TITLE: Carlyle: A Gentle Introduction
SUBTITLE: Or why Great Man Theory is correct
AUTHOR: Peter Banks
DATE: 2026-03-17
URL: https://peterbanks.org/introductions/carlyle-a-gentle-introduction
SOURCE: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/carlyle-a-gentle-introduction

This essay will be an introductory discourse on the philosophy of Thomas Carlyle as well as apologetics for his most famous intellectual product, the Great Man Theory. Since I doubt any of you have been exposed to his thoughts directly, if nothing else you will learn something today.

I want to begin by answering two questions. First: why should you care about Thomas Carlyle? And second: why does no one remember him?

Why care?

Carlyle’s influence on the modern world was once enormous and almost beyond cataloging. During the Victorian era he was the public intellectual in English and so he stands at the headwaters of modern critiques of liberalism, bureaucracy, and moral neutrality. In many ways he reminds me of Voltaire in the sense that even those who reject him almost always do so using categories he supplied. So to engage with any argument about modernity without reckoning with Carlyle is to argue inside a room whose walls he helped build.

Carlyle achieved his peak of influence just as the Anglo-Saxon people exploded into the “empty” spaces of this planet. As a result his writings were carried by telegram, railcar, and steamship to every city from Kabul to the Falklands. They were read by the colonial administrators in India and US Presidents. And the culture was carried in the minds of Anglo mechano-warriors as they filled up the world and crushed all opponents in their way. Carlyle is the banyan tree of Anglo culture and so his roots are invisible.

So why is he forgotten?

Carlyle was erased because the twentieth century was largely a rejection of the world he inhabited. The Victorian world was totally discredited in the half century of crisis after its leadership opted to commit collective suicide in 1914. Additionally, The Great Man Theory, which in Carlyle’s hands was a nuanced metaphysical argument about the relationship between sincerity and historical causation, was flattened into a crude justification for strongman politics. After Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, the very concept of venerating individual leadership has become culturally unspeakable in America. In fact, among the educated today the idea that individuals even matter at all is viewed as naivety and something that has been disproven by science. I disagree, of course.

Why bring him back?

Our era mirrors the conditions Carlyle spoke of with eerie precision. Institutions repeating formulas no one believes, an elite selected for the ability to seem competent rather than be competent, and a population that senses the gap between what it’s told and what it sees. He called this disease of insincerity cant and I have yet to find a better word for what ails us.

Additionally, Carlyle was, whatever else he was, a person with a healthy social life and close personal connections with figures like Emerson and John Stuart Mill. His correspondence with Emerson alone spans decades of genuine intellectual friendship. He actually knew humans and power, not in an abstract Nietzschean or Marxist sense, but in a deeply personal, relational one. This matters because part of the problem with modernity is that the closest thing we have to moral philosophy is largely the product of people alienated from normal social life. You can feel that much of what we have today rings hollow but the people most capable of articulating are tied to its continuing function. Carlyle was not a revolutionary or a madman, he was a working intellectual, a husband, a friend, a man embedded in his community, and so his radicalism was not the product of alienation but of an insider’s honest reckoning with his own experience. That means his critique comes from love rather than resentment.

I’ve been chewing on the degree to which I believe that the “weirdness” of our moral authorities is itself a symptom of the disease of too many outsiders. When young right-wing men turn to the Unabomber or even to Adolf Hitler for philosophical inspiration, what they’re looking for is subversion and reinvention, and they find it in the old enemies of the regime. Carlyle was not a foe of the Victorian regime’s values, he was to his own historical legacies detriment, its mouthpiece.

Structure

In this article I’m going to do three things. First, I’m going to present Carlyle’s philosophical system as honestly and completely as I can, because I think it deserves a serious hearing. Second, I’m going to explain where I think he was wrong, and why. And third, I’m going to lay out what I call the Reformist Carlylean position, what I identify as.

Appearance and Reality

To understand Carlyle the best place to start with is his metaphysical distinction between Appearance and Reality. The Great Man Theory is the political implication of a unified system, and without that system it can easily be reduced to nothing more than “strong leaders are good.”

