Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

On Leadership

Queen of Sheba, Painting by Jean Jules Badin, 1870

Leadership, it may be said, is really what makes the world

go round. Love no doubt smoothes the passage; but love is

a private transaction between consenting adults. Leadership

is a public transaction with history. The idea of leadership

affirms the capacity of individuals to move, inspire, and mobilize

masses of people so that they act together in pursuit of an end.

Sometimes leadership serves good purposes, sometimes bad;

but whether the end is benign or evil, great leaders are those

men and women who leave their personal stamp on history.

Now, the very concept of leadership implies the proposition

that individuals can make a difference. This proposition

has never been universally accepted. From classical times to the

present day, eminent thinkers have regarded individuals as no

more than the agents and pawns of larger forces, whether the

gods and goddesses of the ancient world or, in the modern era,

race, class, nation, the dialectic, the will of the people, the spirit

of the times, history itself. Against such forces, the individual

dwindles into insignificance.

So contends the thesis of historical determinism. Tolstoy’s

great novel War and Peace offers a famous statement of the case.

Why, Tolstoy asked, did millions of men in the Napoleonic Wars,

denying their human feelings and their common sense, move

back and forth across Europe slaughtering their fellows? “The

war,” Tolstoy answered, “was bound to happen simply because

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it was bound to happen.” All prior history determined it. As for

leaders, they, Tolstoy said, “are but the labels that serve to give a

name to an end and, like labels, they have the least possible connection

with the event.” The greater the leader, “the more conspicuous

the inevitability and the predestination of every act he

commits.” The leader, said Tolstoy, is “the slave of history.”

Determinism takes many forms. Marxism is the determinism

of class. Nazism the determinism of race. But the idea of

men and women as the slaves of history runs athwart the deepest

human instincts. Rigid determinism abolishes the idea of

human freedom—the assumption of free choice that underlies

every move we make, every word we speak, every thought we

think. It abolishes the idea of human responsibility, since it is

manifestly unfair to reward or punish people for actions that are

by definition beyond their control. No one can live consistently

by any deterministic creed. The Marxist states prove this themselves

by their extreme susceptibility to the cult of leadership.

More than that, history refutes the idea that individuals make

no difference. In December 1931 a British politician crossing Fifth

Avenue in New York City between 76th and 77th Streets around

10:30 p.m. looked in the wrong direction and was knocked down

by an automobile— a moment, he later recalled, of a man aghast,

a world aglare: “I do not understand why I was not broken like an

eggshell or squashed like a gooseberry.” Fourteen months later an

American politician, sitting in an open car in Miami, Florida, was

fired on by an assassin; the man beside him was hit. Those who

believe that individuals make no difference to history might well

ponder whether the next two decades would have been the same

had Mario Constasino’s car killed Winston Churchill in 1931

and Giuseppe Zangara’s bullet killed Franklin Roosevelt in 1933.

Suppose, in addition, that Lenin had died of typhus in Siberia in

1895 and that Hitler had been killed on the western front in 1916.

What would the 20th century have looked like now?

For better or for worse, individuals do make a difference.

“The notion that a people can run itself and its affairs

queen of sheba

anonymously,”

wrote the philosopher William James, “is now

well known to be the silliest of absurdities. Mankind does nothing

save through initiatives on the part of inventors, great or

small, and imitation by the rest of us—these are the sole factors

in human progress. Individuals of genius show the way, and set

the patterns, which common people then adopt and follow.”

Leadership, James suggests, means leadership in thought as

well as in action. In the long run, leaders in thought may well make

the greater difference to the world. “The ideas of economists and

political philosophers, both when they are right and when they

are wrong,” wrote John Maynard Keynes, “are more powerful than

is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else.

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from

any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct

economist. . . . The power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated

compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.”

But, as Woodrow Wilson once said, “Those only are leaders

of men, in the general eye, who lead in action. . . . It is at

their hands that new thought gets its translation into the crude

language of deeds.” Leaders in thought often invent in solitude

and obscurity, leaving to later generations the tasks of imitation.

Leaders in action—the leaders portrayed in this series—have to

be effective in their own time.

And they cannot be effective by themselves. They must act

in response to the rhythms of their age. Their genius must be

adapted, in a phrase from William James, “to the receptivities

of the moment.” Leaders are useless without followers. “There

goes the mob,” said the French politician, hearing a clamor in

the streets. “I am their leader. I must follow them.” Great leaders

turn the inchoate emotions of the mob to purposes of their

own. They seize on the opportunities of their time, the hopes,

fears, frustrations, crises, potentialities. They succeed when

events have prepared the way for them, when the community

is awaiting to be aroused, when they can provide the clarifying

and organizing ideas. Leadership completes the circuit between

the individual and the mass and thereby alters history.

It may alter history for better or for worse. Leaders have

been responsible for the most extravagant follies and most

monstrous crimes that have beset suffering humanity. They

have also been vital in such gains as humanity has made in individual

freedom, religious and racial tolerance, social justice, and

respect for human rights.

