Time & Perspective Quote by Albert Bushnell Hart

History loves a savior story: the lone statesman, the singular genius, the irreplaceable “great man” holding the world together by force of will. Hart punctures that romance with a historian’s cool knife. “Few characters in history are indispensable” isn’t just a shrug at hero worship; it’s a methodological warning. If your explanation depends on one person being necessary, you’ve probably smuggled in mythology where structure belongs.

The word “characters” does a lot of work. Hart doesn’t say “people” or “leaders” but “characters,” as in figures shaped by narrative and remembered through selective storytelling. He’s calling out the way historians and publics cast roles: hero, villain, martyr, genius. Once you reduce a complex system to a cast list, indispensability becomes an illusion of good plotting. The subtext is almost anti-cinematic: history is less a screenplay than a messy ecology of institutions, interests, technology, accidents, and mass behavior. Individuals matter, but they’re rarely the sole load-bearing beams.

Context matters, too. Hart wrote in an era when “great man” history still dominated popular and scholarly accounts, even as professional history was moving toward archives, social forces, and comparative explanation. His line reads like a nudge to his peers and students: resist the temptation to treat contingency as destiny.

There’s also a democratic edge. If few are indispensable, then change is not the private property of elites. Movements, bureaucracies, voters, workers, and rivals all get credit - and responsibility. Hart is reminding us that the most seductive history is often the least accurate.