David Hollinger’s notion of“communities of discourse.” First forwarded at the 1977 WingspreadConference, he emphasized this mechanism as a way to wrest thefocus from singular individuals (great men) identified as intellectu-als and situate them among specific social and cultural contexts

I’m reminded of an old poem by Bertolt Brecht, which my Viennese grandmother, the daughter of a lifelong socialist and union man, taught me. It’s called “Questions From a Worker Who Reads”:

Intellectual historians have never really abandoned the GreatMan theory of history. They often write as if all important ideas in agiven age can be traced back to one or other extraordinary individual– whether Plato, Confucius, Adam Smith or Karl Marx – rather thanseeing such authors’ writings as particularly brilliant interventions indebates that were already going on in taverns or dinner parties orpublic gardens (or, for that matter, lecture rooms), but whichotherwise might never have been written down

Such are great historical men—whose own particular aims involve those large issues which are the will of the World-Spirit.