SOCY 200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Pointillism, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Great Depression
1 Jul 2016
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
We used to have a necessity, a need and invented something to satisfy it. The history of the world is but the biography of great men. Diamond says our commonsense notions of invention overstate the importance of the so-called great man. The broad patterns of human history would not have been altered if some genius had not been born at a particular place and time. Herbert spencer: great men are themselves products of their societies and what the great men contribute would have been impossible without all the inventions, ideas, philosophies, knowledge that went before them. This is wat isaac newton was talking about when he said if i have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. There were people of great ability thousands of years ago but none invented the computer. Beethoven would not have been great if he had lived as a peasant in rural china.
