Europa Universalis 4: A Game of Great Men
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- Опубликовано: 30 июн 2024
- Hi.
Great Man Theory is a framework for history that seldom sees open discussion, and as such, is often relegated to being a kind of "default" way of doing history. I thought it would be interesting to explore Great Man Theory using Europa Universalis 4, give that it exemplifies the lens.
This is the second video in a broader series on learning historical concepts through games, and it's on a fairly important topic with respect to learning how to "do history," so I put it early in the playlist--though by no means are these topics going to get less significant as we go.
Next time we'll be looking at Social History through Humankind (the game, not the water).
Super Cool Behind the Scenes fact!: The temptation to add 4 more seconds of needless waffling to this one, to get the video time to match the last one was...very very strong.
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00:00 intro
02:34 Where do Great Men come from?
05:49 Power
07:11 The Features of Great Man Theory
10:43 The Dark Side of Great Man
13:59 Conclusion
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Carlyle essay:
babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?i...
Mill Response:
babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?i... 
Игры
Great video! You really surprised me by picking EU4 and not Civilization as your model for Great Men Theory. I mean, in Civilization you actually PLAY as a great man leading your civilization from 4000 BCE to the future!
It was a tough call but I felt like EU4 had a better structure for talking about discussing the actual historical lens, as well as using a variety of games for the series in general.
The biggest thing that swayed me was just how impossible it would be to scrounge MP if you had no advisors and a 0/0/0 for the whole game, where like, you could win in civ if you had a civ with no special ability/unit. (It would just be dull, not soul crushing)
@@Rosencreutzzz on the same rail I guess is Crusader Kings, you may be isolated leader of a desertic county and have that 20+ stats character that creates a empire during his 50 years or so of leadership.
Civilization doesn't really simulate alt history, closest thing would be the scenarios
In Civ you and the other nations are supposedly playing as a great (wo)man but as you're immortal and nearly omnipotent and all-knowing when it comes to your people it's more of a God game than a Great People game
I disagree with you analysis.
While EU4 does put emphasis on the importance of the people in charge, it doesn't treat them as special or irreplaceable. Sure, not all kings are equal, but even the best one can find its match to random luck and whether your ruler has good or bad stats doesn't affect the decisions you are able to make. Sure, it is convenient to have a competent king, but even without one, the machine of the state runs all the same, just less efficiently. Even the historical characters generated by events that you can employ as advisors don't bring anything unique, they are just cheaper to employ.
Noone is special in EU4, noone is unique. Even the leaders are but pawns of the state. This isn't a game I would associate with Great Man theory. It does feature a hierarchy with people on top, but doesn't care who is on top. Just that someone is there to fit that role.
I completely disagree with your analysis. The Great Men theory is indeed a real thing and created the perspective of viewing and analyzing history, international relations, etc, through the lens of individuals' actions(and inactions) and the impact those had. However this is clearly not the lens EUIV is showcasing. Instead EUIV is showcasing the extreme opposite lens, of viewing history, international relations, etc, through the lens of the international system itself and how the different actors play within it. There are numerous examples of this, from the trade system to the way nations progress through the eras(Renaissance, Exploration, etc).
Perhaps even more telling is what the game doesn't focus on and thus puts in the background. That's actually where monarch points come in, as while they are very important to game play they are a generic concept applying to all leaders equally, which the player has very little(though at least some) control over its accumulation(advisors, becoming a republic and keeping leaders through election cycles, etc). They epitomize the exact opposite of what the Great Men theory focuses on, by not viewing the leaders themselves but viewing them as a black box(as in the player doesn't really know who they are beyond their name nor what they actually do) where it doesn't matter who the leader is, just that s/he exists to provide you with these monarch points.
I think Hegel said it best "I saw the Socioeconomic Factors - this soul of the world - go out from the city to survey their reign; it is a truly wonderful sensation to see such an abstract series of complicated, interlocking, aggregated historically-conditioned social and material processes, that, concentrating on one point while seated on a horse, stretch over the world and dominate it"
so true
@@themi0598 I think Hegel was just echoing Napoleon who said "'I found the crown of France lying in the gutter, and a complex and nearly unknowable interaction of trade, cultural exchange, wider social process too subtle to possibly record guided it to my sword. Right place, right time, really. Could have been anyone!"
Stopped reading after Hegel. Grow up.
@@dariusonly1384 maybe if you kept reading after hegel you'd have gotten the joke. doubtful, tho. you're less of a darius the great, more of a darius III. ciao, loser of issus
I once got a catholic Oliver Cromwell
CURSED
It's fine, I have made orthodox the official faith of hre multiple times
That Cromwell won't ban Christmas, he will make two of them!
@@WeebishSwed michaelmas?
I was really looking forward to this one! The portion on the 'why' the game went the way of GMT is especially important, and I'm glad you had included it. I wish you'd put in more time/focus on it, since it might have explained some more of why the game took on it's final form.
