Of all the short books in the Marxist library, this is the one whose fate is the sharpest joke history has played on its publisher. The Role of the Individual in History — Georgi Plekhanov gave it the longer, drier title On the Question of the Individual's Role in History, and it is under that heading that it appears in the Selected Philosophical Works from which the present text is taken — argues, with more wit and rigour than any rival, that the great man is not the author of his age, that he can be replaced, and that no personality however towering can bend the course of history to its will. The state that printed it by the million spent those same decades building the most extravagant cult of a single personality the modern world has seen. The essay in your hands is the standing refutation of the regime that canonised it. Nothing an introduction can add improves on that fact; the most it can do is set it out.
Plekhanov wrote the essay in 1898 and published it that year in the St Petersburg journal Nauchnoye Obozreniye (Scientific Review), under one of the pen-names he used to slip past the tsarist censor. He was then the acknowledged head of Russian Marxism in exile, and the piece belongs to the same campaign as the writings that had made his name. In the 1880s he had demolished the Narodniks — the Populists who staked everything on the "critically thinking individual", the hero who would drag a sleeping peasant Russia toward socialism by force of will and self-sacrifice. That was a pamphleteer's quarrel with a Russian sect. Here the quarrel matures into a general theory, and its immediate targets widen: on one side the subjectivists, chief among them the Populist sociologist N. K. Mikhailovsky — the "esteemed sociologist" the essay opens by teasing — who made the individual a free-standing force pulling history along; on the other the mechanical determinists and the shallow "economic" fatalists who abolished the individual altogether, reducing a human being to a negligible quantity in an equation already solved.
Plekhanov refuses both exits, and the refusal is the book. He states the antinomy in as many words — the individual as everything, the individual as nothing — and then, in a formula that is pure Hegel put to work, insists that neither term may be sacrificed to the other: the correct standpoint is reached only when the elements of truth in both are blended in a synthesis. What follows is a long, delighted excursion through eighteenth-century France — Louis XV and the incompetent generals of the Seven Years War, the deaths of Mirabeau and Robespierre, the "good sword" the Directory went looking for and found in Bonaparte — deployed to show exactly how much accident is granted and exactly where its writ stops. The play of chance is real: had a brick fallen on Robespierre in early 1793, or a bullet found Bonaparte at Arcole, "his place would of course have been taken by somebody else", and that somebody would have done broadly what the moment required. Accident decides which individual answers a social need, and colours how the need is met; it cannot conjure the need away, or invent one that the productive forces have not prepared.
From this comes the essay's central and justly famous definition, which deserves to be read slowly:
A great man is great, not in his personal features lending an individual complexion to historic events but in his possession of traits which make him the most capable of serving his time's great social needs, which have arisen under the influence of general and particular causes.
Carlyle, Plekhanov notes, called great men Beginners, and he accepts the word while emptying it of the worship Carlyle poured into it: "A great man is precisely a Beginner because he sees farther than others do and his desires are stronger than in others." The hero is not the man who can halt or reverse the natural course of things but the one whose activity is "the conscious and free expression" of a course that would otherwise work itself out blindly and more slowly. He matters, and he matters enormously — Plekhanov is no fatalist, and says so flatly: individuals "can influence the fate of society", their influence "is sometimes very considerable", but "the possibility of its being exercised and its extent are determined by society's organisation". The great man moves the world by seeing sooner and wanting harder what the world, in any case, was going to need.
On its own terms the essay is close to flawless of its kind, and its virtues are the ones that make Plekhanov worth reading at all: the generosity toward opponents, the delight in concrete historical texture, the refusal of the easy formula in either direction. It is the finest short statement in the tradition of a genuinely dialectical account of human agency — one that neither flatters the individual into a demiurge nor dissolves the individual into a statistic. A century of readers who wanted to know why history is neither the biography of great men nor an automatic machine have been sent here, and rightly.
Where it strains is exactly where its author's own life would later strain, and the two failures are the same failure. The engine of the essay is the sentence that the great man "cannot eliminate the given economic relations if the latter correspond to a definite state of the productive forces." As a discipline against the voluntarist — against the Narodnik who thinks will alone can leap over a stage of development — it is bracing and correct. But the same discipline, carried into politics as a rule for reading off tactics from the "definite state of the productive forces", is what would leave Plekhanov himself stranded. If the productive forces dictate that the coming Russian revolution can only be bourgeois, then the workers' party must trim its horizon to that measure and wait — and it was precisely this deduction, drawn from a premise Lenin shared, that carried Plekhanov into Menshevism, into support for the imperial war in 1914, and finally into denouncing October 1917 as a crime against the laws of history. The rigour and the limitation are one thing seen from two sides. The essay's strength as philosophy is its refusal of wishful voluntarism; its weakness as a guide to action is the same refusal, hardened into a fatalism about what a class may attempt before the productive forces have signed the permission slip.