To Carlyle the world was divided between Appearance, the visible, material, temporal world and Reality by which he means the deeper spiritual facts. In “On Heroes”, he frames Christianity itself as “faith in an Invisible…as the only reality; Time…resting on Eternity.” And in “Past and Present”, the same structure appears again. The earthly life is “not intrinsically a reality at all, but…a shadow of realities eternal, infinite,” and the Time-world “plays and flickers in the mirror of Eternity.”

Now I know this sounds to a modern ear like mysticism, but I want to be clear Carlyle is making a hard, specific claim about reality. He is claiming that there is a way the universe works, that it is discoverable, and that abiding by it is not optional. In “Latter-Day Pamphlets” he gives the analogy of navigating the Straits of Magellan. There are real rocks and a real path through meaning that there is “but one thing requisite, That the man or nation can discern what the true regulations of the Universe are.” To get through you cannot vote away the rocks or theorize your way through, instead you either perceive the reality of the passage or you wreck upon it.

This is different from Platonic idealism and instead closer to a secularized Calvinism, which makes sense, since Carlyle was raised in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, the son of a stonemason, embedded in late eighteenth-century Calvinist culture. So like Calvinism it believes that the universe is exterior to us, and it has a preordained moral structure, that is discoverable through earnest seeking. And that sins, especially lies, are punished not by human courts but by external reality itself.

source

Nothing I will write after this will make sense unless you understand this. Since if reality has a moral structure, and if this structure is knowable through genuine inquiry, then the central question of life is whether the people entrusted with power are in contact with that structure or merely performing a role. Every other Carlylean argument about cant, about greatness, about democracy, about work is downstream of this single claim.

Sincerity Over System

So if reality has a moral structure, how do we access it? This is where Carlyle’s epistemology becomes crucial and where I think he is most frequently misunderstood and misread.

Carlyle’s answer is not logic, but instead sincerity, what he calls direct insight. In other words we access the truth by being relentlessly honest about what we actually perceive, rather than by believing only what we are told. All knowledge falls into two modes of knowing: sincerity, which is the involuntary alignment with reality, and theorizing, which is constructing abstract systems and then trying to force reality to conform to them. In a letter to Emerson he puts it plainly:

“Man lives by Belief; by logic he can only at best long to live.”

I agree with Carlyle that we develop axiomatic systems to fit reality; reality does not fit our axiomatic systems. If the world were forced to comply with the most consistent, simple representation, we would be living in a world of Newtonian physics.  We do not.

Take Carlyle’s survey of famous historical figures in “On Heroes”, although the individuals span from Muhammad and Dante to Napoleon what unifies them is not what they believed, which varied enormously, but the quality of belief. Each of these men had what Carlyle calls “sight”, the ability to perceive the Reality beneath Appearance. This is “the open secret” that truth is available to everyone, but that most people are too busy performing cant to notice it.

Thus Carlyle can praise Muhammad and Luther in the same breath because is not evaluating their doctrines against objective Truth. Instead he is evaluating their sincerity of belief, i.e. whether they were earned through a genuine clear eyed examination of reality or instead received secondhand as dead formula.

From “Life of John Sterling”: “What the light of your mind, which is the direct inspiration of the Almighty, pronounces incredible — that, in God’s name, leave uncredited; at your peril do not try believing that.” Carlyle is saying that honest doubt is superior to forced belief and that the man who sincerely struggles toward truth is closer to it than the man who mechanically affirms a creed he does not genuinely feel to be true.

In an attempt to formalize this we can say that Carlyle has an epistemological hierarchy that looks something like this.

1) Direct insight by the sincere man.

2) Honest doubt.

3) Received wisdom genuinely believed.

4) Theory and system-building

5) Cant, dead formulas repeated without belief.

This is a metamodernist hierarchy if I’ve ever seen one since it does not only tolerate opponents but even finds heroism in them when they are sincere. Consider his assessment of utilitarianism, the very philosophy he spent his career attacking:

“I call this gross, steam-engine Utilitarianism an approach towards new Faith. It was a laying-down of cant; a saying to oneself: ‘Well then, this world is a dead iron machine, the god of it Gravitation and selfish Hunger; let us see what, by checking and balancing, and good adjustment of tooth and pinion, can be made of it!’ Benthamism has something complete, manful, in such fearless committal of itself to what it finds true; you may call it Heroic, though a Heroism with its eyes put out!”

