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Personality and Politics in the Early Modern Era
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14601 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1988 |
3,043 Words |
| Author
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John G. Gagliardo
John G. Gagliardo is professor of history and international
relations at Boston University. He is the author of several
books, including Reich and Nation: The Holy Roman Empire as
Idea and Reality, 1763-1806. |
It is a bold undertaking for anyone to paint with as broad a brush across as large a canvas of time as Paul Kennedy has done in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Such an enterprise not only risks placing the historian onto seas relatively uncharted from the standpoint of his own previous research and expertise, but also carries the danger of the methodological reduction and oversimplification which often characterize attempts to deal meaningfully with the rich variety of people and events encountered across centuries of the history of any civilization--in this case, European civilization. But such undertakings must be essayed from time to time if history is to escape the narrow bounds of utility set for it by so many of its professional academic practitioners and to become part of the world of pragmatic general knowledge and discourse. Kennedy is to be admired for his courage to accept the challenge.
This commentary is that of a specialist in early modern European history--a period that admittedly is not Kennedy's own terra cognita, given the nature of his earlier research and publication. But since Kennedy uses the Europe of 1500-1815 as the foundation of his general theory of the relationship between the expense of the security imperative, the economic base on which that imperative must rest, and the consequences on the balance of power and politics of an imbalance between the two, it is perhaps justifiable to look with some care at his treatment of a period that is probably less well known to the general reader than more recent times.
The dynamics of development
Let us begin, however, with the double argument of Kennedy's thesis: first, that the changes occurring over time in the world's military-power balances are the result of a dynamic driven largely by economic and technological developments, with their resultant social, political, and military consequences; and second, that these economic and technological developments, uneven in pace of occurrence, have critical long-term impacts on the relative military strength and strategic position of the great powers. This argument underpins the grand theory of the book: that the preservation or increase of national power in a competitive world is a function of maintaining a balance between the expense of security needs, on the one hand, and the overall strength of the economy, especially with respect to those factors most crucial to future growth (mostly, but not exclusively, investment). Security costs that sap the foundations of economic growth over any lengthy period of time will become increasingly unbearable, and will result in a diminution of both security
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