Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast episode 566, The Revolutionary Part 1.

All this talk of outlaws and lawbreaking over the last few weeks has gotten me thinking, my friends,

there's been an episode I've had rattling around as an idea for a while now,

and I think, fresh on the heels of our most recent

string of lawbreaking, now is finally the time for it. You see, in history today, biography as a

discipline is considered somewhat outmoded. If you're at all plugged into the academic world,

you know that biographies of famous historical figures are simply not a thing in the way they were in the past.

That approach to writing history, a focus on the so-called great man, is considered to be behind the times,

ignorant of the forces that in the academic consensus really drive history, the big social, impersonal, and economic ones.

And I have to admit that on a purely intellectual level, I agree with that trend. Great man approaches to history are not, in my view,

great for the discipline as a whole. They tend to put undue emphasis on the actions of the rich and powerful,

and can obscure as much as they reveal about the forces that drive social change.

But at the same time, and maybe this is why I didn't make a great academic historian,

I have my reservations about this shift. For one thing, I do think there are cases where it's

hard to escape a great man view of history. The classic example I point to with my students is the Napoleonic Wars.

It's hard to imagine if you replayed the history of France after the French Revolution,

that without someone as charismatic and militarily capable as Napoleon at the helm,

things would have turned out identically. In the case of Japanese history, look at someone like Tokugawa Ieyasu.

Sure, the reunification of Japan after the Civil Wars of the 1500s, probably inevitable.

But if someone else had done it, someone not as detail-minded or interested in stability

on a structural level as Tokugawa Ieyasu, it's hard to imagine

the next two centuries playing out the same way. Maybe instead you get a government that's

...