a.

Great Man View of History

The "Great Man" theory suggests that dominant personalities determine the
course of history. Rulers, warriors, statesmen, are the decisive forces in history and
history is the record of the deeds of great people.
The Great Man view has had numerous incarnations according to the values
attached at different times by different people to the various domains of social activity.
In antiquity, these ranged from the divine monarch, the tyrant, the lawgiver (Solon), the
military conqueror (Alexander), the dictator (Caesar), the hero-emancipator (David), and
the religious leader (Christ, Buddha, Mohammed). All these were put in the place of the
Almighty as the prime mover and shaper of human history. (Novack, n.d.)
Thomas Carlyle's (1795-1881) "everyman" view of history is one which sees
history as being a record of the collective experience of the ordinary person. "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."
Sir Walter Scott's (1771-1832) novels showed how people lived through
significant events and he advanced the idea that history was the story of ordinary
people's lives.

William E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) in his histories, Black Reconstruction in

America, Crisis, and The Souls of Black Folk, rejected the idea of history as the record
of Western European events and advanced a view of history as the record of the lives of
subject peoples.

b. The Best People View of History

This view believes that some elite, the Best Race, the favored nation, the ruling
class alone make history.
The Old Testament assumed that the Israelites were God's chosen people.
The Greeks regarded themselves as the acme of culture, better in all respects
than the barbarians. Plato and Aristotle looked upon the slave-holding aristocracy as
naturally superior to the lower orders. (Novack, n.d.).

Hitler thought that the Arian race was the best among races.
 c. Ideas or the Great Mind View of History
This view of history is one in which the driving force in history is people's
ideas.
The conditions that create history are created or changed by ideas.
The Greek Anaxagoras said: "Reason (Nous) governs the world."
Aristotle held that the prime mover of the universe and the ultimate
animator of everything within it was God, who was defined as pure mind engaged
in thinking about itself.
G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) view history as the continual refinement of
intellectual understanding. The progress of mankind consisted in the working out
and consummation of an idea. He wrote: "Spirit, or Mind, is the only motive
principle of history." The underlying goal of the World Spirit and the outcome of its
laborious development was the realization of the idea of freedom.
Some 18th century rationalists believed that "opinion governs mankind."
They looked toward an enlightened monarch to introduce the necessary
progressive reconstruction of the state and society.

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