I love that line: “Heroism with its eyes put out”

He is saying that Bentham, whose conclusions Carlyle despised, was nonetheless admirable because he was willing to actually follow his axioms to their logical end rather than hedging or trying to salvage something which he did not actually believe. This is the mark of a thinker who genuinely believes that the quality of belief matters more than its content and it gives you a way to evaluate thinkers and leaders across ideological lines today. You should assess them on the one variable that, according to Carlyle, actually predicts institutional health: whether the people in charge mean what they say, and do what they believe.

He is able to extend this charity to ideas because even if reality is knowable in a narrow sense it is too large to ever fully capture. Central to his metaphysics is the fundamental unknowability of things and the insanity of trying to too closely abide by the imperfect teachings of men. From “The French Revolution”:

“All theories, were they never so earnest, painfully elaborated, are, and, by the very conditions of them, must be incomplete, questionable, and even false. Thou shalt know that this Universe is, what it professes to be, an infinite one. Attempt not to swallow it, for thy logical digestion; be thankful, if skilfully planting down this and the other fixed pillar in the chaos, thou prevent its swallowing thee.”

He is not asking you to accept a system, in fact the exact opposite. He is asking you to develop the quality of perception that will let you navigate reality directly, using theories for what they are, tools, rather than what they are not, the Truth.

I believe that this anti-systematism is defensible and in many ways Carlyle is making the same argument that Friedrich Hayek would make a century later about central planning. Specifically, that formal systems always lag behind reality and that local and practical knowledge is more reliable than abstract theory.  James Scott’s “Seeing Like a State” is essentially a Carlylean argument even if he has never read him. Additionally, Nassim Taleb’s critique of the “ludic fallacy”, the error of treating neat models as if they capture messy reality, is Carlylean to its core.

The Doctrine of Cant — “A Lie Cannot Endure For Ever”

Carlyle’s single most important claim, repeated across every work is that lies are self-destroying. A society built on falsehood must eventually collapse, because reality does not accommodate pretense indefinitely. From “The French Revolution”: “The first of all Gospels is this, that a Lie cannot endure for ever.”

To Carlyle this is not only a moral preference but instead a law of nature as binding as gravity. From “Past and Present”: “In the centre of the world-whirlwind, verily now as in the oldest days, dwells and speaks a God. The great soul of the world is just.” Societies that lose sincerity accumulate dishonesty the way a body can accumulate cancer. The process is slow, often invisible at first until suddenly systems begin to break down from the accumulated damage.

It is this accumulation of damage that sits at the heart of his conception of the French Revolution. Centuries of accumulated cant — the divine right of a king who was manifestly not divine, the infallibility of a Church that was manifestly corrupt, the nobility of an aristocracy that manifestly did nothing noble — were thrown aside when the “thin Earth-rind of habit” broke and “the fountains of the great deep” boiled forth.

The lies that destroy societies are rarely cynical deceptions, instead often they are time honored “truths.” They were once sincere beliefs that have since outlived their honesty. From “On Heros”:

“Quackery and dupery do abound; in religions, above all in the more advanced decaying stages of religions, they have fearfully abounded: but quackery was never the originating influence in such things; it was not the health and life of such things, but their disease, the sure precursor of their being about to die!”

The divine right of kings was once sincerely believed and so where the lie entered was when the form persisted after the substance had died. When the king no longer governs but still claims divine sanction is what Carlyle means by cant — not lying exactly, but the mechanical repetition of formulas that no longer correspond to Reality. This repetition has the effect of undermining belief in the existence of sincere truth.

From “On Heroes”: “So many base plated coins passing in the market, the belief has now become common that no gold any longer exists.” The decay of false authority poisons belief in all authority, including genuine authority. Since once you have been cheated enough times by plated coins, you stop believing gold is real.

