President Barack Obama meets with Burmese Opposition Leader Aung San Suu Kyi in the Oval Office, Sept. 19, 2012 (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza, Public Domain).
When Thomas Carlyle wrote that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men,” he spoke to a common sentiment. Although the ‘great man theory’ has seemingly gone out of fashion in the academic world, it has not receded from our instinctive understanding of politics, and is certainly not an exclusively conservative tendency.
