A longstanding rule of newspaper writing is that there’s always a local angle—there is, in other words, always a way to tie a bigger story back to something of interest to a newspaper’s readers. For newsletters, which don’t really have a “local” connection, we have to twist this a bit: there’s always a specific, topical angle for a more general story.
So it is with this newsletter and the death of Henry Kissinger.
Hold on, we know what you’re thinking. You’re not tuning into Thesis Statement for our political punditry. Fear not. We won’t litigate Kissinger’s career as a policy adviser and lobbyist here. Instead, let’s focus on Kissinger’s undergraduate thesis—and what it means for you and our mission of making all undergrad theses better.
Kissinger’s thesis, The Meaning of History, was submitted to the faculty of the Harvard Government Department in 1950. Kissinger was, it should be noted, a non-traditional student. He was 27 years old as a senior Government concentrator (the unnecessarily Harvard term for “major”), was a veteran of the Second World War, and had fled Nazi Germany with his family in advance of Kristallnacht and the intensification of anti-Jewish persecutions (and then the Shoah).
His thesis is notable partly because it represents Kissinger’s first independent academic work but mostly because it is very, very long. You can read it here on the Internet Archive; the scanned version clocks in at 400 pages long. (The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies published a print edition in 2022 to make it more available to readers.) It was to have been even longer; the introduction alludes to chapters on Hegel and Albert Schweitzer that Kissinger claimed to have cut.
We aren’t going to claim to have read it. It’s way too long to read for a free newsletter. And it’s also … well, it’s an undergraduate piece of work. It is juvenilia. And that’s fine! Undergraduate theses aren’t supposed to be the last word on a subject—they are supposed to be an introduction to how to converse.
Kissinger’s thesis, at any rate, is more of a monologue than a work of social science. It begins with the passage
In the life of every person, there comes a point when he realizes that out of all the seemingly limitless possibilities of his youth he has in fact become one actuality. No longer is life a broad plain with forests and mountains beckoning all around, but it becomes apparent that one’s journey across the meadows has indeed followed a regular path, that one can no longer go this way or that, but that the direction is set, the limits defined.
We must stress something here: Please, do not begin a thesis like this.
You might think that it shows a poetic gloss to a dreary subject, but we swear to you that we are more excited by the meat of the argument than by the life wisdom of a 20-something. More than that, this is a tired genre of beginning—fresh, perhaps, to the writer, but dully familiar to the audience, who has seen something like this in a thousand undergrad essays before.
The work does get better from there, establishing questions about what it means to regard history as alive or settled, even deterministic. (“History, according to [Karl] Popper,” Kissinger writes, “has no meaning. It is the chronicle of international crime and mass murder and takes no account of the tears and suffering of mankind.”) But it also meanders through reflections and generalities about thinkers that are not treated in any detail.
Kissinger’s thesis shows little interest in engaging with broader debates. There is, in the introduction at least, a decided disinterest in the thoughts of others and a pronounced insistence on expounding Kissinger’s own thoughts—which are, as hinted, less profound than they may have appeared at the composition table. (This might seem like a sweeping judgment, but in a 400-page PDF only five pages are given over to references.)
Kissinger’s conclusion in this doorstop was that there is to be no single judgment of historical meaning. At least, that’s what he seems to be arguing—there is no real statement of a thesis and no single argument to follow.1 Some of that has to do with the mode of writing in which Kissinger is engaging. This is not social science in any way we’d recognize today; it is more like a literary critique of philosophers’ writings about the ultimate meaning of history, a topic that lends itself neither to progressive debate nor to falsifiable statements.
We are not alone in having found Kissinger’s thesis hard to read. Notoriously, the Harvard faculty found that the thesis was too long—and implemented a subsequent rule that future theses should be much shorter, with a cap of 150 pages. At least one redditor has claimed that this was bunk, but indeed the Harvard Government department’s Guide to Writing a Thesis specifies a maximum of 35,000 words, or about 140 pages (at 250 words/page). (It also specifies a minimum of 15,000 words, which is longer than some universities’ maximum.)
Some students may wonder why a maximum would be necessary. In our experience, there’s always a student or two who thinks that the accumulation of words in a thesis—or essay—means that it’s better. That’s far from the truth. A Kissingerian thesis at 150 pages would have been not only easier to read but easier to think through, not least because the great benefit of limits is forcing clarity—not only on the reader, but, more important, on the writer.
So much of what Kissinger wrote is unnecessary fluff. To take a page (p. 338) at random, it is a discussion of Dante and Milton—in a thesis that is not about Dante or Milton. Another random page (p. 303): “But existence involves strife, life presents a continuous series of problems. Hardship seems the lot of humanity … Man’s real happiness consists of rational self-esteem. Now the eternal violence of history attains new meaning. Man’s faculties develop through the antagonism of society and the struggle between nations. …” Come on, quit trying to impress us with bro wisdom and just make an argument!
Being ruthless is not always a good strategy, but being ruthless in pruning digressions almost always is.
Worse, sprawl conceals weaknesses in the foundations. A thesis should be honed to present and support an argument. A paper that continues to spread over too many subjects is no longer honed, but dull, and, like a dull knife, it is likelier to hurt its own user than not. There’s a reason this newsletter is called Thesis Statement, and it is because at some point the author should be able to abstract—in a sentence or a paragraph—the core arguments being advanced. The fact that the Kissinger thesis is difficult to summarize is not testament to some great genius in its author; it is testament to an inability to produce a thesis that is fit for purpose.
The Kissinger Rule is a good one. If anything, it is much too generous to students (100 pages, exclusive of appendices, seems like a nice square number to us). And you can do a better job by keeping things shorter. A thesis balances making your argument in a thorough fashion against the time constraints of the reader. Don’t think about impressing us (or history!) with how much you can write: as professors, we can assure you that your readers are strapped to the gills, so keep it plain, direct, and concise.
The takeaway: Longer isn’t better. Longer can be worse. Stay focused.
The practical: Keep in touch with your adviser and your department or college about length expectations. Don’t exceed them unless there’s a good reason!
This isn’t just sour grapes from some wacko leftist professors or whatever epithet you’d like to throw at us to discount our opinions. Here’s a sample from the conclusion: “There can not consequently exist one universally valid philosophy of history. It portrays the metaphysical resolution of the dilemma of the experiences of freedom and the knowledge of necessity, and represents as much a testimony to the philosophical assumptions of its creators as an absolute standard for the evaluation of the numina history. Since the content ascribed to life, moreover, constitutes the emanation of an inner state, the possibility arises for the attainment of a level of meaning transcending the more phenomenal appearance of power phenomena. Kant’s ethical philosophy testifies to this solution, the ultimate reality of which is only accessible by way of an inner experience.” This is, to be blunt, hard sledding. We’re also not at all clear that Kantians would be eager to find Kissinger among their number, nor that realists would be thrilled with the deeply unrealist ontologies of Kissingerian philosophy. History, K seems to argue, is what we make of it.