Appreciation, respect and perhaps even friendship for Brian Simon are not immediately the best conditions for a critical and detached investigation of his legacy. So we would do best to take account of this subjective element from the outset, all the more so because Gary McCulloch and Ruth Watts, in a recent special issue of "History of Education", requested explicitly that attention should be given to more 'awareness of theory and methodology in the work of the historian'. As a possible antidote to excessive reverence, the question certainly arises here of whether individuals could indeed play a leading role in the model of social historiography that Simon himself advocated. As he indicated in his autobiography, Brian joined the Communist Party in 1935, and his sympathy for Marxism almost cost him his job in Leicester--a fact (or feat?) that he recalled in an interview with Ruth Watts, seven months before his death. The consequence of this ideological background, however, could be that individual achievements in such a theoretical framework are actually irrelevant. To quote Pavla Miller, it is 'the complex logic of capitalism, inscribed in the various state institutions, which makes things happen; individuals are simply bearers of the structural relations in which they are situated; the social structure does not have a creative subject at its core'. Moreover, it may well be that each scientific discipline, probably from a reflex of self-preservation and, even more, self-development, now and then creates its own heroes, so there is no need for a historical researcher to become trapped by 'canonization'. Instead, his or her task seems to be more the puncturing of the myths that history has itself created, by for example pointing out their historical functionality and helping to explain them from the historical context. Such, as far as we are concerned, need not involve a denial of the personal merits of historical subjects. On the contrary, the reductionnal stars in history to more modest proportions can, in my opinion, only enhance their humanity.