In 1950, at the age of twenty-seven, Henry Kissinger wrote The Meaning of History as his senior thesis at Harvard university. Now, more than 70 years later, it’s published for the first time. The thesis explores the ideas of three important thinkers in Western philosophical and historical thought, in a way that also reflects Kissinger’s own transition from the Continental world to the Atlantic: Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), a German historian and philosopher; Arnold Toynbee (1889–1975), a British historian and philosopher and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), a Prussian of the European Enlightenment era and one of the most important philosophers of this time.

The study wrestles with some of the first-order dilemmas of Western political, philosophical, and moral thought. Its scope ranges from the Enlightenment through to the midpoint of the twentieth century – an era scourged by two world wars and the advent of the nuclear age. It also provides great insight into the conceptual perspective of its author, who was to become the most influential American statesman of the post-war period.