According to Karl Marx, ‘Men make their own history, but not as they please, in conditions of their own choosing, but rather under those directly encountered, given and inherited.’ Or as Harold Macmillan put it: ‘Events, dear boy, events.’ While the Marxist aphorism may seem incontrovertible, the granular relationship between individual actors and the quotidian drama of actual history is contentious. Does history explain the role of leaders or do the actions of leaders explain history? It is the study of ‘Great Men’ versus contemporary, materialist history, which demotes the individual, however charismatic, to focus on collective movements.
Introducing his unsurpassed 1998 study of Hitler, Ian Kershaw confessed that biography ‘never [previously] figured in my intellectual plans’. In it he discovered a Hitler who was a lazy underachiever with a gift for oratory – who stood at the apex of a state that, instead of being an expression of the leader’s will, was crammed with competitive power brokers. Tyranny, war and genocide reflected Hitler’s malign intent, to be sure, but as joint enterprises.
