role is not necessarily to change the entire world but rather he is a man who has an agency to bring some kind of order(Carlyle seems to think that without GM there would be entropic rise of disorder) or inspire people to do so.

>>17836556
Wouldn't say so, he was wrong but he did base it on things that go beyond what a hick would believe. It's possible that marxist theory of history could've been reformed but they'd have to cut off everything before the early modern period and adopt some of the ideas from The Managerial Revolution by Burnham(writing in the 1930's Burnham's idea was that the next synthesis would be what he called managerialism) and obviously give up the utopian mythos.
I could see how you have the thesis of the capitalist class vs. the antithesis of working class activism and end up getting managerialism out of it to then get the thesis of managerialism and antithesis of the financiers(distinct section of capitalists) and get a synthesis of neoliberalism. This does make sense, but there's no communism there, in fact the whiggism of dialectical materialism is completely removed if you go that route, we don't know the direction the world will take next. However the fact of the matter is I don't think anyone has picked up this line of thinking, Burnham ended up siding with conservatives who didn't bother with the implications his work had on historical materialism and leftists of all sorts just ignore him because he worked for the CIA(he did, he also promoted the thinkers that effectively created modern left when he was there but be quiet about it).

That being said I'm not convinced of it, just saying that there's some interesting directions you can take marxist view of history if you strip it out of wishful thinking.

>>17832898 (OP)

>>17832898 (OP)