Reading a book on the early Cold War that focuses on the American personalities that helped influence the development of those policies, I am struck by the significantly different ways of interpreting history some of these policymakers had.  Some, especially, George Kennan, the author of the famous "X" article in Foreign Affairs, seemed to be what I would call structuralists.  They believe in impersonal forces that underlay all elements of history and that carry individual personalities along with them.  Others, subscribe more to the "Great Man" theory.  This view entails the thought that certain key personalities (like Alexander the Great, Caesar, Napoleon, or Hitler) play outsize roles and actually change the flow of history by acting almost like architects of new orders. 

The philosophy of history (of which the variants are myriad) is fascinating.  I am a believer in a hybrid of structuralism and "Great Man" theory.  Progress and social forces certainly establish a framework in which all decisions made by individuals, including leaders, artists, and thinkers are made.   All people are to this extent, creatures of their time, even if they are able to envision a future that no one else can see beyond their given context.  

However, it appears that at critical junctures, there are breaks with familiar patterns and history can take radically different courses.  Would Persia have been conquered by anyone except Alexander?  Would the Roman Republic have survived as a republic as opposed to an empire had Julius Caesar not crossed the Rubicon?  Would Germany have unified if the Prussian core had not gained a sense of national identity in opposition to the yolk of Napoleon?  Would Israel exist as a modern state in the Middle East if not for the Holocaust brought about because of the election of one man to power in Germany? 

Of course the same questions can be asked of so many people.  Would civil rights have been largely achieved without Martin Luther King Jr's beautiful poetry of speech and power of message?  What about India's independence from England without the presence of Gandhi?  Would we have nuclear weapons today if not for Einstein?  Indeed, the "what ifs" of history are too innumerable to really ponder.  Yet I can't escape the conclusion that without any of these people, the world would be a vastly different place.  Influenced though each might be by their given time on earth, they helped write new chapters through the actions they took.