1. A.H. (Archie) Brown, ‘Prime Ministerial Power’, Part I, Public Law, Spring 1968, pp. 28–51; and Part II, Summer 1968, pp. 96–118. In an abbreviated version, it was republished in Mattei Dogan and Richard Rose (eds), European Politics: A Reader (Macmillan, London, 1971), pp. 459–482.
2. The interview was conducted for a Jesuit journal and reported in the New York Times, 19 September 2013.
Introduction
1. To take an example at random, the first sentence of a recent article in a respected newspaper reads: ‘For years, it has been a matter of common agreement that what Japan needs, above all, is a strong leader.’ See David Pilling, ‘Why a strong leader in Japan is a plus not a minus’, Financial Times, 18 July 2013.
2. John Rentoul, Tony Blair (Little, Brown, London, 1995), p. 427.
3. Miliband, who appears to be sufficiently balanced not to be an overbearing leader, rose to the bait rather more than was necessary. Perhaps overly concerned that he might be perceived as weak, he remarked in an interview: ‘You discover things about yourself in this job [Leader of the Labour Party], which is that I am someone of real steel and grit . . .’, Guardian, 7 January 2012. Miliband’s use several times of ‘my government’ (in the context of what the next Labour government would and would not do), during a generally impressive speech on 24 September 2013 to the Labour Party annual conference, may have been a similar response to exhortation to project an image of strength. However, no Labour leader or prime minister before Tony Blair (who used the first person singular much more than his successor but one) would have employed the constitutionally incorrect and politically imperious terminology, ‘my government’.
4. ‘David Cameron and Ed Miliband clash over Lords reform’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-18798683.
5. Donald J. Savoie, Power: Where Is It? (McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal, 2010), p. 96.
6. Jonathan Malloy, ‘Prime Ministers and their Parties in Canada’, in Paul Strangio, Paul ’t Hart and James Walter (eds.), Understanding Prime-Ministerial Performance: Comparative Perspectives (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013), pp. 151–171, at p. 168.
7. Savoie, Power, p. 96.
8. I am extremely grateful to Stephen Whitefield of Oxford University, under whose supervision the investigations of public attitudes were conducted, for generously making available to me the survey data on these post-Communist European states. The italics in the proposition, as well as the interpretation of the differences between one country and another, are my own.
9. Max Weber, From Max Weber, translated, edited and with an introduction by H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1948), pp. 245–250, esp. p. 245.
10. S. Alexander Haslam, Stephen D. Reicher and Michael J. Platow, The New Psychology of Leadership: Identity, Influence and Power (Psychology Press, Hove and New York, 2011), p. 103.
11. Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (HarperCollins, London, 1993), pp. 6–7.
12. The Lord Chancellor, Derry Irvine, chaired four Cabinet committees which formulated policy on constitutional reform – on Scottish and Welsh legislative devolution; on Human Rights legislation; on the Freedom of Information Act; and on reform of the House of Lords. Irvine had, along with David Miliband, drafted the 1997 Labour Party election manifesto and helped to make sure that these issues of constitutional reform, which he cared about, were included. The commitment to hold a referendum on the establishment of a Scottish parliament had become firm Labour policy under Blair’s predecessor as party leader, John Smith, and to have reneged on it would have been too damaging to the Labour Party in Scotland for Blair to contemplate. (Blair at the time thought that there was overlap among this legislation and that they, therefore, needed the same guiding hand. That was a major reason why Irvine chaired all four of these important committees.)
13. Tony Blair, A Journey (Hutchinson, London, 2010), p. 516.
14. Brown’s economic adviser (later a Member of Parliament and minister), Ed Balls, played an important role in the devising of the tests, and Lord Chancellor Derry Irvine lent his legal skills to their drafting.
15. Alistair Darling, ‘The lure of common sense’, Guardian, 11 September 2010.
16. Jonathan Powell, The New Machiavelli: How to Wield Power in the Modern World (Bodley Head, London, 2010), p. 112. Powell adds that there were no ‘really big ideological differences’ between Blair and Brown on economic policy – ‘just a refusal on Gordon’s part to involve Tony and Number 10 in the process’ (ibid., p. 113). As Peter Mandelson aptly noted: ‘Any Chancellor wields major influence on all aspects of government, through control of tax and spending’. But Brown’s influence was much greater than that of most Chancellors. It was, Mandelson contends, ‘of an entirely different order’. Brown ‘believed that his own acumen, and the talents of his inner circle, served the government’s policy-making far better than anything in Number 10’. See Mandelson, The Third Man: Life at the Heart of New Labour (Harper Press, London, 2010), p. 240.