I think this is the single most useful concept in Carlyle’s entire body of work, and the one with the most obvious modern application. It feels like this is where we are now in the West. The institutional failures of the last several decades,  in government, in media, in academia, have not merely discredited those specific institutions but instead the very concept of institutional authority itself. Young people do not merely distrust this Congress or this university, instead they distrust the possibility that any Congress or university could even be trustworthy.

I have written elsewhere about how signaling reshapes reality regardless of intent, how the woke signaling of the 2010s became real policy, how the right’s counter-signaling is becoming real cruelty, how you become what you signal regardless of what you actually believe but this is just a Carlylean insight in modern dress. Because cant takes on a life of its own until even the difference between performance and sincerity is forgotten.  The only remedy Carlyle can see is an individual brave enough to speak plainly in an age of universal performance.

This links to Carlyle’s argument against what he calls Mammonism, the reduction of all human relations to cash payment. From “Past and Present”: “man has a soul…different from the stomach,” and the treatment of “Cash-payment” as the “sole nexus” between humans is not merely unjust but metaphysically false. It denies what humans are and the economic reductionism that has dominated our thinking since his time is thus built on something false.

We all believe that if you get the incentives right, good outcomes will follow regardless of the character of the people involved but Carlyle would contend you cannot build a civilization on mechanisms alone. Since the mechanisms require operators, and the operators are individuals with souls, and the souls require truth to thrive. If we cut any link in that chain then the whole thing unravels, no matter what our incentive structure looks like. It is this moral backbone that Carlyle would argue keeps us from falling into a trap set by Moloch.

The Great Man Theory

Now that I’ve written some 3,000 odd words I finally feel ready to tackle The Great Man Theory.

To summarize, if Reality has a moral structure, and if this structure is accessed through direct insight rather than theory, and if societies decay when they lose contact with this structure, then it follows that the most important variable in history is whether the people in positions of influence are genuinely in contact with Reality or only Appearance.

That this is the most important variable is the Great Man Theory. It is not the claim that history is made by powerful individuals, that is trivial. Instead it is the claim that the quality of the individuals at the helm, their sincerity, their insight, their moral seriousness, determines whether a civilization rises or falls.

I feel as if the theory is often misrepresented and misquoted. Take for example the following quote taken from the introduction to “On Heroes” that greets you when opening the Wikipedia page for the “Great Man Theory” :

“Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realization and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world’s history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these.”

I think this is a beautiful paragraph, and when placed in its proper Carlylean context the point it conveys is good and interesting. Namely, that when studying history, at the root of everything from communism to Christianity is a person who lived a life. But the fact that it is lifted mid-sentence from the opening paragraph gives people a false, caricatured impression of what the theory actually says. Specifically, it seems to imply that Carlyle is arguing Nature plays no role in history and that the only thing which matters are these “great men.”

Hopefully, you already see why this is wrong because Carlyle does not think that great men can design history in whatever way they want. Instead a true great man is someone who is able to perceive what Nature is demanding he do, and then act on it. From “Latter-Day Pamphlets”:

“The Present Time, youngest-born of Eternity, child and heir of all the Past Times with their good and evil, and parent of all the Future, is ever a ‘New Era’ to the thinking man; and comes with new questions and significance, however commonplace it looks: to know it, and what it bids us do, is ever the sum of knowledge for all of us.”

The key analogy to understand this interaction between man and nature comes later in “On Heroes”: “I liken common languid Times…to dry dead fuel, waiting for the lightning out of Heaven that shall kindle it.” The fuel, social conditions, economic forces, and popular discontent, must be present but without the lightning, the individual nothing ignites and the fuel continues to pile up.

The question is not if the broader social conditions matter but which variable gets neglected more relative to its importance and in our era, I would argue, it is overwhelmingly the lightning.

But how plausible does this claim, that individual people are at the core of history, actually seem? The obvious counterarguments all take the form of “economic” histories which treat humans as large predictable masses. The most famous is Marx’s Historical Materialism, but there are many modern versions such as Kenneth Pomeranz’s “The Great Divergence”, Ian Morris’s “Why the West Rules: For Now”, and Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel.” All of these books are ones I sincerely enjoyed, and all of them contain real insight about the world.