I have a bonus episode in the works centered on “player autocracy” in the genre and it’ll get at why games come out looking this way, maybe from another angle, but an important one.
@@Rosencreutzzz I'm hype. Whenever I play these games, I feel as if I am exploiting these great figures, mining them for mana. They are ruthlessly optimized into being 'great' because I derive immense, untoward satisfaction from watching numbers go up. A deeper look into what drives this is of great interest to me.
An interesting take for sure, although I think the particular view of "Great men history" that you take is... perhaps less interesting in an analytical sense for me personally than perhaps a less strictly dogmatic view would (not sure if that conveys exactly what I mean but oh well). I've always seen Great Man history as basically being a view of history which is composed of the actions of individuals in positions of power, without carrying any of the baggage of "this is how one particular thinker, the progenitor of Great Man history" viewed his theory. To me a simpler view of Great Man history would be more interesting in that it allows for a broader analysis of the lack of emphasis on the impact of structures and institutions as opposed to the overarching reach of individuals.
Don't know if I've fully expressed what I mean here because I don't want to take too long writing a comment, but just some food for thought.
P.S. You mentioned "hero worship of Frederick the Great" and I promise that I just like using historical pseudonyms and that my account name is not indicative of hero worship lol.
Generals in EU4 are not really "great men". They're more like real world generals. "We have an army, we need someone to lead it. We have our highest ranking officers for that". And advisors can't really change course of history. They give you some bonuses and that's it. So if anything EU4 really undermines great man theory.
I had a couple of complaints about your previous video of eu4 regarding the interpretation of its mechanics, but this one is pretty good
Just saw that you updated the thumbnail. Exquisite meme.
Great video, keep it up!
You should do a video in the Meiou and Taxes mod for eu4 since it introduced many new flavors and view history in a different, more realistic lens
*Me playing Dithmarschen* Hmm... interesting, so kill all the great men is what you are saying?
The DDR(Dithmarscher Democratic Republic) is the only legitimate government in the EU4 timeline, no I will not elaborate.
(Truth be told I like using Rothenburg for my proto-Weimar republic runs, cause their ideas are really good for unity and ignoring religion)
@@Rosencreutzzz Those types of peasant republics always made me think: How would liberal democracies have developed without having to respond and adapt the existing checks and balances systems often leftover from their feudal counterparts
@@HierophanticRose But a peasant republic has to survive first. There's a reason why throughout peasant republics died pretty easily. A peasant republic that can survive and thrive must conquer it's innate flaws and weaknesses, which history told us that , it is impossible.
@@riverman6462 It's impossible to determine what is impossible *in principle* from what actually occurred. The supposed "inherent flaws and weaknesses" you speak of might actually be completely fictitous and in fact it was very likely for peasant republics to thrive and they failed merely due to extreme bad luck.
Again, it's impossible to determine what was likely to happen based on what actually happened. We only know of what occurred, based on limited sources, and in another timeline, perhaps even most of such hypothetical alternate timelines, things turned out very differently.
As a bit of a joke I went and looked up all Napoleon fights to try to estimate how many man he was worth
I’d say that around 40 thousand
The reverse is harmful too. Individual behaviour, effort and skill can't affect history. There are no heroes and villans, so when even great people have no impact, what can your contribution ever matter? Why even strive to be great, good or even strive to do anything at all, if it is all meaningless?
I would argue the actions of leaders can affect outcomes decisivly for good or ill. Of course it is not the only thing, and leaders clash. For example replace Truman and MacArthur might get his way about the decision to nuke China during the war in Korea leading to a world where nukes are commonly used.
I wish I saw this video when we're deciding to on our thesis topic, this would've been an easier topic to prod into
Great Men Theory always reminds me of the concept of WAR in baseball. For those not in the know, WAR stands for Wins Above Replacement, and is a metric for how many games a team won because a certain player was on the field, as opposed to some hypothetical average, replacement player. It's perhaps the easiest metric to point to see how good a particular player is. If you're above 1 WAR, you're good, because you caused your team to win more games than your replacement. If you're below 1 WAR, you're not good for the opposite reason. I've always wanted to apply the concept to historical figures, to see how Napoleon stacks up against all the other potential Napoleons, to use an example. How much more or less did our Napoleon "succeed" compared to them? Of course, the crucial difference is that there's 162 baseball games in an MLB season, but history only happened once, and also baseball has easy to define metrics for success as opposed to real life where it's far murkier.
Nevertheless, it's an interesting thought experiment to look at historical figures from. How much do they stand out from their peers, and how much of their success is 'right time, right place' versus something that actually makes that person, well, great? Because as much as history is driven by social and material factors, that society is made of individuals, and the materials are taken advantage of by individuals. Could any Jean Schmean have picked up the crown from the gutter, or did Napoleon's diminutive stature enable him to reach lower into that gutter than everyone else?
