ABSTRACT

Even if one rejects the subjectivity of psychobiography as an approach to studying personality, we cannot leave things at that, not least because there are other ways of approaching the topic. Clearly, personality does not matter in all circumstances, and political psychologists who focus on personality factors nowadays are generally cautious in the kind of claims that they make. A leading advocate of personality-based approaches to politics, Fred Greenstein, provides us with a classic distinction which formalizes in a rather neat fashion some ideas that may have occurred to you already. In assessing whether individual leaders “matter”—in our terms, whether dispositions make a difference in shaping behavior—Greenstein distinguishes between what he calls actor dispensability and action dispensability. 1 This is a handy way of thinking about the forces that shape politics and history.