Great Men Theory

A couple of weeks ago, TIME Magazine mentioned a survey on who was the greatest Russian leader. Of course, this was a survey run in Russia. You couldn't run such a survey in the U.S., where most people wouldn't be able to locate Russia on an unlabeled map of the world, let alone name one of their past leaders.

Reading the results, which are immaterial to my point, I tried to classify those leaders in my head. I came up with this: there are the feckless ones, the sinister ones, the dour managers, and the transformers. Arguably, the latter category included the Great Catherine, who brought Russia in contact with Europe and pulled it away from its Central Asia roots; Lenin, who upset the old order and ushered in the great and ultimately failed laboratory experiment of Communism; and Gorbachev, who closed that parenthesis. Note that I am not saying that their transformations were good or entirely successful: I am just saying that they were enormous, in some way "inspired," changes of direction. Whether Putin is just one of the "dour managers" à la Krushchev, or ranks among the sinister ones (Ivan the Terrible, Stalin) is yet to be seen, although it would be a stretch to compare his behavior to the degree of malevolence of those two.

After I had finished thinking of Russian leaders, I realized that it is a lot easier to start with another country, assuming one knows something about its history, than with one's own. For example, most French people learn about Napoleon in school in a very biased way. While he created a set of institutions and legal principles that endure to a large extent today, he arguably had a disastrous impact on all of Europe, not just France, through fifteen years of incessant wars. And to start with, he was basically a dictator who seized power in a coup, ostensibly because the previous governments were so dysfunctional that only a "providential man" with full powers could save the day. Which brings to mind the debate on whether Pétain, 140 years later, was a sinister or a feckless leader, a conscious ally of the fascists or a half-senile grandfather who was abused and manipulated by his ministers.

My model is too simple in many cases, for sure. If you look at U.S. leaders, what was Nixon? At home, he was sinister, but overseas, he was practically a transformer, considering that he ended the war in Vietnam and dealt constructively with China. For Bush No. 1 and Bush No. 2, the verdict of history will probably be one of double fecklessness, the second case being worse than the first because of the presence of some sinister puppetmasters named Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice. Now we shall see if Obama is a transformer. If his presidency is anything like the speech he gave the night of his election, there is a good chance of that.