3 Matching Annotations
- Dec 2022
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www.thenation.com www.thenation.com
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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”:
Bertolt Brecht has a poem "Questions From a Worker Who Reads" which points out how necessary societies are to their great accomplishments which can't ever be solely attributed to kings and leaders as if there is only a "Great Man theory of history".
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- Dec 2021
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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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
The Great Man theory of history is the misconception that all the most important ideas can be traced back to a single great individual—usually a man—and ignoring the fact that they had likely been brewing in the social milieu of their time before being encapsulated, like a bug in ember, by a particular writer who then gets an outsized amount of credit for "inventing" the idea.
I wonder if the effect of social media and ubiquity of communication will dampen this effect?
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- Jul 2019
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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Such are great historical men—whose own particular aims involve those large issues which are the will of the World-Spirit.
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