Professional historians have tended to underplay the role of individuals in shaping the destinies of humankind. In his 1961 book, What is History?, EH Carr famously mocked what he called the “Bad King John and the Good Queen Bess” school of history-writing. Now it is true that, as Karl Marx once said, individuals make history not in the circumstances of their choosing. They are constrained in their actions by the economic and social conditions prevailing, and in particular (so Marx argued) by technology and class relations.
Nonetheless, on occasion individuals can play a vital and even determining role in shaping history, for good and especially for ill. There might have been no Soviet state without Lenin; there certainly would have been no Nazi state without Hitler.
In the world we now live in, individuals who shape history loom large. And none more so than Donald Trump. Admittedly, his rise to power must be understood against the background of broader economic and technological changes. Without the disenchantment of the White working class due to globalisation, and without the use of the new media forms to amplify his image and his untruths, Trump may have never become president of the United States of America.
Nonetheless, once he assumed...
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