From ptrourke@methymna.com Sun Dec 29 06:12:58 2002 Received: from mxu7.u.washington.edu (mxu7.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.165]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.12) with ESMTP id gBTECvCK018122 for ; Sun, 29 Dec 2002 06:12:57 -0800 Received: from relay01.valueweb.net (relay01.valueweb.net [216.219.253.235]) by mxu7.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.12) with ESMTP id gBTECsJV021848 for ; Sun, 29 Dec 2002 06:12:54 -0800 Received: from thor.valueweb.net ([216.219.254.23]:2968 "EHLO thor.valueweb.net") by relay01.valueweb.net with ESMTP id ; Sun, 29 Dec 2002 09:09:34 -0500 Received: from h00500480cb85.ne.client2.attbi.com ([24.61.233.74]:21260 "HELO caliban") by thor.valueweb.net with SMTP id ; Sun, 29 Dec 2002 09:12:21 -0500 Message-ID: <000501c2af44$2b1e7b10$4ae93d18@caliban> From: "Patrick T. Rourke" To: Subject: Re: Too Quiet Date: Sun, 29 Dec 2002 09:11:22 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2800.1106 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1106 X-Uwash-Spam: Gauge=III, Probability=3%, Report="USER_AGENT_OE, __EVITE_CTYPE, __HAS_MIMEOLE, __HAS_MSMAIL_PRI, __HAS_OUTLOOK_IN_MAILER, __HAS_X_MAILER, __HAS_X_PRIORITY" Good try, but it mostly restates the proposition rather than provides an argument for it. > Rational choice theorists fail in particular > to take into account the possibility that > the actions of a single individual can, under > certain circumstances, shift standards of > rationality, and hence appropriate behavior, > for millions of others. The last name in the next list betrays an unsurprising ideological slant on the part of the author quoted: > They've no way of accounting, say, for Buddha, > Christ, and Mohammed, or for Alexander, Napoleon, > and Hitler, or for Lincoln, Churchill, and > Margaret Thatcher. As Sesame Street says, "one of these things is not like the others." Thatcher can be accounted for quite as easily as her American analog, Reagan, can: both are products of financial retrenchment in their respective countries. Money was tight, and conservatism was popular. There is really little else to Mrs. Thatcher than a tight purse and a big stick. And even Reagan, whose saving grace was his naivete (see Lou Cannon on the Reykjavik Summit), seems less a product of his times. Sorry, I remain unconvinced that the teaching history is exclusively the business of praising great men (or women). While certain aspects of history (especially intellectual history) are best understood as the influence of individuals, there are events in which the influence of the individual is all but negligible: the "fall" of Rome in the West, for instance, is something that it seems to me cannot be described in terms of the clash of individual personalities. PTR .