There is, then, a tragedy folded into this little book, and it is the essay's own doing. By its criterion the great man is the one who "sees farther than others" and grasps "his time's great social needs" in time to meet them. Measured against that standard — his own — 1917 is the year Plekhanov's finest instrument turns and convicts its maker. The social need was there; a beginning was demanded; and the man who had taught a generation of revolutionaries how to read history could not read the need his own moment had thrown up, and set himself against those who could. No external verdict is required. The book supplies it.
Now to the use the essay was put to, which is where an introduction earns its place. Reproduced faithfully below, complete with the Institute of Marxism-Leninism's own explanatory notes, this text was a fixture of Soviet political education for the better part of a century — a set piece on "the individual in history", assigned, summarised, examined. And every year it was taught, its plainest sentences stood in open contradiction to the regime that assigned it.
For the doctrine the essay hammers home is that no individual is indispensable and none can override the course set by material conditions. Yet the Soviet state under Stalin was organised around the opposite proposition in its most naked form: a single figure presented as the indispensable maker of events, the "Lenin of today", the coryphaeus of the sciences, the leader whose personal genius was said to author victories and whose name was chanted as though history flowed from his will. The cult of personality was not a stylistic excess grafted onto Marxism; it was a working refutation of the very text the same presses were turning out under Plekhanov's name. To hand a Soviet student The Role of the Individual in History was to hand them the sharpest available argument against the portrait of Stalin hanging on the classroom wall — and to trust, correctly for a long time, that no one would say so.
The contradiction became, for one extraordinary moment, official. When Khrushchev moved in 1956 to dismantle the dead Stalin's reputation, the category he reached for was precisely this one: the "cult of the personality", the error of ascribing to one man what belonged to the class, the party, the objective march of events. The Marxist theory of the role of the individual — Plekhanov's theory, taught from Plekhanov's essay — was wheeled out to explain the disaster. But it was wheeled out to do half a job. It was allowed to indict the dead man; it was not allowed to ask how a doctrine so thoroughly taught had been so thoroughly ignored in practice for twenty-five years, or what kind of state permits a cult its own textbooks forbid. The essay's thesis was good enough to bury Stalin and never permitted to examine the system that had produced him. That is the exact shape of the apparatus's honesty throughout: scrupulous on the page, sealed off from the mirror.
To the editors' credit — and it is a real credit, of a kind not every book in this catalogue can claim — the apparatus reproduced here does not tamper with Plekhanov's argument. The notes, given in full below in the Institute's own numbering, are honest scholarship: they identify Mikhailovsky behind the "esteemed sociologist", gloss the French history, place the quotations. Nothing in the annotation bends the essay toward the current line. The distortion was never in what the notes say; it was in what the whole edifice of Soviet Marxism declined to notice — that the book it was printing was a charge sheet against its own practice, and that the charge was never answered because it was never allowed to be read as one.
Read outside the shadow of that contradiction, the essay recovers its full force, and the force is not antiquarian. Two temptations perennially organise the way people think about history, and Plekhanov is the standing rebuke to both. The first is the Great Man theory in its endlessly renewed forms — the disruptor, the founder, the strongman who alone bends the arc — the flattery every cult of leadership lives on, and against which this small book remains the most economical antidote ever written. The second is the fatalism that abolishes agency altogether, whether in the vulgar economic determinism Plekhanov himself was already fighting or in its later, glossier descendants: history as a machine in which nothing anyone does could have been otherwise. Between the demiurge and the cog, Plekhanov holds open the difficult middle where human beings really act — where individuals matter enormously, and matter within limits they did not set and cannot wish away.
That there is a tragedy at the heart of the book — that its author failed his own test at the one moment it counted — does not weaken the teaching; it deepens it. It is the surest proof the essay could ask for that seeing farther is not a permanent possession, that the theorist of historical necessity is as answerable to it as anyone, and that no doctrine, however true, exempts the man who holds it from the demand to grasp his own moment while there is still time to act in it. Plekhanov wrote the manual for recognising the beginner history requires, and then, in 1917, could not recognise the beginning. The Soviet state printed the manual and staged the cult it forbade. Both failures point the same way — back to the living core the essay defends against every idol and every fatalism alike: that men and women make their own history, and do not make it just as they please, and that the whole art is to know the difference.