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Bonaparte and William James


 Given the box office success of Ridley Scott's epic NAPOLEON, I am reminded of the following thought from the guiding spirit of this blog, William James. 

The essay is "The Importance of Individuals," one of a pair of essays in which he defends a sort of extended-Carlylean conception of history. I've discussed that conception in this blog before and will not go into it in particular now.  Just the one quick quote. 

James writes, "Some organizing genius must in the nature of things have emerged from the French Revolution; but what Frenchman will affirm it to have been an accident of no consequence that he should have had the supernumerary idiosyncrasies of a Bonaparte?"    

Let us contemplate that thought without a lot of commentary from me:  I'll let Ridley Scott do the commenting.  I will only borrow from a dictionary a definition of supernumerary: "being in excess of the normal or requisite number." Presumably Bonaparte had more idiosyncrasies than one would have been entitled to expect. And that turned out to matter. 

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  1. Paul D. Van PeltDecember 8, 2023 at 7:35 AM

    It is nearly axiomatic how ambitious, ruthless individuals are often equally brilliant: if you are going to be good at the bad things you do, it helps to have the smarts and the resources to pull it off. Arrogance and narcissism cancel out any overt feelings of guilt in these matters because objectives rule over all else. The notion of pragmatism, doing what is more useful instead of what is less so, often deals the deal. That is how we roll.

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