The history books I have read do not strongly support this assertion. E.g. WWII was a product of Hitler’s personality and Hitler’s false predictions about how e.g. Britain would react to an invasion of Poland.
One argument that gets a lot of traction in sociology is that only someone with Hitler’s personality and particular proclivities towards those false predictions could have grabbed the attention of the German people and founded the Third Reich. It’s not-quite predestination, but it’s an attempt to sort-of formalize the idea that “one man can’t make a difference”; that history is run by vast impersonal forces. The countertheory of course is the “Great Man” theory, where WWII was entirely about Hitler and Churchhill and FDR wielding their armies of teeming faceless heroes against each other like the Swords of Heaven.
The third alternative (that history occasionally focuses on critical cusps, where the smallest perturbation causes wildly different global downstream consequences) is rarely really discussed.
To put another way:
Hitler was not magic. The economic, social and technological conditions that gave rise to the Third Reich would have caused a similar conflict regardless of who rose to power. But the fact that it was Adolph Hitler who DID in fact rise to power, and that FDR and Chamberlain and Churchill and Stalin were the powers in their own states, crystalized all the particulars.
To use a physical metaphor, once the temperature of a fluid drops below its freezing point, it WILL freeze. But the particulars of where and what the impurities happen to be will determine exactly what the crystals look like, and those can be vastly different with just a tiny bit of change.
Hitler was not magic. The economic, social and technological conditions that gave rise to the Third Reich would have caused a similar conflict regardless of who rose to power.
It would probably have caused a conflict, but I take issue with “similar”. History has so many cusps, each potentially and unpredictably leading in several possible directions, with only one observed. What if Germany used graphite for fission, what if Germany decided to finish off Britain before engaging Russia, what if at least one of the Hitler assassination attempts were successful, etc. Same with almost any other time and place. In addition, the medium- and long-term consequences are also unpredictable, and what seems initially like a positive development could well turn out to be negative.
In your physical metaphor I’d compare it with freezing solid and staying solid, vs freezing, cracking and crumbling into pieces.
“Maybe someday, the names of people who decide not to start nuclear wars will be as well known as the name of Britney Spears.” should read:
“Maybe someday, the names of people who prevent wars from occurring will be as well known as the names of people who win wars.”
I think it’s safe to say that virtually all major wars are caused by forces too powerful for one single person to make a difference.
The history books I have read do not strongly support this assertion. E.g. WWII was a product of Hitler’s personality and Hitler’s false predictions about how e.g. Britain would react to an invasion of Poland.
One argument that gets a lot of traction in sociology is that only someone with Hitler’s personality and particular proclivities towards those false predictions could have grabbed the attention of the German people and founded the Third Reich. It’s not-quite predestination, but it’s an attempt to sort-of formalize the idea that “one man can’t make a difference”; that history is run by vast impersonal forces. The countertheory of course is the “Great Man” theory, where WWII was entirely about Hitler and Churchhill and FDR wielding their armies of teeming faceless heroes against each other like the Swords of Heaven.
The third alternative (that history occasionally focuses on critical cusps, where the smallest perturbation causes wildly different global downstream consequences) is rarely really discussed.
To put another way:
Hitler was not magic. The economic, social and technological conditions that gave rise to the Third Reich would have caused a similar conflict regardless of who rose to power. But the fact that it was Adolph Hitler who DID in fact rise to power, and that FDR and Chamberlain and Churchill and Stalin were the powers in their own states, crystalized all the particulars.
To use a physical metaphor, once the temperature of a fluid drops below its freezing point, it WILL freeze. But the particulars of where and what the impurities happen to be will determine exactly what the crystals look like, and those can be vastly different with just a tiny bit of change.
It would probably have caused a conflict, but I take issue with “similar”. History has so many cusps, each potentially and unpredictably leading in several possible directions, with only one observed. What if Germany used graphite for fission, what if Germany decided to finish off Britain before engaging Russia, what if at least one of the Hitler assassination attempts were successful, etc. Same with almost any other time and place. In addition, the medium- and long-term consequences are also unpredictable, and what seems initially like a positive development could well turn out to be negative.
In your physical metaphor I’d compare it with freezing solid and staying solid, vs freezing, cracking and crumbling into pieces.
Related: We wrestle not with flesh and blood