Table of Contents
Historians have always been fascinated by leaders. Throughout recorded history, kings, generals, philosophers, prophets, dictators, presidents, prime ministers and captains of industry have been highlighted in accounts of public events. As one contemporary writer on leadership theory has suggested, ‘From its infancy, the study of history has been the study of leaders — what they did and why they did it’ (Bass 2007: 3).
One question that has persisted is the extent to which, on the one hand, an individual can create history compared to the extent to which, on the other hand, any individual, even a leader, is merely the product or prisoner of historical circumstances. Do leaders make history or does history make leaders? Certainly, some who became recognised as leaders owed much to the luck of being in the right place at the right time and responding successfully to a situation they had not initiated, while others on whom fortune did not smile faded from sight and never realised their potential (see Dowding, this volume).
Sidney Hook suggested some 60 years ago that individuals could make history but only when they had clear purposes and only when subject to a complex of conditions leading to ‘a plausible balance’ or even a symbiosis between the roles played by a leader and his or her context and culture. He concluded that ‘if the great man had not existed the course of events in essential respects would in all likelihood have taken a different turn’ (Hook 1945: 10 and 84).
Other historians, while recognising structural, situational and broader and more varied personal constellations at work, have also emphasised the causal role of great leaders in determining the politics of nations, economic and social changes within them, and wars and diplomacy among them. They assert that individual leaders made and still do make a difference, stressing what Peter Clarke has referred to as ‘the crucial role of the individual in an appropriate historical context’ (Clarke 1991: 7). As one historian has accurately suggested: ‘The study of political leadership must acknowledge the interaction between the leader’s resources, such as personal skills and political opportunities, and the constraints imposed by social, economic and political systems and historical circumstances’ (Moon 1999: 81). Or as a political scientist has pointed out: ‘Political leaders operate as wild cards between the realm of ideas and the material conditions which surround them’ (Johannson 2004: 3).
The British historian Arnold Toynbee, in his 12-volume A Study of History, written between 1934 and 1961, suggested that there were broad general changes in history, specifically the rise and fall of civilisations and cultures, based to a large extent on religion, an approach that was not well regarded by most other historians of his generation, though the ‘clash of civilisations’ theory has been recently and also controversially revived by the American international relations specialist Samuel P. Huntington (1996). But Toynbee added that the rise or the fall was determined at least partly by the success or failure of leadership and the wise or unwise decisions leaders made and, in a discussion on leadership with the Japanese Buddhist leader and peace activist Daisaku Ikeda, suggested that ‘personal leadership is needed for every collective enterprise of any kind, even for enterprises that are organised on the most democratic lines possible’ (Toynbee 1976). Democratic leadership was ‘a more delicate and difficult task than charismatic, dictatorial leadership’, which often depended on coercion or emotionally exciting one’s followers. The democratic leader had to steer a middle course between the populist pandering ‘to the wishes of his constituents, even when he judges their wishes to be misguided’, and tricking ‘his constituents into voting for a policy that he judges to be right but that they would have rejected if it had been put to them candidly’ (Toynbee 1976: 207).
Toynbee, incidentally, warned that the end did not justify the means and that leaders who follow such a course might reach ends quite different to what they intended. Robespierre and Lenin, for example, might have sincerely wanted what was best for most French or Russians but ‘made the mistake (an ethical mistake as well as an intellectual one) of thinking that their aims were so good and the attainment of those aims was so important that violence was a justifiable means. Consequently, instead of creating earthly paradises, Robespierre produced the Terror and Lenin a totalitarian regime’ (Toynbee 1976: 212). Hook also cautioned that in a democracy, because of the principle of majority rule, even when mistaken, people must be ‘eternally on guard’ against the heroic leader – ‘an event-making individual who redirects the course of history’ by choosing to impose his will against the wishes of the majority (Hook 1945: 157).
In recent years the role of leadership in history has been much more widely and radically questioned. It has been argued increasingly that, while leaders might well ‘initiate action and play central roles’ in a group’s decision making, their followers and subsequent historians often incorrectly ‘attribute effects that are due to historical, economic or social forces to leadership’ As a result, although ‘outcomes are determined primarily by other factors’ the ‘leaders are credited with what happens after the fact’ (Evans 1997: 7 and 9). Certainly, society is always changing, if only by the process of birth and death. Generational, technological and attitudinal changes occur over time to a large extent irrespective of public leadership and, although the timing, pace and even direction of the change can certainly be affected by leadership, as I have noted elsewhere, that change may be inevitable not optional, organic not mimetic, complex not simple, and spontaneous not planned (Gustafson 2007: 143). For a fuller discussion of social and political transformation see Gustafson (1976).
Leaders, however, do have a significant impact on their own lives, their environment and on history. They may tend to merge into the organic life of their nation or organisation and certainly factors outside their control do provide both opportunities and impose limitations. Although context plays a key role, leaders should not be simply regarded as passive irrelevancies in a detailed analysis of context or buried in some collective mass. While they differ greatly, leaders can make a difference and can even substantially alter outcomes by the way they react to, facilitate or impede organisational, environmental and collective factors over which they may have only limited control and by which they may, in fact, be highly constrained. Evans is correct when he observes that, ‘In the end, no one has managed to better Marx’s dictum that people make their own history, but they do not do it under circumstances of their own choosing. It is precisely the interaction between the individual and his or her circumstances that makes the study of people in the past so fascinating’ (Evans 1997: 189-90).