17. Blair, A Journey, p. 522.
18. See Richard Gunther, José Ramón Montero and Juan J. Linz (eds.), Political Parties: Old Concepts and New Challenges (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002).
19. When John Major resigned his leadership of the British Conservative Party, while prime minister, in June 1995 in order to force a re-election for the party post, this was an exception to that generalization. Major did not pretend to a monopoly of wisdom, but, faced by very persistent sniping at the government from his back benches, especially on policy towards Europe, he deemed it necessary to show who had the greater support. His opponent in the election, John Redwood, received 89 votes as compared with Major’s 218. It was a sufficient vote against a sitting prime minister (especially when one adds in eight abstentions and twelve spoiled papers) by his own side in the House of Commons to be of only modest help in consolidating his authority. It was, however, enough to enable Major to continue until the next general election in May 1997. See John Major, The Autobiography (HarperCollins paperback, 2000), pp. 617–647.
20. Blair, A Journey, p. 545.
21. Powell, The New Machiavelli.
22. Ibid., p. 59.
23. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History (Chapman & Hall, London, 3rd ed., 1846), p. 1.
24. Louis Fisher, Presidential War Power (University of Kansas Press, Lawrence, 2nd ed., 2004); and David Gray Adler, ‘Louis Fisher on the Constitution and War Power’, PS: Political Science and Politics, Vol. 46, No. 3, 2013, pp. 505–509.
25. Fisher, Presidential War Power, esp. pp. 278–279.
26. Ibid., pp. 261–262.
27. Cf. James Blitz, ‘A long week: Putin’s diplomatic gambit’, Financial Times, 14 September 2013.
28. Fisher, Presidential War Power, pp. 81–104.
29. For Fisher, however, resolutions passed by the UN Security Council matter less than the US Constitution, with the former no more than ‘a beguiling but spurious source of authority’ (ibid., p. 81).
30. Many, however, would regard Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb on two heavily populated Japanese cities as a major blot on his record. It has been argued that ‘a test demonstration in an unpopulated area would have been a far more humane means of achieving the same objective’, which was to bring to a rapid end the prolonged suffering on both sides caused by the war with Japan. See Richard F. Haynes, The Awesome Power: Harry S. Truman as Commander in Chief (Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1974), p. 269.
31. Robert L. Beisner, Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006), p. 27.
32. Percy Cradock, In Pursuit of British Interests: Reflections on Foreign Policy under Margaret Thatcher and John Major (John Murray, London, 1997), p. 24.
33. Richard E. Neustadt, Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan (Free Press, New York, 1990), p. 10.
34. Ibid.
35. Harry S. Truman, Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman, edited by Robert H. Ferrell (Harper & Row, New York, 1980), p. 96. In a farewell address by radio and television to the nation in January 1953, Truman said: ‘When Franklin Roosevelt died, I felt there must be a million men better qualified than I, to take up the Presidential task. But the work was mine to do, and I had to do it.’ Quoted in David McCullough, Truman (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1992), pp. 919–920.
36. Truman, Off the Record, p. 207.
37. Ibid., p. 211.
38. Roy Jenkins, Truman (Collins, London, 1986), p. 187.
39. Haynes, The Awesome Power, p. 255.
40. There was, however, a ‘Truman Doctrine’. That was the name given to the policy, enunciated by Truman in March 1947, of containment of Communist expansion, by military means if necessary. It initially and specifically referred to the need to prevent the Communist subversion of Greece and Turkey after the British had admitted that they no longer had the economic strength to provide military underpinning of those efforts.
41. Stephen Graubard, The Presidents: The Transformation of the American Presidency from Theodore Roosevelt to George W. Bush (Allen Lane, London, 2004), p. 326.
42. Thus, on the basis of an unsupported assumption that the smaller membership of British political parties as compared with the 1950s makes them less representative of the wider population, one prominent political commentator worries that this makes the parties ‘even more difficult for leaders to lead’. See Andrew Rawnsley, ‘The numbers that add up to trouble for all political parties’, Observer, 14 July 2013. It is not clear, to take a case cited by Rawnsley, why one leader, chosen by an electorate which included the mass membership of his party, should be more ‘representative’ than the one hundred and ninety thousand members of the Labour Party as of 2013. And, in reality, successive Labour leaders John Smith, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband have been given a much easier ride by the smaller and supposedly less representative membership of their party than was Hugh Gaitskell as leader of a much larger Labour Party (over a million members) in the 1950s.
