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The debate is at least as old as Socrates.
Is history best understood as the past actions of ‘great men’ and their consequences, or are larger, impersonal forces more important?
The historian R G Collingwood, in The Idea of History, framed Socrates’s answer like this: ‘No one can resist the forces of his environment. Either he conquers the world or the world conquers him.’
Versions of this discussion have played out ever since. Montesquieu thought people ‘are governed