Sometimes I can’t resist temptation. In this case to return to the old debate about the importance in history – or lack thereof – of great men.*
A word about the words. “Great” does not here mean good. It means having an enormous impact. Changing the course of history.
“Men” does, though, does mean men. Why men? Because now as before leaders are, overwhelmingly, men. Not women. Overwhelmingly leaders are men in every country and culture, and in every sector. For all the progress that women have made in recent decades, equity at the top still eludes them, us. Likely, moreover, it always will.
That though is another conversation. Here I return to the point of this post. Which is to suggest that though we live in a time – the time of Trump – in which the debate seems if not dead, then on life support, we cannot resist it. It’s why Daniel Immerwahr raises it in a recent piece in The New Yorker.**
He reminds us that the most famous voice denying and decrying the importance of great men was Leo Tolstoy’s. Tolstoy argued that to “ascribe historical agency to figures like Napoleon was akin to seeing a herd of cattle and concluding that the cow in front must be in charge.” What Tolstoy believed instead was “that social forces, not men on horseback, decide the fate of nations.”
Immelwahr writes, importantly, correctly, that academia is also hostile to the idea that leaders matter much if at all. “The scholarly tendency has been to devalue choice and chance as historic factors. War and revolutions might feel chaotic, but they happen for reasons rooted in economics, ideology, geography, and climate. The doings of generals, in this view, are froth on the waves.”
This in his review of a book just out, by Scott Anderson, titled King of Kings. The book is about the Iranian revolution (1979) in which three men were of overweening importance: the Iranian Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi; the Iranian cleric and revolutionary, Ruhollah Khomeini; and the president of the Unites States, Jimmy Carter. They more than anything or anyone else explain what happened and why.
All this at a moment when the importance of great men seems indisputable. I admit to a bias. My interest in leadership is lifelong. Moreover, studying it, writing about it, teaching about it is what I do. But… I approach leadership systemically. I do not focus solely on leaders. I pay equal attention to followers and to the contexts within which leaders and the followers are situated.
I am arguing therefore that the longstanding great man debate is artificial. Of course great men matter! The evidence that they do is overwhelming. This does not, though, mean that Tolstoy was wrong. He was not, he was right. Context matters. It matters every bit as much as do leaders – and followers.
Far more than any other single individual or single anything else, Vladimir Putin has recently dominated events in Europe. Far more than any other single individual or single anything else, Donald Trump has recently dominated events in the global West. What these men do when they meet tomorrow in Anchorage, how they act and interact, what they say and do not say, what they decide and do not decide will be enormously significant. This is not to say that no one and nothing else is. Rather it is to underscore that sometimes great men matter. A lot.
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*See, for example, this post.