Role of the individual in history

(There is a book by a Russian philosopher, Georgi Plekhano, with the title The Role of the Individual in History.)

I had an interesting argument over the winter break with Luke and Will Moffat, about the implication of my genealogy of influence. Do these people truly deserve to be taking up space in our historical collective conscious? Does their work exhibit a spark of creative genius above their now unknown peers (who they might have stolen ideas from)?

I found this 1894 Engels quote on a site about Marxism, and it relates to the idea of the individual in history. I especially like the bolded part (which I added, italics not added).

Men make their history themselves, but not as yet with a collective will according to a collective plan or even a definite, delimited given society. Their aspirations clash, and for that very reason all such societies are governed by necessity, the complement and form of appearance of which is accident. The necessity which here asserts itself athwart all accident is again ultimately economic necessity. This is where the so-called great men come in for treatment. That such and such a man and precisely that man arises at a particular time in a particular country is, of course, pure chance. But cut him out and there will be a demand for such a substitute, and this substitute will be found, good or bad, but in the long run he will be found.

That Napoleon, just that particular Corsican, should have been the military dictator whom the French Republic, exhausted by its own warfare, had rendered necessary, was chance; but that, if a Napoleon had been lacking, another would have filled the place, is proved by the fact that the man was always found as soon as he became necessary: Caesar, Augustus, Cromwell, etc.

(Marx and Engels Correspondence, pp.467-68)

At this point, the thousand odd people with listed influences include additions from other people on Freebase. The list has grown to include people like Larry Page, Bob Dylan, Bill Cosby, etc. Any recording of history reflects the bias of the people entering data; the people participating on Freebase and I have a Western bias of course, a bias towards well-documented individuals, and therefore a bias towards wealthy white men.

But looking at the more historical figures, I think that for whatever reason, these figures became lodged into a collective (Western) genealogy – whether they were good self-promoters, were on the right side of a cultural war, accidentally or purposefully anticipated a change and then became a symbol of that change, and so on. Some, like the founders of the United States, I think actually did have an active hand in directing history. This is not to say that others would not have taken their place, had our familiar historical figures never been born.

I think that with enough people participating, the genealogy would settle into a non-contentious state – that people would generally agree on a large percent of the proposed influences, and in many cases there are first-person accounts that acknowledge influences.

I tried to make it a reflection or an averaging of who I saw considered significant cultural figures. In doing so, I was trying to capture the perceived significance, not make any claims about who deserved to be considered significant.