(A Brief) History of Heroes

Most of us have our own rough defnition of heroism — we think we know a hero when we see one. But pinning down those attributes is a challenge; your hero may not look much like mine. So it’s worth asking: Are there certain immutable characteristics that have defined heroism across the ages? The men and women on the following pages are individuals of extraordinary distinction, but how do they stack up against the legends of the past? Although there are some timeless, universal qualities known as heroic, throughout history the idea of the hero has fluctuated and evolved to suit the ethos of the times.

The modern concept of the hero would not have been possible without the Renaissance. Previously, the Middle Ages had not looked favorably upon man’s achievements. Living under the shadow of human sin, the Roman Catholic scholars of medieval Europe stressed the afterlife. Greatness came from God, not man, so the true heroes of Christendom were the martyrs, missionaries and priests preparing for salvation. The Renaissance challenged this bleak vision. Part of the challenge came from 14th century Italy’s rediscovery of the classical literature of ancient Greece and Rome. The histories of Tacitus, the biographies of Plutarch, but above all the letters and speeches of the orator Cicero opened the classical world anew. What they all emphasized was man’s capacity for greatness.

It was the Italian poet Francesco Petrarca, known as Petrarch, who ushered in the new humanism. What excited Petrarch was the classical tradition of education — the aim of which, as Cicero had explained, was to cultivate not a narrow range of technical skills, but the single, noble virtue of manliness. This idea of virtus went on to inspire a Renaissance literature of advice books outlining what was needed to foster a well-rounded man. A manly man was proficient in warfare, scholarship, government, letters and even the art of seduction. In the city-states of 15th century Italy arose a new belief in human potential. The modern hero was born, and the ideal of the Renaissance man remains a heroic value today.

From this Renaissance culture — this new stress on the autonomy and virtue of man — came a series of histories in the late 14th century recounting the inspirational lives of great men. Petrarch’s De Viris Illustribus (On Famous Men) ignored saints and martyrs, concentrating instead on the achievements of generals and statesmen. For Petrarch, heroism demanded the purposeful display of virtus: from Romulus, the founder of Rome, to the war leader Scipio, Petrarch celebrated heroes who conquered fortune, beat the odds and rose to the top. More than a few of the heroes in these pages fit that description.

There was, however, one dissenting voice: that of the disgruntled Florentine diplomat Niccolò Machiavelli. He ridiculed Cicero’s lofty sentiments about virtus. In The Prince (1513), he turned these Renaissance truisms on their head. Where Petrarch had stressed the virtues of justice, clemency and honesty in great men, Machiavelli offered the chillier satisfactions of realpolitik. His heroes were those who thought it was better to be feared than loved; who practiced cruelty rather than charity; who didn’t base their conduct on firm principles but on the winds of fortune. Machiavelli’s hero was not the valiant General Scipio, but the scheming, manipulative prince Cesare Borgia. This notion of antiheroism represented a shocking reversal of thinking and secured Machiavelli his everlasting notoriety (and it finds its echo today in some scheming statesmen and princes of industry).

Yet Petrarch’s more benign vision of classical heroism continued to dominate European culture for centuries to come. Only in the 18th century was the Renaissance man finally thwarted. The rationalists and philosophers of the Enlightenment had little time for the vanity of personal greatness: they advocated the heroism of humanity. Universal human reason was to be honored, not the petty achievements of politicians and conquerors, or “celebrated villains,” as Voltaire called them. Even history, it was thought, could provide little insight into heroism. The Edinburgh philosopher David Hume, writing in 1748, summed up the rigid formalism of the day: “It is universally acknowledged that there is a great uniformity among the actions of men, in all nations and ages, and that human nature remains still the same, in its principles and operations.”

Inevitably, the impersonal equality of the Enlightenment produced a reaction: Romanticism. Beginning in the late 1790s with the writings of Schiller, Schlegel and Novalis, the early German Romantics criticized the elevation of reason above sentiment. Instead, through art, literature, music and love they celebrated the inner emotions and creative development of the human spirit. Schlegel declared genius “the natural condition of mankind” and believed it “characteristic of humanity that it must rise above humanity.”

The Romantics believed in man’s natural goodness and the call of individuals to develop their personality to the full. If the Renaissance tradition had emphasized military glory and outward achievement, the German Romantics emphasized the uniqueness of each intimate experience. The heroes of the day were not warriors but poets, dreamers, philosophers and rebels. Lord Byron (1788-1824) managed to embody it all: author, lover and proto-revolutionary. His early death only augmented his heroic status and made him an iconic precursor of Che Guevara or Kurt Cobain. British culture became steeped in Romanticism through the work of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey. In France, Jean-Jacques Rousseau celebrated his own brilliance and irrepressible humanity in his Romantic masterpiece, The Confessions. His lead was followed by Victor Hugo who, through the pages of Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, championed the human spirit in the face of all adversity. And Italy awaited its own Romantic hero in the form of revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi.

