Making It Personal

Kaiser Wilhelm, Putin, and the levels of analysis problem

Last week Adam Casey and I published a short essay on Putin and personalist regimes. [“The Bully in the Bubble”, ungated]. This is not a post about that. It’s about how difficult it is to reconcile the role of structural forces with choices made by individuals. I do want to say first, though, that I was not a great fan of the title, since it reduces Putin’s motivations to a kind of schoolyard pathology. In fact one of our arguments was that Putin has not been reckless, but his pragmatism is running up against the problems of his personalist rule — unrestrained decision-making, bad intel, and belligerent self-censoring subordinates.

Which gets me to the core problem: integrating individual decision-making into structural explanations of politics. When I teach the Intro to IR course, I delay teaching the levels of analysis, a.k.a. Ken Waltz’s three images, until late in the semester. It’s too powerful — undergraduates start seeing everything in these terms, to the exclusion of other theo…