Hero Worship

Hero worship is Will Durant’s organizing frame in The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time, and he embraces the term unapologetically: “OF THE MANY IDEALS which in youth gave life a meaning and radiance… one at least has remained with me as bright and satisfying as ever before—the shameless worship of heroes.” It underwrites his theory of history — “the real history of man is not in prices and wages, nor in elections and battles… it is in the lasting contributions made by geniuses to the sum of human civilization and culture.” History, in Durant’s telling, is “the struggle of man through genius” against “the obdurate inertia of matter.”

The frame is generative rather than merely reverent: Durant invites readers into “The Country of the Mind,” a “celestial realm of all genius” where “the heroes of our species dwell,” and urges them to build their own pantheons — “let us have many lists and many heroes; we cannot honor them too much.” This connects to the wiki’s Republic of Letters thread: civilization transmitted through accumulated genius “across a hundred generations.”

Context: “Hero worship” as an intellectual stance is most associated with Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), which argued world history is fundamentally the biography of great men — the tradition Durant is consciously working within.

Where this appears

• The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time — Durant’s explicit “shameless worship of heroes” and his genius-driven theory of history are a recurring frame throughout the book.