But it was the Victorian polemicist Thomas Carlyle who turned the countercultural Romantic into the Great Man of history. A painfully tortured genius, Carlyle found in the humanism of the Romantics a refuge from his own brutal, mechanical age. For Carlyle, the Britain of the Industrial Revolution was a petty, soulless society run by technocrats lacking any conception of greatness. In 1840, he delivered a series of lectures, titled On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, lamenting this cultural poverty and championing the role of great men in history. From the prophet Muhammad to William Shakespeare to Martin Luther to Napoleon Bonaparte, Carlyle argued, “Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.” In Carlyle’s analysis, heroic conduct was not a skill which could be taught, as Renaissance thinkers had hoped; it was something individuals were gifted with. Moreover, heroes were not people to be emulated, but rather demigods to be acknowledged as possessing greater power. It was a dangerously demagogic idea, but one that struck a chord in Victorian Britain and led to such national saviors of the 20th century as Winston Churchill, General de Gaulle and, to some, Generalissimo Franco. Yet even as Carlyle eulogized his Great Men, there emerged an alternative: the earnest heroism of middle-class virtue. Where the Renaissance hero achieved greatness in battle and the Romantic hero turned his back on society, the 19th century hero quietly did his duty. As the Leeds-based lecturer Samuel Smiles put it in his global best seller, Self-Help, “Many are the lives of men unwritten, which have nevertheless as powerfully influenced civilization and progress as the more fortunate Great whose names are recorded in biography.” And in recording the lives of such men as engineers James Watt and Richard Arkwright, Smiles aimed to do just that. Heroism had become democratized. It was a history of earnest, unpublicized endeavor which caught the imagination of one of my own heroes, John Ruskin. “The wonder has always been great to me,” he wrote in 1864, “that heroism has never been supposed in anywise consistent with the practice of supplying people with food, or clothes; but rather with that of quartering one’s self upon them for food, and stripping them of their clothes.” This special issue continues to honor that vision, by recognizing several heroes who seek to bring staples of Western life to those who lack them. As the democratic 20th century dawned, there was an ever stronger emphasis on those whom history forgot. For the traditional marks of heroism had passed over the worthy lives of millions. Some seemed even to believe that every human being was intrinsically heroic. The late 19th century Russian anarchist Alexander Herzen suggested that it was “quite enough to be simply a human being, to have something to tell.” Virginia Woolf — daughter of Leslie Stephen, editor of that Victorian celebration of heroism, the Dictionary of National Biography — was moved to remark: “Since so much is known that used to be unknown, the question now inevitably asks itself, whether the lives of great men only should be recorded. Is not anyone who has lived a life, and left a record of that life, worthy of biography — the failures as well as the successes, the humble as well as the illustrious? And what is greatness? And what smallness?” It was up to modern biographers to set up new standards of merit and “new heroes for our admiration.”

As the century progressed, many felt the need to reject heroism altogether. Carlyle’s Great Man had morphed into Nietzsche’s Super-Man with calamitous global consequences. The warmongering of European statesmen led novelist E.M. Forster to condemn hero-worship as “a dangerous vice.” For Forster, one of democracy’s merits was that “it does not � produce that unmanageable type of citizen known as the Great Man,” but “produces instead different kinds of small men — a much finer achievement.”

Small heroes seemed absolutely necessary in the face of Adolf Hitler. Just as the philosophers of the Frankfurt School physically fled their native land, so too did the thinkers of the mid-century flee from the idea of equating militarism with greatness. Even during wartime, George Orwell felt able to write in 1944, “The English people have no love of military glory and not much admiration for great men.” Orwell did not ascribe to heroism semidivine greatness or classical virtus; instead he admired “a moral quality which must be vaguely described as decency.”

Heroism today is even more complex. The transparency that mass media demands means that personal foibles can, in the public imagination, often overshadow great acts: today, John F. Kennedy is as much remembered for his love life as for the achievements of his presidency. The cult of celebrity often threatens to undermine true heroism; while these pages contain their share of celebrities, they have used their fame to further the public good.

Perhaps most problematic is that few modern Western states are homogeneous societies instinctively able to rally around “national heroes.” (Because this edition is published throughout Africa and the Middle East, we’ve included heroes from those regions as well.) An educated, multicultural citizenry rarely shares a unified benchmark of heroism — which is why this issue singles out a French woman of Algerian descent fighting for women’s rights and a half-Turkish, half-Kurdish man who’s been persecuted for trying to preserve Kurdish music. At the same time, when a country’s star athlete wins an Olympic medal after years of struggle, how many among us can fully resist sharing the national pride?

That tension is precisely why the consensual search for modern heroes is all the more important. And so TIME has chosen a definition of heroism based on merit and humanity; one that seeks to record the often forgotten achievements of an unremarked public; one that values overcoming adversity and celebrates selfless acts to help others. We think it’s an appropriately 21st century reflection of history’s shifting sands. And when you’ve read this year’s profiles, we hope you’ll agree.