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Comment by mongol | Hacker News Reader

I think it can depend a lot. Political figures can have long lasting impact. Consider Jesus. Or Napoleon, without him Europe may have looked entirely different today. But for general scientific progress I agree. Scientific breakthroughs are bound to happen if enough people work on them.

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The French were thrashing the coalition forces for 2 years before Napoleon led a major campaign. Napoleon was a military genius, but what shifted the revolutionary wars in the favour of the French was the revolutionary goverments' innovation of total war - directing the entire economy and population of the nation towards the war with mass conscription and modern organisation. That would have happened with or without Napolean, and it was the social forces of the Revolution that made it possible for a Corsican nobody to even become a general in the first place.

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.

> That would have happened with or without Napolean

I am not convinced

It’s pretty hard to dispute that it happened before Napoleon.

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.

I've heard talk of the great idiot theory of history, and I think it has merit. As many have pointed out, the great men of history more often than not are channeling the historical momentum of the time period, where there are many chases of a extremely stable status quote being shattered to pieces because one idiot couldn't keep it running.

The introduction of the potato and the invention of the steam engine changed Europe several orders of magnitude more than Napoleon or any other great man.

Yes sure, but that is not a counter argument. If James Watt et al did not invent the steam engine, someone else would

Didn't someone invent the telephone at roughly the same time as A. G. Bell? For another example, in Japan Soddy's Hexlet was described in 1822, while in the West it was introduced in England in 1937.

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