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The articles on military heroes, statesmen, and intellectuals in which Oliveira Martins acknowledged the exception – Pombal, Saldanha, Garrett, Antero, Napoleon, Luís da Baviera, Gladstone, Renan,... – were nothing but a prelude to his major biographical works and those which, even today, credit him with a large part of the laurels. But in these articles, even more expressively, since they were closer to the biographical style of their time, one could already find a conception – eclectic, nonetheless – of history and, in particular, of human agency, which largely echoed the debates around the notion of the great man and hero that tinted the most relevant biographical production of the second half of the 19th century, within and beyond the academic circles. (L. Magalhães, “Oliveira Martins: o historiador e o politico”, 1930, p.ii)
In Oliveira Martins, as in others, the syncretic way in which the highly fashionable variations on the voluntarist theory was composed is especially symptomatic. The debate on the concept of the great man, which at the end of the century took the forefront in historiographical theorisation around agency, never offered well-defined views. Somewhat akin to Herculano's approach when, despite contradicting the history of kings and dynasties built around singular figures, in practice, he emphasised the role of individual will and motivations as explanatory factors, the great character could never divorce himself from the collective that served as his reference or even from the conditions imposed by the social environment on his actions. On the one hand, the almost indiscriminate use of the ideas of hero and great man, referring primarily to men of arms for the former and the increasingly dominant benefactors of humanity (among statesmen and men of letters, arts, and sciences) for the latter, pointed to the consensual prevalence of the criterion of exceptionality, or superiority, in the selection of historical protagonists, far beyond considerations about the limits that could or could not be recognised in their actions; on the other hand, and as a logical consequence, there was a de facto agreement, in general terms, regarding their conception (simultaneous or even interchangeable) as a synthesis, symbol, representative, or interpreter of the national whole in its historical evolution.
