Happy Birthday, Thomas Carlyle

The Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle was born on this day, more than two hundred years ago: 213, to be exact.

His reputation as a philosopher and a man of letters has suffered something of an eclipse in recent decades. He's probably best remembered today as a name to attach to the "great man theory of history," because of this book: http://www.questia.com/read/1444983#|

Carlyle's examples of history-defining heroes in that book?

Mohammed (the hero as prophet), Dante and Shakespeare (the hero as poet), Martin Luther, John Knox (the hero as priest); Johnson, Rousseau, Burns (the hero as man of letters); Cromwell, Napoleon (the hero as King).

Notice the back-and-forth structure there. Carlyle's book starts with religion, proceeds to literature, returns to religion, returns to literature, and only at the end arrives what his first readers may have been impatiently awaiting throughout -- European political history.

But of that another day.

At the peak of his influence, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Carlyle was chiefly thought of as the author of an odd book called Sartor Resartus (the tailor re-tailored), in which Carlyle poses as an editor trying to reconstruct the life and work of a German "philosopher of clothes" named Diogenes Teufelsdrockh.

It was Carlyle as the author of Sartor that James often approvingly cited. In "The Dilemma of Determinism," for example, Carlyle figures as the great enemy of subjectivism, the voice ("so chaste and sane and strong" James calls it) for the view that it doesn't matter how you feel, what matters is what you do.

So toast Carlyle on his birthday. And tip a tailor.