Proto-Fascist Thomas Carlyle on this Day in History

This Day in History: Scottish historian, satirical writer, essayist, translator, philosopher, mathematician, and teacher, Thomas Carlyle, died on this day in 1881. Carlyle also gave us the idea of the Great Man: "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. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, 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 material result, the practical realization and embodiment, 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 history of these." 

If you read the above and are thinking of a Randian Great Men, that is not what Carlyle had in mind. 

"He made his appearance in the midst of the age of laissez faire, a time when the UK and the US had already demonstrated the merit of allowing society to take its own course, undirected from the top down. In these times, kings and despots were exercising ever less control and markets ever more. Slavery was on its way out. Women obtained rights equal to men. Class mobility was becoming the norm, as were long lives, universal opportunity, and material progress.

Carlyle would have none of it. He longed for a different age. His literary output was devoted to decrying the rise of equality as a norm and calling for the restoration of a ruling class that would exercise firm and uncontested power for its own sake. In his view, some were meant to rule and others to follow. Society must be organized hierarchically lest his ideal of greatness would never again be realized. He set himself up as the prophet of despotism and the opponent of everything that was then called liberal." ~Jeffrey A. Tucker

As such, Thomas Carlyle can be viewed as the forefather of Fascism. His idea of a Great Man was that of a dictator. 

"Carlyle's distaste for democracy and his belief in charismatic leadership was appealing to Joseph Goebbels, who frequently referenced Carlyle's work in his journal, and read his biography of Frederick the Great to Hitler during his last days in 1945. Many critics in the 20th century identified Carlyle as an influence on fascism and Nazism." Wikipedia

"Great men are almost always bad men." Lord Acton