History Books Should Carry a Warning About the Great-Man Bias

We attribute historical events to persons rather than to processes, and we do it so automatically that the alternative rarely occurs to us.

Newton started the scientific revolution. Hitler caused the Second World War. Keynes is responsible for Keynesian economics. Napoleon drove French expansion. Henry VIII was the force behind the English Reformation.

Every one of those sentences is how the thing is normally said, and every one of them is at best a serious simplification.

Where the Bias Comes From

The instinct was not built for this.

In a band of a hundred people, the person with the good idea really is responsible for it. He conceived it, he argued for it, and he carried it out — and if he had not existed, the idea would not have happened. Attribution to individuals was accurate at that scale, and our intuitions were formed there over a very long time.

The instinct is not a malfunction. It is a correct heuristic applied far outside its range.

Why It Fails Now

In societies of millions, events are not the work of one person. They are undercurrents: millions of people changing their minds, their technology, their economic position, their working patterns — usually over decades, usually without anyone noticing while it happens.

A prominent individual may be associated with a change without having produced it. Sometimes he is the person who articulated what many already believed. Sometimes he is the one who happened to be in office. Sometimes he is simply the most memorable participant, which is a fact about narration rather than about causation.

The counterfactual test makes this visible. Remove Newton and the scientific revolution proceeds — Leibniz has the calculus, Hooke and Huygens are circling the inverse-square law, and the institutional machinery of the Royal Society is already assembled. Remove Hitler and the structural situation in Germany after Versailles remains what it was.

I do not want to overstate this. Individuals do sometimes matter enormously, and the counterfactuals are genuinely hard. The claim is not that people never matter; it is that we have no way of telling when they did, and we default to assuming they always did.

The Bias Is Reinforced by How We Store History

Here is what makes it so persistent.

Memory is organised around people. We remember the scientific revolution through the names of its scientists, and the Second World War through Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito. That is how the information is indexed, because names are memorable and diffuse social processes are not.

And then we mistake the index for the cause. The list of names was a filing system; we read it as an explanation.

This is why the bias survives contact with better accounts. A historian can write four hundred pages on the economic and demographic origins of a war, and the reader will still walk away with a story about the men in the photographs — because that is the form the information takes when it is compressed for storage.

The Warning

The effect is strong enough that I think it should be printed at the front of every history book:

Warning: you have a bias toward remembering historical events as the work of rare individuals. In modern history that bias is badly wrong.

Not because the great-man account is always false, but because it is the account you will arrive at regardless of what the evidence says, and you should know that about yourself before you start reading.