History as Superhero Tale

A.J.P. Taylor quipped in one of the essays collected in Europe From Napoleon to the Second International that in biography the biographer "builds up his individual subject until society is almost forgotten," whereas in history "society comes first," and the subject is "always man in society."

Looking at "popular" history I suspect the distinction is lost on most. It seems that for many, maybe most, of those who produce and consume it, history is nothing but biography--and what Taylor would recognize as history scarcely present at all. Here the "Great Man" theory (with the "good" among them responsible for all progress, the "evil" for all calamity) lives on, as if centuries of intellectual progress--the advent of other ways of looking at the world--simply never happened.

For those who unquestioningly accept such a view of history, as for Margaret Thatcher and her acolytes, society does not exist (unless they suddenly find it convenient to speak foolishness about "Big Society" to gull the simple as they slash the social safety net).

Accordingly, when cultural critics (quite correctly) take to task the simple-mindedness of superhero fiction, with its larger-than-life heroes and villains and the reduction of everyone else to cast-of-millions extras, it seems well to remember that it is less a matter of comic book writers distorting the public mind than the fact that their work simply reflects what people are taught about the world by the very institutions and persons responsible for their education in the broadest and narrowest senses of the term--so that they comprehend all history as superhero tale anyway.