Paul Kennedy: Do Leaders Make History, or Is It Beyond Their Control?
[Paul Kennedy is a professor of history and director of International Security Studies at Yale University and author of “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.”]
Some 70 years ago, on the evening of May 10, 1940, a controversial British politician entered Buckingham Palace for an audience with King George VI. The king asked him to become prime minister and to form a government. The politician then left to carry out his new job. His name was Winston Churchill.
To this day, that change in leadership — with the appeaser Neville Chamberlain shuttling off the stage — has been regarded as decisive. The dishonest decade of the 1930s had gone; now came “blood, sweat, toil and tears” — and an eventual, hard-fought victory. If anything proved Thomas Carlyle’s argument about the importance of the Great Man in history, then here it was. There was also ample contemporary evidence for this leader-centered theory in the form of Hitler (who adored Carlyle and was still reading him in his bunker in April 1945), Stalin and Roosevelt.
Nor is there any reason to doubt that Churchill’s accession to power did indeed change a lot of things. He unified the British nation, bringing Labour and Liberal politicians into his national War Cabinet, making Clement Attlee, the Labour Party leader, his deputy prime minister, unifying the separate defense command structures, and assuming enormous executive powers.
Churchill brought with him his extraordinary talents for rhetoric and language. As more than one observer noted, the new prime minister mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.
His visits to the bombed-out houses of East London, his surprise flights to the troops in Egypt, his incredible interest in new weapons, new forms of fighting war — anything, anything, to bring Hitler down — re-energized the British nation, and many smaller nations as well. Little wonder that he regularly tops the polls — American as well as British — as the most significant figure of the 20th century. Here was a man who placed his stamp upon world affairs.
Yet was he — or, indeed, any of the other Great Men — really all that decisive in altering world affairs? What, after all, changes the course of history?..
Read entire article at International Herald Tribune
Some 70 years ago, on the evening of May 10, 1940, a controversial British politician entered Buckingham Palace for an audience with King George VI. The king asked him to become prime minister and to form a government. The politician then left to carry out his new job. His name was Winston Churchill.
To this day, that change in leadership — with the appeaser Neville Chamberlain shuttling off the stage — has been regarded as decisive. The dishonest decade of the 1930s had gone; now came “blood, sweat, toil and tears” — and an eventual, hard-fought victory. If anything proved Thomas Carlyle’s argument about the importance of the Great Man in history, then here it was. There was also ample contemporary evidence for this leader-centered theory in the form of Hitler (who adored Carlyle and was still reading him in his bunker in April 1945), Stalin and Roosevelt.
Nor is there any reason to doubt that Churchill’s accession to power did indeed change a lot of things. He unified the British nation, bringing Labour and Liberal politicians into his national War Cabinet, making Clement Attlee, the Labour Party leader, his deputy prime minister, unifying the separate defense command structures, and assuming enormous executive powers.
Churchill brought with him his extraordinary talents for rhetoric and language. As more than one observer noted, the new prime minister mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.
His visits to the bombed-out houses of East London, his surprise flights to the troops in Egypt, his incredible interest in new weapons, new forms of fighting war — anything, anything, to bring Hitler down — re-energized the British nation, and many smaller nations as well. Little wonder that he regularly tops the polls — American as well as British — as the most significant figure of the 20th century. Here was a man who placed his stamp upon world affairs.
Yet was he — or, indeed, any of the other Great Men — really all that decisive in altering world affairs? What, after all, changes the course of history?..