Scottish writer THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881) is perhaps best remembered today for dubbing economics "the dismal science," but in his day he was widely known-and often controversial-for his criticism of the "progress" of the Industrial Revolution, for his satires in the vein of Jonathan Swift, and for his championing of German Romantic poetry to English readers.This 1841 volume collects six of Carlyle's lectures on heroes, which offered a damning critique of the rising faceless corporatism and the denigration of the individual that the Industrial Revolution was promoting. Honoring the power of great men to change history, Carlyle discusses: The hero as divinity: Odin, Paganism, and Scandinavian mythology The hero as prophet: Mahomet and Islam The hero as poet: Dante and Shakespeare The hero as priest: Luther, Reformation by Knox, and Puritanism The hero as man of letters: Johnson, Rousseau, and Burns The hero as king: Cromwell, Napoleon, and modern revolutionism

Carlyle’s classic exploration of heroes and heroic leadership is accompanied by essays that reevaluate the spiritual, rather than the authoritarian, roots of his thought.

Excerpt from On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History: Six Lectures; Reported, With Emendations and Additions WE have undertaken to discourse here for a little on Great Men, their manner of appearance in our world's business, how they have shaped themselves in the world's history, what ideas men formed of them, what work they did - ou Heroes, namely, and on their reception and performance; what I call Hero-worship and the Heroic ia' human a 'airs. Too evidently this is a large topic; deserving quite other treatment than we can expect to give it at present. A large topic; indeed, an illimitable one; wide as Universal History itself. For, as I take it, Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bot tom the History Of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, pat terns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer mate rial result, the practical realisation and embodyment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world's history, it may justly be considered, were the his tory of these. Too clearly it is a topic we shall do no justice to in this place! About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."