This file is a single sociological essay from Wieser’s collected writings. Its scope is at once autobiographical, methodological, and sociological: Wieser recounts how school history, Spencer’s sociology, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, economics, and later reflection led him to a revised account of the relation between “great men” and the people. The essay’s thesis is not a return to heroic historiography, but a synthesis: social development depends on historically prepared masses and institutions, yet also on exceptional leaders whose innovations cannot be reduced to average social forces.
Zwischen Epos und Geschichte verschwimmen die Grenzen selbst für den gereiften Mann, um wieviel mehr für den Knaben!
English translation: Between epic and history the boundaries blur even for the mature man—how much more so for the boy!
Wieser begins with the spell of epic history in childhood: kings, battles, names, dates, and Macaulay possess for him the “Reiz der Wirklichkeit.” Spencer’s attack on the “Große-Mann-Theorie” then breaks this enchantment. The young Wieser accepts the lesson that institutions, habits, opinions, and collective capacities cannot be explained by biographies of rulers. Tolstoy deepens the conversion: in War and Peace, Napoleon recedes and Borodino becomes intelligible through the unnamed soldiers.
Der Feldherr tritt zurück, das Gefühl der Massen entscheidet den Ausgang, die Schlacht von Borodino, die die Russen nicht zu gewinnen vermochten, hat ihnen gleichwohl den Sieg gebracht, das Wild ist weidwund und der nächste Angriff mußte es erlegen.
English translation: The general steps back, the feeling of the masses decides the outcome; the Battle of Borodino, which the Russians could not win, nevertheless brought them victory: the quarry was mortally wounded, and the next assault was bound to bring it down.
The essay then turns from autobiography to theory. Wieser grants Spencer’s strongest point: no genius is self-created. Great individuals inherit language, institutions, needs, techniques, rivalries, and audiences. Even solitude is filled with impressions received from the time. This is the structural side of his argument, and it links the essay to Wieser’s broader social-economic concern with invisible interdependence.
Spencer hat ohne Zweifel recht, auch das Genie ist von der geschichtlichen Vorbereitung abhängig.
English translation: Spencer is without doubt right: even genius depends on historical preparation.
But Wieser’s decisive move is to deny that social conditioning exhausts the meaning of genius. The new idea appears within history, yet not as something sociology can simply derive from antecedent causes. The “great soul” concentrates inherited pressures and gives them a form no average force could have supplied.
Dieses Neue, das im geheimnisvollen Dunkel einer großen Seele entstanden ist, hat nur in ihr entstehen können.
English translation: This new thing, which arose in the mysterious darkness of a great soul, could arise only within that soul.
From this follows Wieser’s central conceptual balance. The leader provides the seed; the people receive, test, imitate, extend, and judge it. A work becomes cultural reality only when “the many” can enact it. Yet the people’s judgment itself is educated by those whom it judges. Thus neither heroic voluntarism nor democratic mass determinism suffices: leadership and collective realization are reciprocal moments in development.
Against Spencer, Wieser insists that leadership is not merely a primitive military phenomenon. The harder the tasks of culture become, the more indispensable superior initiative is—in science, art, politics, morality, and peaceful social organization.
Keinerlei Fortschritt kann ohne Führung gelingen, kein kriegerischer und vollends kein friedlicher.
English translation: No progress of any kind can succeed without leadership—neither martial progress nor, still less, peaceful progress.
The closing sections place this theory in the intellectual crisis of modernity. Spencer’s error is explained sociologically: he himself is shaped by natural science and English liberalism, just as Tolstoy speaks from compassion for the common man and older history from princely power. Wieser reads the present through the polarity of Tolstoy and Nietzsche: mass emancipation and the longing for the “Übermensch” are not simple opposites, but symptoms of the same search for a freedom that gives the multitude its rights without crippling excellence.
Der Uebermensch wird erst zum Propheten, indem er zur Masse spricht, die Masse wird erst zum kraftvoll geordneten freien Volk, indem sie sich unter die besten Führer stellt.
English translation: The superman becomes a prophet only by speaking to the masses; the masses become a vigorously ordered, free people only by placing themselves under the best leaders.
The essay’s relevance lies in this early formulation of an agency-and-structure problem before those terms became standard. Wieser rejects both the schoolroom cult of heroes and Spencer’s near-erasure of them. He ends by rehabilitating the pedagogical image of “arma virumque”: not because history is made by armed heroes alone, but because school had already shown, however naively, “den Führer und sein Volk.” Social progress is the joint product of prepared collective energy and exceptional form-giving personality.
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