Abstract
To say that political science as a whole ignores the role of specific leaders is inaccurate.1 To say, by contrast, that most modern international relations scholars tend to either ignore or disregard the role of individual leaders is, on the whole, true.2 Undeniably, contemplating a role for the personality and abilities of any particular leader is difficult to reconcile with aspirations to scientific rigor. In one of the rare articles in the international relations literature that attempts to address the issue, the authors break down criticisms against consideration of the leader into two general varieties. In the first, they claim that “many political scientists contend that individuals ultimately do not matter, or at least they count for little in the major events that shape international politics.”3 Yet, as was suggested in the Introduction, the claim that individual leaders do not matter is simply inconsistent with the experience of most people and must be rejected because, as noted by Robert Tucker, “people as individuals, and particularly those who are leaders, often make a significant difference in historical outcomes by virtue of the ways in which they act or fail to act at critical junctures in the development of events.”4 The opening pages of this book suggested that it is hard to imagine the Second World War and its consequences without reference to Hitler.
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Notes
The literature in the American Politics subfield has perhaps dealt with the issue most extensively in writings on the role that particular presidents play. The canonical text on this is. Another contribution to the genre is Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). Some work on the topic has been less directly focused on the presidency and encompasses leadership within the American political culture more broadly.
Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
Adam D. Sheingate, “Political Entrepreneur-ship, Institutional Change, and American Political Development,” Studies in American Political Development 17 (Fall 2003): 185–203.
For the most part, the international relations literature is silent on the topic, leading students to infer the role that leaders may play more from what is either assumed or not said than what is. Within the discipline, the most illustrative case of the irrelevance of leadership comes from the explicitly structural work of Kenneth Waltz. One of Waltz’s most intriguing and controversial contributions comes from his piece The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1981). Waltz argues that because nuclear weapons have a stabilizing effect, their spread to conflict zones should be encouraged rather than discouraged. This argument, logical on its face, flies against the common wisdom in policy circles. In Waltz, whether the state is guided by Saddam Hussein or Mother Theresa makes no difference; the stabilizing effect of the weapons is the same. Most people would not agree with that conclusion. Indeed, Scott Sagan has forcefully denounced Waltz’s argument in Scott D. Sagan and Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995). Sagan points out that the efficacy of nuclear weapons as a stabilizing element is contingent on their rational employment by the actor possessing them and that that rationality should not be assumed to apply equally in all cases. The essence of Sagan’s argument, although he does not frame it this way explicitly, is that leadership matters and that some leaders can be trusted, while others cannot. A nuclearized Saddamite Iraq was a concern, a nuclearized Israel less so. I thank Steven David for bringing this particular insight on the irrelevance of leadership to my attention. An exception to the silence on leadership is.
Margaret G. Hermann and Joe D. Hagan, “International Decision Making: Leadership Matters,” Foreign Policy, Spring 1998, 124–37.
Daniel L. Byman and Kenneth M. Pollack, “Let Us Now Praise Great Men: Bringing the Statesmen Back In,” International Security 25, no. 4 (Spring 2001): 108.
Robert C. Tucker, Politics as Leadership: Revised Edition (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1981/1995), 27.
Eliot A. Cohen, Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen and Leadership in Wartime (New York: Free Press, 2002).
Jerrold M. Post and Robert S. Robbins, When Illness Strikes the Leader: The Dilemma of the Captive King (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).
For examples of the “psychology of the leader” literature, see Raymond Birt, “Personality and Foreign Policy,” Political Psychology 14, no. 4 (December 1993): 607–25.
Jason M. Satterfield, “Cognitive Affective States Predict Military and Political Aggression and Risk-Taking: A Content Analysis of Churchill, Hitler, Roosevelt, and Stalin,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 42, no. 6 (December 1998): 667–90.
Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, The Mind of Stalin: A Psychoanalytic Study (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1988).
Frederick C. Redlich, Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Richard J. Samuels, Machiavelli’s Children: Leaders and their Legacies in Italy and Japan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).
Kenneth N. Waltz, “Anarchic Orders and Balances of Power,” in Neo-realism and Its Critics, Robert O. Keohane, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 117.
Deborah A. Stone, “Causal Stories and the Formation of Policy Agendas,” Political Science Quarterly 104, no. 2 (Summer 1989): 282.
Robert D. Benford and David A. Snow, “Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment,” Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000): 614.
There are several variants of the “theory of the democratic peace.” For overviews, see Bruce Russet, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold War World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
Michael E. Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller (eds.) Debating the Democratic Peace, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 246–312.
Robert C. Tucker, “Personality and Political Leadership,” Political Science Quarterly 92, no. 3 (Autumn 1977): 385–86.
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© 2010 Ariel Ilan Roth
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Roth, A.I. (2010). Leaders and Leadership. In: Leadership in International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230113534_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230113534_3
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