In the 19th century, Scottish historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle proposed what’s known as the "great man theory" — at root, a belief that history has been regularly determined by the great acts of prominent people. As Carlyle wrote in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1840), “They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modelers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical r...