What these theories share is the claim that history is not about “Great” men any more than biology is about “Great” lions. And when you zoom out far enough, there is truth to it. The geographic structure of Europe is essential to understanding European civilization, and Carlyle would never dispute that. Still the idea that the last 1,000 years of world history could be summarized by saying “the population increased,” although factually true, is decidedly not what we mean by history.

People aren’t fascinated by WW2 or the Civil War because of the biological processes which took place, but for deeply human reasons like the ideologies at stake and the way they continue to impact our lives. I would argue that when you dig into the causes of events, really dig, what almost always sits in the center is a series of human decisions, or sometimes indecisions. The choice to do one thing or write the law such-and-such a way are real lived choices as much as anything we do in our lives, their causes were human causes not simply mechanical ones. It is these decisions Carlyle places at the center of history, and thus it is the highest imperative to find the man who will make the best decisions and entrust him with power.

If you are into strategy games like Civilization or anything by Paradox, it will stand out how difficult of a time games have at modeling the rise and fall of nations. It is frankly very hard to mirror the actual cyclical nature of human social affairs without just adding some hardcoded “decline” mechanic, because there is only one person controlling the entity for the entire game. In real life, the fact that everyone who has ever been alive has progressed down the same basic path from infancy to death means that history is routinely punctuated by genuine discontinuity in the beliefs and character of leaders. 

Since economics is autoregressive and success breeds success much as failure breeds failure, it is easy to look at any current moment and fail to appreciate the subtle human core. But consider WW2 more closely. It is literally impossible to understand Nazi Germany without understanding Hitler the man. His context as a German in Austria on the frontier between the Slavic and Germanic world. The trauma of war and of revolution. All of this shaped him in human ways which we cannot hope to reduce to numbers. These human experiences in turn shaped the country and as a result our entire era — which believes nothing more sincerely than the evil of Hitler. From 1941 onwards there literally was a man in a bunker deciding the fate of entire peoples. Not only this, but that man was undergoing experimental treatments from a mad doctor and surrounded by other individual men, each one also a unique product of a time and place. I haven’t even touched on FDR or Stalin or Mao or Mussolini or Gandhi or any of the countless other examples from that era. The twentieth century was, for better and definitely for worse, an era defined by the personal whims of “great” men.

How much of history was human? It was not primarily economic factors that determined Augustus would, have through Agrippa, the military strength to overcome Marc Antony and as a result postpone the orientalization of Rome for nearly four hundred years. Yes, of course “someone” was going to emerge from that era but the structure of all of Roman history was shaped by the fact it was Augustus specifically.

When we look at the field of history we can see a mass of faces and so each one seems also replaceable. As if a council of Germans could have approximated Hitler via linear combination. But how sure are you that this is true? Even pieces of historical trivia like the fact that Kaiser Wilhelm had an atrophied arm and a resultant inferiority complex, the result of a shoddy English doctor are of unimaginable importance when you trace their downstream effects on European politics leading to 1914.

America is Anglo because Great Britain juts out into the sea, but so does France, and yet I’m writing these words in English. Is America not also Anglo because of men like John Smith and Walter Raleigh and queens like Elizabeth? Or even one step further is America not Anglo because Henry VIII could not sire a male son? How much of history is the result of a handful of women’s infertility?

Could we go back even further and say that all of modern world history is ultimately due to Luther and the series of events spawning from that one man’s sincerity? This is what Carlyle means when he says that “all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realization and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world.”

Critique of Democracy, and Racism

Two further elements of Carlyle’s system deserve attention because they are the ones most likely to make modern readers uncomfortable. I’ll get more into where I think he is wrong but it would be insincere to write an entire article about what he believed only to bury the uncomfortable parts.

