World-Historical Individuals

What distinguishes a world-historical individual is not superior virtue or genius in the ordinary sense. It is a peculiar alignment between the individual's inner drive and the historical moment. Caesar did not create the circumstances that made Rome's republican institutions obsolete; those circumstances were the product of contradictions within Roman society that had been building for generations. But Caesar had the insight — instinctive, not philosophical — to grasp what the moment required, and the will to act on that grasp without hesitation.

Hegel is explicit that world-historical individuals should not be judged by ordinary moral standards. Caesar's assassination of the republic, Napoleon's wars and conquests: these cannot be evaluated by the norms appropriate to private persons in settled social conditions. The world-historical individual operates at the level of Spirit's self-development, where the old norms are in the process of being superseded and the new ones are not yet fully established. To judge them by the standards of the world they are destroying or creating is to miss what they actually are.

The fate of world-historical individuals is characteristic and, for Hegel, philosophically revealing: they are used and discarded. Having achieved the historical task for which Spirit required them, they lose their function. Their private persons — with their passions, their plans, their ordinary human needs — are not carried forward by the history they made. Alexander died at thirty-two; Caesar was murdered; Napoleon ended on Saint Helena. Hegel sees this not as injustice but as the mark of their genuinely historical rather than merely personal significance.

The concept of world-historical individuals has had a troubling legacy, lending itself to the kind of "great man" theory of history that downplays structural and collective forces. Hegel himself would resist this reading: the individual only becomes world-historical through alignment with objective necessity, not through sheer will. But the concept undeniably romanticises the great political actor in ways that have made it available for ideological misuse.