Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues

by Jonathan Kennedy

The main alternative to the Great Men theory of history is what Lucien Febvre, the French historian, referred to in the early 1930s as “histoire vue d’en bas et non d’en haut,” or “history from below and not from above.”[35] This approach focuses on the masses of ordinary men and women, often fighting against exploitation and oppression. In this view, it is the cumulative impact of all their struggles that drives progressive social, political and economic transformations. E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) and Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980) are classic examples of this genre. The idea of history from below is much more inclusive than the worship of a few heroic individuals, but still it focuses on humans as the driving force of history.