The first of these is Carlyle’s critique of democracy. Take for example this quote from “Latter-Day Pamphlets”:

“Everywhere immeasurable Democracy rose monstrous, loud, blatant, inarticulate as the voice of Chaos. Everywhere the Official holy-of-holies was scandalously laid bare to dogs and the profane”

Carlyle’s objection to democracy was that he believed it, as a method, was incapable of identifying and elevating the genuinely capable man. His perspective on life was fundamentally hierarchical and paternalistic. From “Latter-Day Pamphlets” again:

“It is the everlasting privilege of the foolish to be governed by the wise; to be guided in the right path by those who know it better than they. This is the first ‘right of man;’ compared with which all other rights are as nothing.”

In other words the first right of every person is not to vote but to be governed well, and if voting produces bad governance then voting is evil.

His concrete complaint was that democracy selects for what he called “Phantasm Captains” or men who are skilled at appearing competent rather than being competent. Since the ballot-box rewards eloquence it also reinforced cant and excludes the “Real Captain,” who actually perceives reality and could govern well.

He extended this to universal suffrage specifically. Although he conceded that a limited franchise among a genuine aristocracy might function, he argued that since universal suffrage asks every person, regardless of wisdom, to select their leaders it would be like the crowd that chose Barabbas over Christ.

I should be clear here though that what Carlyle wanted was not dictatorship in the modern sense but something closer to an idealized medieval order. A society where the men he called “the Noblest” would be “raised to the supreme place” and they would rule through virtue and example. The best example of his ideal is probably Fredrick the Great of Prussia who he wrote an extensive, and extremely fond, biography of.

The second is his view on race.

Carlyle believed in a natural racial hierarchy and did nothing to hide this. In fact, even during his own lifetime he faced enormous criticism for his views and almost certainly sacrificed professionally to espouse them. This is to say that they were almost certainly sincerely held. I’ll get more into where I disagree, much as with democracy, in the next section but for now I want to clearly present what he actually believed.

The most explicit writing that touches on race is the “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question“ – without a doubt his most indefensible work – but he makes similar remarks in “Latter-Day Pamphlets.”

The basic shape of his argument is this:

First, he held that all men have a sacred duty to labor and that idleness is a sin against the cosmic order. Second, he claimed that emancipation in the West Indies had failed because freed Black workers, able to subsist on easily grown food, had no economic incentive to work the sugar plantations. The sugar rotted in the fields while, as he saw it, a formerly productive colony collapsed into what he called a potential “Black Ireland.” Third, he concluded that if Black people would not labor voluntarily they should be compelled to do so by the White population, which he regarded as their natural superiors.

Carlyle also attacked the abolitionists, “Exeter Hall” philanthropists, as sentimentalists whose emancipation program was grounded not in reality but in “rosepink sentimentalism” and “the Dismal Science” of laissez-faire economics. He argued that treating Black and White people as “unrelated, loose from one another, on a footing of perfect equality” was itself a lie, a form of cant that “contradicts the palpablest facts.” In his view the relationship between the races was not one of equality but of natural command, and pretending otherwise would destroy both parties.

On the uses and misuses of Great Man Theory

In addition to the actual writings of Carlyle I cannot write an honest document without addressing the way Great Man thinking was weaponized in the twentieth century. Hitler, in particular, drew on this tradition but almost every European cult of personality has intellectual roots that pass through Carlyle’s thought. Part of this is simply the scale of his impact since Liberals and Socialists both also drew heavily on him but part of it is also a direct result of his theories.

Still, I would argue that Carlyle’s own framework condemns fascism thoroughly.

Fascism is built on lies such as performative strength or a party apparatus that demands loyalty to the leader over loyalty to truth. Similarly, the fascist leader is not a man who perceives the moral structure of reality and aligns himself with it but instead a man who hopes to force reality to conform to his will. Napoleon himself is Carlyle’s own example of a man of enormous natural ability who falls because he substitutes personal glory for truth and Hitler is a more extreme version of the same failure.

Hitler was a sham, a plated coin that fooled people who had forgotten what gold looked like. Carlyle would argue that the reason people were fooled is because so many base-plated coins had passed through the market already that people had lost the ability to distinguish genuine from sham authority. They fell for the first man who claimed authority with enough confidence and charisma because they had no living memory of what genuine authority felt like.

