I find the denialism around the great man theory somewhat baffling. Does anyone really believe, just for one example, that Apple computer would be what it is today without Steve Jobs?
The computer revolution happened because a string of great men and women made it happen. Unix and Linux very clearly didn't have to happen (as they have) for example, and certainly didn't have to happen in a way that was so dramatically beneficial to the open source community.
The safest assumption seems to be that people like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak very significantly accelerated progress.
But because of the way acceleration seems to kick of revolutionary changes, it does seem fair to say they were pretty 'Great' in terms of their impact.
For example, without them, maybe we would be in the 1990s era of personal computing now, thirty years later. Or maybe someone else would have done even better than them, and we would be further along, but the latter is harder to believe.
We'll simply never know the answer to these questions because we can't run the counter-factual.
Do you think in a world without Apple, the founders of these companies would have ended up doing what Steve Jobs ended up doing? If so, what stopped them?
That's the argument against the "great man" idea. Sure, specific events would not have happened without that person, but the overall state of the world would not be drastically different.
Honestly the biggest argument for great man theory in the French Revolution is Louis XVI - if he hadn't been quite so indecisive and incompetent maybe the revolution would have fizzled out or been crushed instead of spiralling out of control.
I am not convinced
The leveé en masse was implemented in 1793. Napoleon only rose to prominence in 1796, by which point France had already conquered the Low Countries and the Rhineland. Napoleon wasn’t running the show until 1799.
Revolutionary France was smashing the armies of the monarchies of Europe for years before Napoleon seized power.
Even Napoleon was very much a product of the times he lived through as a young man.
But one specific person that in my opinion personally changed world history in a drastic way was Lenin.
The history of the Bolsheviks rise to power is pretty insane. Nobody thought they could seize power, and once they got it, which was pretty much solely because of Lenin browbeating them to commit at the moment they committed, nobody thought they could hold on to it. And for good reason.
If just a few things had gone slightly differently Russia would have been governed by groups with different belief systems than the communists.
Disclaimer: 100% armchair historian who's knowledge mostly comes from a handful of podcasts. Hopefully someone will correct me :)
It probably would've been drastically different had the socialist-liberal coalition held on to power. It likely would've been overthrown in a couple of years politically/socially it would have still played out quite differently (bolsheviks were pretty unique amongst socialist group in their single mindedness, hatred of democracy and support of totalitarianism and mass terror).
> develop at a similar rate to the rest of Europe
Unless you were one of the subjugated Central/Eastern European countries. Economically the gap between Czechoslovakia, Poland, Estonia, Latvia etc. and Western European countries considerably wider in 1990 than it was in the 1930s.