Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy

Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy is a 2022 book by scholar and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. It was the last major work Kissinger produced in his more than 100 years of life. As with many of his later works, such as World Order (2014), it takes familiar themes from his scholarly and political career and updates them to reflect contemporary concerns. Kissinger was fascinated by the possibilities of individual leadership as early as his PhD dissertation, A World Restored (1957), in which Kissinger focused on the three statesmen most responsible for the post-Napoleonic order in Europe. Just as he did in his early scholarship, in Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy, Kissinger expresses concern about the scholastic trend in the Western world, particularly in the United States, to downplay the significance of individuals on the grounds that this “Great Man Theory of History” tells simple stories of individuals moving events all by themselves, ignoring the “movements, structures, and distributions of power” that purportedly move human events (xxvi). This volume is Kissinger’s final attempt to defend the value of the individual in shaping history, not to the exclusion of social forces, but rather through an individuals’ ability to give these social forces a solid direction and align them with fundamental human wants and needs.