Word: heroicizing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Thomas Carlyle who articulated the beginning of the modern romantic cycle. "The history of the world," he wrote in 1841, "is but the biography of great men." Hitler elaborated the argument with Hegel's theory of the "world-historical figure" ? the heroic genius who emerges when the historical moment is right to lead a people to their preordained destiny...
That thought merged a kind of messianism with Hegelian and Marxian determinism, the idea that vast and blind historical forces sweep across the world's stage without important regard to personalities. But of course that Marxist thought is invalidated by Marxist his tory ? the crucial "heroic" role played by men like Marx himself, and Lenin and Stalin. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. suggests that "men have lived who did what no substitute could ever have done; their intervention set history on one path rather than another. If this is so, the old maxim There are no indispensable men' would seem another...
...English aristocracy was capable of disastrous follies. There is no more perfect indictment of such leadership than the fatuously self-confident direction by the Lords Raglan and Cardigan of the charge of the Light Brigade. The event must be seen in retrospect not just as a piece of heroic military stupidity (worse ones have occurred since), but as a symbol of what happens to a trained elite that is closed to new blood and new ideas...
...clear what the actual event is, but in 1919 President Lowell sent Harvard students into Boston to scab during the police strike. Two students were killed while they did their class duty and undermined the workers. Maybe the molasses flood was more entertaining; it certainly must have been more heroic. The show is being presented by the People's Theater of Cambridge at 1253 Cambridge St. in Inman Square. Saturday's performance is at 8:30, two shows on Sunday at 5:30 and 8, one show Monday at 8. Tickets cost a buck and a half...
...heat of a grave political crisis, a modest man became momentarily a heroic one. Now, eight months later, Cox has returned to his book-lined office in the International Legal Studies Building at the Law School, saying little about the scandal even in his now-frequent speeches and waiting modestly for the other shoe, the one his defiance set in motion, to drop on Richard Nixon...