I don't know what the current historical consensus on great men is. That is, where once it was believed that history was a product of the acts of great men--Caesars and Machiavellis and Winston Churchills--around the time that poststructuralism and identity politics and Foucault hit the academy, feminist history and social history and Marxist history and microhistory (and probably some other histories) combined to create a historiography in which social forces were what mattered, not individuals and their acts. I don't know if the pendulum has swung back (historiography isn't one of the things I keep close tabs on), though I'm guessing it is at least in mid-swing, like so many such pendulums.
I'm not suggesting that Ariel Sharon is a great man (god knows that is not something I would ever suggest, at least not based on the last 40 years). But my first instinct was to say that this is a case where the individual makes a difference. If Sharon dies tonight, things will be different. On the other hand, one could argue that if Sharon dies tonight, it will be just one more chapter in the disaster that is the Middle East, a disaster far greater than the acts of any individual.
[And how remarkable is it that Wikipedia already includes today's events?]
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