I would also contend that “greatness” doesn’t just take the form of evil. FDR steered a country which seemed destined to go down in ruin — as it navigated the hangover of industrial transformation — but instead the WASP aristocrat brought it out into an idyllic golden age. Churchill’s stubbornness in 1940, his refusal to negotiate when every rational calculation said Britain was finished, is inexplicable without reference to individual character. And Lincoln’s combination of moral clarity and political spine ended slavery and held the Union together. These men were not saints but they were great in the Carlylean sense that they perceived something real about their moment and acted on it with sincerity, to the long term benefit of their societies.

I think we have a tendency to speak out both corners of our mouths as it relates to “Great” men. On one hand we reject their existence entirely as merely the product of history and yet on the other we are terrified of the man who hopes to achieve incredible things because we fear it will come with the doom trumpet of tyranny. If “Great” men do not exist, why do we fear them so much?

Laws, as I am fond of pointing out, do not exist in reality. Nothing will ever jump out of a page and stop you from violating their dictates. The only things that exist, right now, are humans and our living preferences. A committee, no matter how large, is still composed of individuals, and you cannot excise the necessity of staffing positions of power with good people. The idea that good men exist, that they can be found, and when found they can be entrusted with power to the benefit of everyone is the antithesis of almost everything our current culture believes. And yet we live with the consequences of that disbelief every single day. Through the mediocrity of our leaders, the cynicism of our public life, and the exhausted resignation of a populace that has given up on the possibility that governance could be anything other than management by committee.

Where Carlyle Was Wrong.

Democracy

Carlyle was correct about much but he was also a human with biases and limited sight.

For example Carlyle was correct that the quality of the individual leader is an enormously important variable. But, in my opinion, he drew the wrong conclusion from his own observations.

If all institutions decay when our forms and Reality diverge, as Carlyle himself insists, then the critical question is not how to find the perfect leader but how to remove bad leaders without requiring catastrophic collapse. The French ancien régime persisted for generations precisely because there was no peaceful means of correcting the accumulation of cant and the only solution was the chaos and violence of the Revolution, which of course destroyed many things that had genuine value. Democracy is, at bottom, a mechanism for periodic, non-catastrophic correction. It often selects for mediocre leaders, probably more often than any other system, but this also means it, usually, avoids retarded emperors.

Just look at recent history. Democracies have empirically outperformed authoritarian systems across virtually every measure and above all avoided catastrophic self-inflicted harm.

Carlyle would likely respond that a democracy staffed by mediocrities is still failing his test and he would, of course, be right. But the relevant vector of comparison is not between democracy and an ideal Carlylean order but between democracy and the actual historical alternatives. And by this measurement the mechanism Carlyle despised has performed better than the one he worshipped.

Slavery and the Limits of Hierarchy

As I mentioned in the section on racism Carlyle was a defender of slavery. I would argue that he was blinded by his worship of the past and that by any honest measure slavery was cant.

The claimed justification, that it was a civilizing institution which was mutually beneficial to both the superior and inferior peoples, bore no relationship to the observable facts. Take for example “The Impending Crisis of the South” by Hinton Rowan Helper published in 1857 which documented the degree to which Whites in slave states were falling behind those in the free states on virtually every available measure. 

Tocqueville observed the same thing in “Democracy in America”.

“Thus the traveller who floats down the current of the Ohio to the spot where that river falls into the Mississippi, may be said to sail between liberty and servitude; and a transient inspection of the surrounding objects will convince him as to which of the two is most favorable to mankind. Upon the left bank of the stream the population is rare; from time to time one descries a troop of slaves loitering in the half-desert fields; the primaeval forest recurs at every turn; society seems to be asleep, man to be idle, and nature alone offers a scene of activity and of life. From the right bank, on the contrary, a confused hum is heard which proclaims the presence of industry; the fields are covered with abundant harvests, the elegance of the dwellings announces the taste and activity of the laborer, and man appears to be in the enjoyment of that wealth and contentment which is the reward of labor

…

Upon the left bank of the Ohio labor is confounded with the idea of slavery, upon the right bank it is identified with that of prosperity and improvement; on the one side it is degraded, on the other it is honored; on the former territory no white laborers can be found, for they would be afraid of assimilating themselves to the negroes; on the latter no one is idle, for the white population extends its activity and its intelligence to every kind of employment. Thus the men whose task it is to cultivate the rich soil of Kentucky are ignorant and lukewarm; whilst those who are active and enlightened either do nothing or pass over into the State of Ohio, where they may work without dishonor.”

