Carlyle, Thomas

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) was a Scottish writer and historian who critiqued modern democracy and industrialization. Raised in the Calvinist tradition, Carlyle eventually rejected the Christian faith but nevertheless focused his work on the spiritual and human natures and their value over the economic and practical forces emerging in Victorian London.

Carlyle's colleagues included John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens, Friedrich Engels, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and others. His views were at first supported by contemporary thinkers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was influenced by Carlyle's first significant work, Sartor Resartus, a discussion of religious conversion. As his thinking developed, however, he eventually alienated some thinkers of his day by his support of authoritarian rule of societies, including punishing the poor and supporting slavery as a means of control and motivation of people whom he claimed might otherwise be useless to society.

Carlyle wrote several major historical works, including The French Revolution, Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, and History of Friedrich II of Prussia; political works, including critiques of British society, such as Chartism, Past and Present and Latter-Day Pamphlets; and other sociopolitical works, such as An Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question and Signs of the Times. His body of work on leadership and politics holds several disparate views, including a condemnation of inherited leadership through aristocracy—but also punishment and ownership of the poor and lazy.

Carlyle studied and wrote on leaders and leadership. In particular, he focused on heroic and charismatic leadership in his writings on Oliver Cromwell and Frederick the Great, and his series of lectures On Heroes and Hero Worship and the Heroic in History. Victorian English society focused on heroes, and Carlyle's lectures explored the historical frameworks in which heroes emerged. His lectures and writings took considerable effort to reframe historical figures and foes, including the historically maligned Muhammed, Cromwell, and others. Carlyle focused on leaders' actions rather than the theories behind them, so his lectures and writings often lacked theoretical definitions and explorations of his contemporaries.

These lectures explored the individual as a leader. Carlyle argued that an increasingly industrial society [Page 106]deemphasized the influence of the individual and that person's ability to influence people and history. He extended this thinking into discussions of physiognomy: that individuals' communications and actions always reflect inner character. He applied this individual character argument to national character, showing how individuals became heroes with their vision and belief-based action and how societal hero worship develops as a result. He eventually contended that only a few people had the leadership and moral capacity to effect political change, with most citizens prone to be willing followers. Many of Carlyle's fellow thinkers rejected this last line of thinking, saying it was undemocratic.