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.