DANIEL BYMAN is a Professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and
a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.
KENNETH M. POLLACK is a Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.148 μ¢¤³£ ¬μμ¬
Beyond Great Forces
How Individuals Still Shape History
Daniel Byman and Kenneth M. Pollack
H
istory used to be told as the story o great men. Julius Caesar,
Frederick the Great, George Washington, Napoléon
Bonaparte, Adol Hitler, Mao Zedong—individual leaders,
both famous and infamous, were thought to drive events. But then it
became fashionable to tell the same stories in terms o broader struc-
tural forces: raw calculations o national power, economic interde-
pendence, or ideological waves. Leaders came to be seen as just
vehicles for other, more important factors, their personalities and
predilections essentially irrelevant. What mattered was not great
men or women but great forces.
In his 1959 classic, Man, the State, and War, the scholar Kenneth
Waltz made the case for this new approach. He argued that focusing
on individual leaders or human nature more broadly oered little
purchase when it came to understanding global politics. Instead, one
should look at the framework o the international system and the
distribution o power across it. In the midst o the Cold War, Waltz
was contending that it mattered little whether Dwight Eisenhower
or Adlai Stevenson occupied the White House, or Joseph Stalin or
Nikita Khrushchev the Kremlin. The United States and the Soviet
Union would pursue the same interests, seek the same allies, and
otherwise be forced by the pressure o Cold War competition to act
in a certain way.
Academics embraced the “structuralist” Zeitgeist, and in subse-
quent decades, although some theorists expanded their list o the
primary movers in international relations to include regime types,
institutions, and ideas, they continued to downplay leaders. Today, at