The slave system was not only a crime against humanity but it also stunted economic development, and produced degraded moral virtue. By every functional measure Carlyle himself would recognize — does the institution produce capable people? Does it align with reality? Does it endure? — slavery failed.

Carlyle could not see this because his love of hierarchy and his nostalgia for the medieval past blinded him. What he saw on the plantation was a version of the feudal manor and so he imposed his template onto a reality that did not fit it, exactly what he would condemn.

Slavery also reveals a structural weakness in Carlyle’s framework. His sincerity test asks whether the man in charge believes sincerely but this is simply not enough. The test must also include outcomes. The slaveholders often did believe, sincerely and completely, in the justice of their position. Anyone who is willing to honestly read the historical record must grapple with that. But their personal sincerity meant nothing because it was out of step with the calling of the time.

The Static Cosmos

In addition to his bias and blindness Carlyle was also incorrect in his conception of the Universe as being composed of a fixed divine order.

The problem is that the conditions of human life are always changing and the very question of what it means to be alive is not static. What counted as genuine human flourishing for a twelfth-century monk is not what counts for me because our lives are radically different.

I’ve written about this extensively in the past and my favorite metaphor is of a dog that began diving for fish in icy waters. We are all like the hundredth generation of that dog, not quite a seal, but also without the ability to hunt on land. We stand halfway between two evolutionary equilibria, and our desires are relics of an ancestral environment that simply no longer exists. Carlyle contends that those desires point toward a permanent truth about human nature, and the task is to align ourselves with it. I would respond that the goal is to align ourselves with reality as it actually exists.

Carlyle could not have anticipated evolutionary biology in the Darwinian sense so I don’t hold this against him but still it is a serious blind spot. The cycle he describes, founding, flourishing, ossification, cant, crisis, new founding, always assumes the endpoint is a return to genuine order. He does not entertain the possibility that perhaps the meta goal is shifting also.

I’m going to end my critique of Carlyle with this wonderful quote from “The French Revolution”

“To the eye of History many things, in that sick-room of Louis, are now visible, which to the Courtiers there present were invisible. For indeed it is well said, “in every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing.” To Newton and to Newton’s Dog Diamond, what a different pair of Universes; while the painting on the optical retina of both was, most likely, the same!”

Carlyle could not see what he was incapable of seeing, even if the evidence was all around him. We are all like Newton’s dog in the sense that we can only access Appearance. Reality is, and always will remain, beyond us.

The Reformist Carlylean Position - For Paid Subscribers Only

I like to call myself a Reformist Carlylean and today I would like to take the time to articulate  what that actually means as clearly as I can.

Sincerity is still the cardinal virtue:

The man who sees clearly and acts on what he sees, rather than performing a role or signaling tribal loyalty is still the most valuable and most necessary type of person.

Cant still kills:

The specific pathology Carlyle identified of the institutional repetition of formulas that no one believes but everyone performs is as lethal now as it was in 1840. The gap between what our institutions claim and what they do widens every year, and the accumulated dishonesty will eventually reach a breaking point.

The character of leaders matters more than the systems they operate:

No mechanism, not voting, not constitutions, not markets, not AI, can substitute for the quality of the people at the helm. The form of government is secondary to the character of the governors.

Reality has a structure that is not up for negotiation:

You either align with it or it destroys you. You cannot vote your way past the rocks in the Straits of Magellan and the universe does not accommodate your preferences.

The test of alignment is empirical outcomes:

Does the institution or policy make the people under it stronger or weaker, more capable or less, more free or more dependent? Does it produce the outcomes it claims?

In short, perceive reality as it actually is, not as your theories say it should be. Be sincere  and refuse cant in all its forms.
