Thinking of how the same actor (Nikolai Cherkassov) portrayed Knyaz Aleksandr and Ivan IV for Eisenstein, and they're both vaguely Stalin analogues, gets me to repudiating the Great Man theory.
Even if such a theory had validity, the Great Men are always entirely too convenient to someone's argument, there are always other Great Men out there, and when held up as admirable it somehow excuses their willingness to sacrifice "lesser" underlings.
No, job hunting isn't riveting, why do you ask?
@kelseyhusky There's always *other* great men whom we don't hear about. F'rex, we hear a lot about Patton but not about Rose or Roosevelt Jr, about Newton but not about Liebniz, and imho the best example, about Edison but not Tesla - until recently. It's like editing Kirov out of the photos of Stalin. And if a choice of Great Men is *that* subjective within a similar time period then the theory's effectively garbage no matter how good it is in theory.
@Leucrotta "There's always a greater man" to paraphrase Qui Gon.