Free The Doubter's Companion by John Ralston Saul Page A

between the forces of democracy and dictatorship gathered strength and they repeatedly engaged each other. Thomas Carlyle’s role was to round up all the anti-democratic ideas careening about in a society dependent on great men—ideas largely inspired by the Napoleonic adventure—to make an integrated theory of civilization. On Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History appeared in 1841, the year Napoleon’s body was brought back to Paris in triumph.
    Carlyle’s concept had an enormous impact. He had packaged what the anti-democratic elements in society had been trying to express. He was not the first to evoke the Great Man theory. Hegel preceded him. Friedrich Nietzsche, Léon Bloy, Max Weber and Oswald Spengler followed close behind. But it was Carlyle who neatly wrapped up the whole theory in an intellectually respectable yet populist manner.
    For, as I take it, 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. 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 realization and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world. 1
    One of Carlyle’s most effective tricks was to roll famous dead poets, philosophers and martyrs together with generals and dictators into a single Heroic class. In his chapter on Dante and Shakespeare he insists that “in man there is the same altogether peculiar admiration for the Heroic gift, by what name soever called…” 2 Twice he speaks of Napoleon while discussing Dante. They are part of the same Heroic family.
    Of course the Florentine poet was a genius who made an important contribution to our civilization. But Dante never sought craven worship from others. He would have detested Carlyle’s fawning attitude. There is nothing worshipful in the way he wrote of the famous dead men he met in The Divine Comedy.
    In Carlyle’s analysis of Napoleon, the Great Man’s flaws are treated as mere “smoke and waste.” 3 This contrasting of the Hero and his weaknesses is central to our contemporary “personality” debates. And it continues to play its role as a mechanism for removing the citizen’s sense of his or her right to judge their leaders on matters of importance.
    To me, in these circumstances…‘Hero-worship’ becomes a fact inexpressibly precious; the most solacing fact one sees in the world at present. There is an everlasting hope in it for the management of the world. Had all traditions, arrangements, creeds, societies that men ever instituted, sunk away, this would remain. The certainty of Heroes being sent us; our faculty, our necessity, to reverence Heroes when sent: it shines like a polestar through smoke-clouds, dust-clouds and all manner of down-rushing and conflagration. 4
    Conventional wisdom has it that the last world war liberated us from these sorts of Heroic attitudes. But even a cursory examination of contemporary political debate reveals that we are still caught up in Carlyle’s dream of Heroic leadership.
    That word —LEADERSHIP— can be found in every sentence which addresses the state of our civilization. Leadership. The lack of leadership. The need for leadership. The cause of our problems. The solution to our problems.
    Carlyle was an anxiety-ridden man. He lost his Calvinist faith as a young man and spent the rest of his life desperately looking for something or someone to give himself to. He hated his own uncertainty and feared above all to doubt. In his thirties he was already writing “Doubt of any sort cannot be removed except by Action” and action required an authoritarian figure to lead the way. Action to what purpose was