Heroic Power in Thomas Carlyle and Leo Tolstoy

This paper explores two opposed paradigmatic approaches to heroic power: Thomas Carlyle's versus Leo Tolstoy's. In On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History (1840), Carlyle argues for its crucial importance, whereas in War and Peace (1869), Tolstoy denies its very possibility. Carlyle's heroic model attributes to the hero (the leader) a high degree of mastery and control over social and political circumstances, whereas Tolstoy's a-heroic model implies a small degree of personal mastery and much greater constraints on the individual leader. Both models achieved prominence in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, which brought the role of the individual (hero) in history to the forefront of intellectual and political debate throughout Europe. The two models are shown as parts of and important links in long-established traditions; they are internally coherent yet totally contradictory of each other. The comparison of these opposed perceptions of heroic figures in history suggests that they might originate in an ambivalent, polarized perception of power and mastery, and in the sense of individual insecurity in the face of historical upheavals.