ABSTRACT
Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers is relevant to a question that political theorists and historians had already been considering for many years when the book was published. One of the other key perspectives on great power politics came from twentieth-century American political scientist Kenneth Waltz. His Theory of International Politics, published in 1979, presented an entirely theory-driven picture of global politics. John Lewis Gaddis explains the historical outcome of “stability” by examining the choices made by the superpowers rather than the nature of the superpowers themselves. Kennedy’s line of inquiry remained uniquely ambitious for his time. He never directly comments on either Waltz’s or Gaddis’s visions of history. Gaddis focused on a particular great power or group of great powers; Waltz focused on power in general. Kennedy’s theory formed the middle way between the international relations theorist and the historian.
