p While stressing the determining role of the masses in historical progress, Marxism does not disregard the influence of rprbiin distinguished personalities on the course of history and on so«al development-, un rhp contrary siirli pprcnnalities are assigned a big role and their activities are considered essential for social progress, producing a certain impact on it.

p The fact is that no group of people or society can do wit-front- leadflyphip or without persons to lead it. These persons are called upon to work out a programme of action for the members of society (the class, party, state) and organise them to implement it. “Not a single class in history has achieved power without producing its political leaders, its prominent representatives able to organise a movement and lead it.”  [490•1 

p What influence, however, do great personalities exert on historical progress? Their impact on society depends on the extent to which they realise the actual needs of society and on how far they express the requisite trends of the time and promote their implementation. Great personalities advance the tasks that have already been posed by the objective course of historical developjnent. and organise people towards their realisa, tion. The importance of the great personality thus lies not in the fact that he, in Plekhanov’s words, “can halt or change the natural course of things, but in the sense that his activities are the conscious and free expression of that necessary and unconscious course".  [490•2  It is this that sets the great personality apart from the mass of other people and assigns him a special historical role in social development.

p Indeed, it was a historical necessity in France, for example, that the obsolete feudal political institutions be replaced with new ones that 491 corresponded better to the capitalist production relations developing within feudal society in the latter half of the 18th century. It was thus those people who best realised this necessity and contributed to its realisation that became great personalities of the period. The transition to socialism has become a historical necessity in the 19th and the 20th centuries. Correspondingly, it is those people who realised the necessity of and became leaders in the struggle of the proletariat and of all working people to remake society along socialist lines, that are regarded as great personalities.

p These personalities emerge whenever society is hi need of them. In other words, they appear on Ihe historical scene when great tasks requiring the unified efforts of many people

p in society. The activities of personalities are thus in no way accidental, but rather necessitated by objective causes that take shape irrespective _of people’s will or wish and are conditioned bv the gourse of historical progress. It is only the specific choice ot the personality entrusted with the task of solving the outstanding social problems and of meeting one social requirement or another, that is a matter of chance. “That such and such a man and precisely that man arises at a particular time,” Engels wrote, “is, of course, pure chance. But cut him out and there will be a demand for a substitute, and this substitute will be found, good or bad, but in the long run he will be found. That Napoleon, just that particular Corsican, should have been the military dictator whom the French Republic, exhausted by its own 492 warfare, had rendered necessary, was chance; but that, if a Napoleon had been lacking, another would have filled the place, is proved by the fact that the man was always found as soon as he became necessary: Caesar, Augustus, Cromwell, etc. While Marx discovered the materialist conception of history, Thierry, Mignet, Guizot and all the English historians up to 1850 are evidence it was being striven for, and the discovery of the same conception by Morgan proves that the time was ripe for it and that it simply had to be discovered.”  [492•1 

p Being moved by circumstances to positions of command and resolving the tasks posed by historical development, the great personality exerts a definite influence on the course of social progress and on certain events: he may accelerate or retard them, but he cannot change the direction of historical progress, ior this is flefprtmnpfl n6t by the will or wish of great personalities, hut by the objective laws of social development.

When denning the role ot a great personality in society’s development, account must be taken of the class he represents and whose interests he expresses. If he represents the class which has become historically obsolete, then his activities retard social progress, whereas, if he expresses the interests of the emerging class, then he contributes to and accelerates social progress. It follows that the role of great personalities should be assessed in its historical context, by taking 493 account of circumstances and the surrounding objective conditions. Thus, great personalities connected with the bourgeoisie as a class played directly opposite roles in different periods of historical development: they were progressive when they fought feudalism, but reactionary when they opposed socialist transformations. Great personalities who represent the interests of the proletariat always play a progressive role, since the interests of that class coincide completely with the requirements of historical progress.