Very interesting, thank you for making this video!
Theirs also something be outnumbered matters less the more troops you have to an extent for example if you are just 1 man fighting 2 men than that’s far more difficult then commanding 50k men against 100k men. This is for two reasons mainly one is that I’d you have only 1 man you can’t form a square formation to make sure your blind spots aren’t attacked and second in a battle the size of 50k men vs 100k men your enemy won’t risk making a line so wide that you can’t match the lines size to encircle you but if your 5 men vs 10 then they would be willing to risk a 1 person thick line to encircle the 5 men.
I feel like the Great Person meme is very deep seated (which I guess is self-evident, using the meaning of the word conveyed by Richard Dawkins). I see this in a lot of general audience books on science. They get very fixated on naming innovators. But I also think that the very authors fall prey to the weaknesses of the idea. "Sapiens" and "Strategy" are two examples, in my mind, where the authors made very sound arguments in the main body of the work but then began to engage in prediction toward the conclusion. This was particularly egregious to me in "Strategy" because it contradicted the main notion of the book, as documenting what people thought about strategy, contradicting that by ultimately trying to provide a path forward for consumate strategy. I feel like the authors are pulled in by the allure of casting themselves as H.G. Wells-esque prognosticators. That said, I myself cannot separate myself from the meme. It's woven into my consciousness. IDK anyway, too lazy to write a thing. So here's a needlessly galaxybrained comment that no one will read.
Honestly I’ve come to thinking about EU4 ruler states as really ranging from ~-4 - 2. An incredible monarch can absolutely elevate a state - but it’s significantly more often that their incompetence gets in the way.
This doesn’t really have a bearing on the the thesis, but it is relevant.
You said Great Man Theory so many times it's starting to sound like a sitcom about 4 awkward history professors whose lives change when a hot blonde chick moves into the apartment across the hall...
I really like your analysis because you go down the rabbit hole of the falacy of origin.
I personally think great men describe many many events and processes in a much more accurate way than some materialist and collective theories.
For example, how could the rise of the Rashidun Caliphate be explained without the personal character and ideas of Prophet Muhammad? Is simply impossible. However, it is true that the Arabian peninsula was neighboring two massive declining empires.
A similar person in a totally different situation is Jesus. He had a different life because his enemy wasnt a bunch if tribal leaders but the Judean authority backed by the most hegemonic superpower of history.
However, the impact Jesus and Muhammad had in histiry are similar, the only difference given by material conditions being that Muhammad had his own state and died peacefully leting his followers run it while Jesus and his followers were executed.
Another example is Cyrus the Great. Sure, an Iranian empire was comming because of development in the region and the toughness of their peoples. But Cyrus didnt create just an Iranian empire but one that respected other cultures and had an amazing administrative system that survived until a century ago.
Overall, I think great men are really important. But they arent omnipotent at all.
2:27 somehow I feel like this example is from personal experience
Well I mean if you think about a monarchy if your leader sucks then it’s gonna be rough 40 years.
used to like eu4 before 1.30 patch that ruined the ai made them split up into 3 stacks
The loading screens obviously show it
So it's not a coincidence the shittiest take on contemporary wars I've recently seen came from a notorious EU4 player.
Oh please share!
Who are you talking about?
what about crusader kings like that video where tommykay created an immoral god emperor
I gotta say after watching several of your videos it is pretty telling how you seemingly refuse to engage with any of the well thought out comments disagreeing with your ideas.
It leaves me with the impression that your thesis are not well thought out and honestly more of a reflection of your worldview rather than an objective analysis of these games.
Napoleon = 13,700 men
In chess, we have found that at the level of engines, a knight is worth 1000 rating points. That is, stockfish versus the best human players is fair if stockfish begins down a knight.
Interestingly, at top human levels it is only 600 rating points. High intermediate levels, a knight is 300. At my rather low level, perhaps 150. To kids who just learned how the pieces move, a knight is worth 50 rating points, barely anything.
I think the conclusion taken is clear: Great men don't matter, but above average ones are absolutely vital.
You can also get mana by having at least 50 power projection, estate priviliges, missions, estate missions and being influenced by a GP. You just ignored those mechanics to prove your point
The critique was super weak
Man, I don't understand anything of what you're saying. Which DLC are you angry at?
Answer to all relevant questions and a rebuttal to your ideas is literally just classical elite theory (Italian school): iron law of oligarchy and human free will.
Read some Burnham, Schmitt and Mosca.
(By the way, Carlyle was right on slavery: ruclips.net/video/eiS-cSUKsh8/видео.html)
Free will doesn't exist and elites should be lined up and shot. As for you, you should be enslaved in order to live by your own principles.
not slavery, abolition. Carlyle didn't argue for slavery. He argued against wasting millions of pounds on abolishing slavery.
Honestly I don't think you know much about history or EU4