There is no sure way to tell in advance who is going to lead

for good and who for evil. But a glance at the gallery of men and

women in Ancient World Leaders suggests some useful tests.

One test is this: Do leaders lead by force or by persuasion?

By command or by consent? Through most of history leadership

was exercised by the divine right of authority. The duty of

followers was to defer and to obey. “Theirs not to reason why/

Theirs but to do and die.” On occasion, as with the so-called

enlightened despots of the 18th century in Europe, absolutist

leadership was animated by humane purposes. More often,

absolutism nourished the passion for domination, land, gold,

and conquest and resulted in tyranny.

The great revolution of modern times has been the revolution

of equality. “Perhaps no form of government,” wrote the

British historian James Bryce in his study of the United States,

The American Commonwealth, “needs great leaders so much as

democracy.” The idea that all people should be equal in their

legal condition has undermined the old structure of authority,

hierarchy, and deference. The revolution of equality has had

two contrary effects on the nature of leadership. For equality, as

Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out in his great study Democracy

in America, might mean equality in servitude as well as equality

in freedom.

“I know of only two methods of establishing equality in

the political world,” Tocqueville wrote. “Rights must be given

to every citizen, or none at all to anyone . . . save one, who

is the master of all.” There was no middle ground “between

the sovereignty of all and the absolute power of one man.” In

his astonishing prediction of 20th-century totalitarian dictatorship,

Tocqueville explained how the revolution of equality

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10 queen of sheba

could lead to the Führerprinzip and more terrible absolutism

than the world had ever known.

But when rights are given to every citizen and the sovereignty

of all is established, the problem of leadership takes a

new form, becomes more exacting than ever before. It is easy

to issue commands and enforce them by the rope and the stake,

the concentration camp and the gulag. It is much harder to use

argument and achievement to overcome opposition and win

consent. The Founding Fathers of the United States understood

the difficulty. They believed that history had given them

the opportunity to decide, as Alexander Hamilton wrote in the

first Federalist Paper, whether men are indeed capable of basing

government on “reflection and choice, or whether they are

forever destined to depend . . . on accident and force.”

Government by reflection and choice called for a new style

of leadership and a new quality of followership. It required

leaders to be responsive to popular concerns, and it required

followers to be active and informed participants in the process.

Democracy does not eliminate emotion from politics;

sometimes it fosters demagoguery; but it is confident that, as

the greatest of democratic leaders put it, you cannot fool all of

the people all of the time. It measures leadership by results and

retires those who overreach or falter or fail.

It is true that in the long run despots are measured by results

too. But they can postpone the day of judgment, sometimes

indefinitely, and in the meantime they can do infinite harm. It

is also true that democracy is no guarantee of virtue and intelligence

in government, for the voice of the people is not necessarily

the voice of God. But democracy, by assuring the right

of opposition, offers built-in resistance to the evils inherent in

absolutism. As the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr summed it up,

“Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s

inclination to justice makes democracy necessary.”

A second test for leadership is the end for which power

is sought. When leaders have as their goal the supremacy of a

master race or the promotion of totalitarian revolution or the

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acquisition and exploitation of colonies or the protection of

greed and privilege or the preservation of personal power, it is

likely that their leadership will do little to advance the cause of

humanity. When their goal is the abolition of slavery, the liberation

of women, the enlargement of opportunity for the poor

and powerless, the extension of equal rights to racial minorities,

the defense of the freedoms of expression and opposition, it is

likely that their leadership will increase the sum of human liberty

and welfare.

Leaders have done great harm to the world. They have also

conferred great benefits. You will find both sorts in this series.

Even “good” leaders must be regarded with a certain wariness.

Leaders are not demigods; they put on their trousers one leg

after another just like ordinary mortals. No leader is infallible,

and every leader needs to be reminded of this at regular intervals.

Irreverence irritates leaders but is their salvation. Unquestioning

submission corrupts leaders and demeans followers.

Making a cult of a leader is always a mistake. Fortunately, hero

worship generates its own antidote. “Every hero,” said Emerson,

“becomes a bore at last.”

The signal benefit the great leaders confer is to embolden

the rest of us to live according to our own best selves, to be

active, insistent, and resolute in affirming our own sense of

things. For great leaders attest to the reality of human freedom

against the supposed inevitabilities of history. And they attest to

the wisdom and power that may lie within the most unlikely of

us, which is why Abraham Lincoln remains the supreme example

of great leadership. A great leader, said Emerson, exhibits

new possibilities to all humanity. “We feed on genius. . . . Great

men exist that there may be greater men.”

Great leaders, in short, justify themselves by emancipating

and empowering their followers. So humanity struggles to master

its destiny, remembering with Alexis de Tocqueville: “It is

true that around every man a fatal circle is traced beyond which

he cannot pass; but within the wide verge of that circle he is

powerful and free; as it is with man, so with communities.”

NB: Extras din Naomi Lucks, "Queen of Sheba"

Dupa cum ati realizat fragmentul nu imi apartine, dar aceasta prezentarea mi s-a parut exceptionala.