This doubt, which has sparked debates among generations of historians, appears again today in the face of a controversial figure like Donald Trump, whose “rebellious” tresses (unkempt hair) have become the symbol of a narcissistic personality, capable of upsetting world balances. Can we really explain the course of History with a fiery oriental love or with a lock of hair spared by the barber’s scissors?
“If Cleopatra’s nose had been shorter, the whole face of the Earth would have changed,” wrote Pascal, referring to the fact that a seemingly insignificant detail can decide the fate of the world. In the marble bust preserved in the Vatican Museums, the nose is missing, broken, leaving room for the imagination. But coins of the time present the exact profile of the last queen of Egypt.
Was it her beauty that captivated Antoninus and led him to destruction at the Battle of Anzio, thus paving the way for the reign of Augustus? Or perhaps History follows an unstoppable trajectory, independent of the whims of chance? This is, in fact, suggested by the theory of the “Thucydides trap”, according to which a dominant power uses force to restrain a rising power, to the extreme possibility of war, as once happened between Sparta and Athens and as is happening today between the United States and China. This doubt, which has sparked debates among entire generations of historians, appears again today in the face of a controversial figure like Donald Trump, whose “rebellious” hairdo has become the symbol of a narcissistic personality, capable of shaking the world’s balance. Can we really explain the course of History with a fiery oriental love or with a lock of hair spared by the barber’s scissors?
Or is Trump’s emergence not a coincidence, but the inevitable result of the economic and geopolitical forces that are colliding in our time? In this context, it is enough to remember that thirty years ago, the United States accounted for 20.2 percent of the world’s Gross Domestic Product (at purchasing power parity) and China only 4.9 percent, while in 2024 China has reached 19.5 percent and the US has fallen to 14.9 percent. Chinese exports have increased in these thirty years from 2.8 to 14.6 percent of the world total, while American exports have fallen from 11.8 to 8.5 percent.
Two different conceptions of History are thus confronted. According to a kind of historical determinism, the American leader is nothing more than a pawn in a picture that surpasses him. The loss of economic and technological primacy by Washington, and the consequences of feelings of social boredom, have made the rise of this tycoon, who has thus been stripped of any direct personal responsibility, inevitable. There are important precursors to this idea: Hegel believed that the “cunning of reason” was put at the service of Napoleon’s ambition, to achieve his goal: the end of the ancien régime and the spread of bourgeois right in Europe.
The second school of thought puts forward free will and rejects the idea of the inevitability of history. Trotsky wrote, in his memoirs, that he had caught a bad cold in the autumn of 1923, while hunting for wild ducks. That seasonal illness temporarily kept him out of political strife at a crucial moment in the clash with Stalin: a seemingly insignificant detail that, due to Lenin’s sudden death, deprived him of the leadership of the Soviet Union. We can therefore say that, if the economic crisis and political crisis of the Weimar Republic had not occurred, affected by galloping inflation, high unemployment, violence in the cities, in a Germany ravaged by a sense of moral guilt after the catastrophe of World War I, President Hindenburg, old and sick, could have acted differently in January 1933, by not appointing as Chancellor of the Reich a man who, with his maniacal obsessions, would drag the world towards the abyss.
Similarly, the decline in confidence in American prospects is not enough to explain everything: Trump’s choices – tariffs and ambiguous positions on crises like the one in Ukraine or Palestine – matter, and with them comes moral responsibility.
Both approaches to history have their limitations. Determinism can lead to fatalism: if history were a script written in advance, could we not judge the actions of Genghis Khan or Attila? On the other hand, conceiving of history as a chain of chance events leads to cynicism: we feel that we are at the mercy of chance, as if the future depended on a pointed nose or a lock of unkempt hair. The philosophers Karl Popper, a harsh critic of the “misery of historicism,” and Isaiah Berlin, who scoffed at “historical inevitability,” have warned us about the danger of theses that eliminate individual responsibility. The great British historian Edward H. Carr, in polemic with both, sought a middle ground, asserting that History depends on large structural processes, not on the “great man” of the moment – although he too acknowledges the role of chance events: the task is to identify the underlying causes that set the gears in motion.
Perhaps the way we see History changes according to the climate of the times we live in. Historians of antiquity like Herodotus and Polybius simply recounted chronicles (res gestae) to draw lessons from human passions (greed, anger, heroism), useful for reading the present, without seeking a definitive understanding of history.
It was only with the Enlightenment of the 18th century that modern historiography (historia rerum gestarum) and a philosophy of history were born. Voltaire, Montesquieu and Condorcet, intoxicated by freedom after two centuries of tyranny, had an unwavering faith in the progress of humanity guided by reason, and saw in the past the path taken towards liberation from slavery. For Hegel, history was the progress of consciousness on freedom, culminating in the modern State. According to Marx’s eschatological vision, the end of History is the salvific advent of a classless society. Even the Victorian historians of the 19th century, at the height of the glory of the British Empire, saw a teleological vision in history. But today our view is completely different.
We are no longer at the peak of glory, we live in a divided West and in an identity crisis, which feels its decline. As a result, our value system is also changing. It is increasingly difficult for us to find the thread that will guide us in history, a horizon that will orient our steps. Therefore, even a loose lock of hair is no longer a grotesque detail, but a symbol of rebirth that a part of America has begun to appreciate.
Not because the barber failed to cut it, but because the values of liberal society – multiculturalism, multilateralism, even the free market and democracy itself – have been consumed in the realm of disappointment. That is why we are more inclined to believe that History is no longer guided by the laws of progress, but we are convinced that it is a field of eternal battles. If history is decided by a roll of the dice, then not only Cleopatra’s nose, but also Trump’s tuft of hair can change the fate of the world.
