Why the people who actually drive history aren’t in the textbooks

History is often told through the stories of individuals. We have movies about kings, YouTube videos about generals, books about inventors, and talks about revolutionaries. These are the Great Men (almost always men) whose names headline the textbooks: Napoleon, Darwin, Gandhi, Churchill. This “Great Man” model of history owes itself to the 19th-century Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle, and it’s a seductive narrative — simple, dramatic, and easy to teach. It’s great for TV.

In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with the popular historian Anton Howes about how he views history. Howes is, broadly speaking, a Marxist historian. He appreciates the impact of great individuals but sees history as the product of deeper forces: economic conditions, material constraints, class relations, environmental pressures, demographic shifts, and so on.

The tension between these two approaches isn’t just an issue for historians. It shapes how we think about our own time. Are we living through a “Musk era” or a “monetary policy era”? Is Trump playing chess, or is he just another piece on the socioeconomic board? The philosophy of history is about how the world works. It’s about how to understand what’s going on today. So, if we’re to make sense of our own times, we should make sure to take a close look at the before-times, too.

Behind the scenes

There is something magnetic about the character of Henry VIII. He was a corpulent womanizer who sought to decide every aspect of England’s governance in a system that was increasingly resistant to the idea. He was a wilful, dictatorial man’s man who constantly needed more money to fuel his latest whims or grand plans.

The media have always loved these kinds of characters. There’s a certain popcorn-crunching thrill in watching a tyrant’s Icarian ambitions reaching for the Sun. Wolf Hall, The Other Boleyn Girl, The Tudors, and so on, all sell the legend of Henry VIII — and millions of people buy it happily.

The problem is that the breech-stretching mythos around people like Henry VIII starts to define how we imagine history more broadly. We imagine that these larger-than-life biographies are the reason why things ended up as they did. Howes is a “Marxist” historian in that he thinks history is better explained by broader socio-economic forces. Behind every Julius Caesar, Catherine the Great, Henry VIII, or Donald Trump, there is an indecipherably complex mesh of forces at play — money, class struggle, and production explain why the world is the way it is. In the case of Henry VIII, Howes explains it like this:

“So the economic fundamentals are absolutely key and a lot of people don’t even realise that. You can read loads of histories of the Tudors which will not once mention the fact that, in the 1530s, property rights [were] massively undermined. It’s not just the dissolution of the monasteries but the idea of private property. Things were changing thanks to the Great Debate in the 1540s and the onset of inflation.

But a lot of that gets kind of swept under the carpet, I guess, because it’s not quite as exciting as Henry VIII having six wives. Even though those wives, their rise and fall is, in some sense, related to some of those [socio-economic factors].”

The risk of overcorrecting

Most historians today are Marxist in the sense that Howes lays out — they believe that history can rarely be easily explained by pointing at the “biographies of great men” alone. But the danger is that we go too far. By objecting to Carlyle’s simplistic and misogynistic view of history, we might write off individual agency altogether.

Howes, for example, believes that while we might be overemphasizing the likes of Henry VIII, that doesn’t mean there aren’t a few individuals we should be focusing on — namely, those concerned with socioeconomic forces. As he put it:

“So a lot of what I’m working on right now is really about how a handful of people in the 1540s and 50s pretty much put England onto a completely different trajectory than it had been on before. So England went from a very agrarian economy and one that’s essentially a land-based power to something very different. There were only a few people who then persuade the government that this is the way that it ought to be, choosing that it should be a maritime, trading, and, I guess, invention-based nation instead.”

Howes’ point is that history is a “mish-mash” of socioeconomics and “great people” history in the sense that the engine-drivers of change are not often found front-of-camera or headlining history books. They are faceless bureaucrats and bankers. Howes gives another example:

“So, you’ve got mass protests which have to be violently put down in 1549, which seem to have very much an economic cause. That leads almost immediately to a coup against the regent for Edward VI. But one thing I’m looking into right now is that the guy who bankrolls the coup seems to be one of the mint officials who then ends up changing the direction [of English history]. So, literally, the person who overthrows Edward VI is staying at his house and it’s kind of interesting that he’s just one mint official. One of the few people in the country that actually understands that the real cause of what’s going on is debasement.”

A defense of the Illuminati

Mini Philosophy and Big Think are serious, reputable, academic-adjacent publications. We do our best to avoid sensationalism and conspiracy theory. But as I was interviewing Howes, I couldn’t stop thinking about the Illuminati. I do not mean some shadowy organization that meets once a year to drink virginal blood and steer world events like a game of Monopoly. But I mean those hugely wealthy, hugely influential businesspeople who have far more power than we might want.

The reason that this isn’t some sensationalist conspiracy theory is, as Howes points out, shown by history again and again. The world dances to the sound of coins jangling, and lasting, systemic change is the result of socioeconomic forces. But those forces are not laws of nature. Humans are not irrelevant to the tides of history. Characters like that nameless mint official in Tudor England exist everywhere throughout time.

So, perhaps the lesson behind what Howes is saying is not simply that “history is more boring than we’d like.” Rather, it’s that if we want to see where the real movers and shakers lie — and if we want to see who really holds the power — we shouldn’t be watching the news. We should be looking at the CEOs and board members running the world’s biggest companies. Follow the money and you’ll follow history.