43. In the financial crisis and prolonged economic difficulties which began in 2008, there was more of a tendency to look to technocrats than to charismatic ‘strongmen’. That is not an evil on the scale of the rise of Mussolini and Hitler, but it is also a threat to, and no substitute for, democracy.
44. Ed Pilkington, ‘“The Taliban thought the bullet would silence us. But they failed”, defiant Malala tells the UN’, Guardian, 13 July 2013.
45. In that speech, Malala Yousafzai said that ‘the extremists are afraid of books and pens’ and that ‘the power of the voice of women frightens them’. Making clear her own loyalty to Islam, describing it as ‘a religion of peace, humanity and brotherhood’, she said that the religion not only asserted the right of each child to receive an education but made this a duty. She scorned the Taliban conception of their deity as ‘a tiny little conservative’ who would send girls to hell ‘just because of going to school’ (ibid.).
46. Ibid.
47. David Remnick, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (Picador, London, 2010), p. 574.
48. Jean Blondel, Political Leadership: Towards a General Analysis (Sage, London, 1987), pp. 19–26.
49. The ‘transforming’ and the ‘transactional’ is the favoured dichotomy of James MacGregor Burns. See Burns, Leadership (Harper & Row, New York, 1978); and Burns, Transforming Leadership: A New Pursuit of Happiness (Atlantic Books, London, 2003).
1 Putting Leaders in Context
1. Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1976).
2. See Christian Marouby, ‘Adam Smith and the Anthropology of the Enlightenment: The “Ethnographic” Sources of Economic Progress’ in Larry Wolff and Marco Cipolloni (eds), The Anthropology of the Enlightenment (Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2007), pp. 85–102; Alan Barnard, Social Anthropology and Human Origins (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011); and Barnard, History and Theory in Anthropology (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000).
3. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage, pp. 238–239.
4. Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2001), p. 242.
5. Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, edited by R.L. Meek, D.D. Raphael and P.G. Stein (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1978). I have used throughout this most scholarly edition of the complete works of Smith (known as the Glasgow Edition and published by the Clarendon division of Oxford University Press). However, when quoting from these works, I have modernized and corrected the spelling, whereas the editors retained some archaic spellings of Smith himself and the misspellings of his student note-takers. Smith was such a perfectionist that, when he was dying, he caused the book manuscript on law and government which he had not succeeded in finishing to his own satisfaction to be destroyed. He would have been horrified had he known that student notes of the lectures on which the book was based were to be published instead. However, these sets of notes do more than enough to indicate the value of the manuscript which was lost. Smith taught at Glasgow from 1751 until early 1764 (as Professor of Moral Philosophy from 1752).
6. Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, pp. 201–202.
7. As John Locke had earlier argued (Two Treatises of Civil Government, Everyman Edition, Dent, London, 1953, p. 180; first published 1690).
8. Agriculture began earlier than Smith assumed, and mixed forms of subsistence were more common than he and his contemporaries knew or acknowledged. Archaeological evidence suggests that as long ago as 7000 BC, the hunter-gatherers of New Guinea also practised agriculture. See Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years (Vintage, London, 2005), p. 148. Moreover, Christian Marouby observes: ‘We now know that except in the marginal conditions of sub-artic regions, hunter-gatherers the world over relied on the collection of plant foods for more than half, and frequently more than 70 per cent of their diet. Of course . . . Adam Smith cannot be faulted for ignoring studies in economic anthropology that were only undertaken in the 1960s’ (Marouby, ‘Adam Smith and the Anthropology of the Enlightenment’, p. 90).
9. Turgot on Progress, Sociology and Economics, translated and edited by Ronald L. Meek (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1973), p. 72. I pay attention in this chapter to the four-stages theory mainly because those who expounded it were vitally concerned with the development of government and of political leadership. The stadial theory itself, especially in the light of more recent research, can be seen to be a great oversimplification. Yet, bold generalization is a useful antidote to the particularism of the kind of anthropological research that seeks to emphasize the utter uniqueness of every tribe or to fit their experience into ever more complex and variegated typologies.
10. David Hume, ‘Of the First Principles of Government’, in Hume, Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects Containing Essays, Moral, Political and Literary: A New Edition, Vol. 1 (Cadell, London, 1788), p. 37.
11. Hume, ‘Of the Origin of Government’, in Hume, Essays, p. 43.
12. Ibid. Some anthropological research of recent decades provides empirical support for Hume’s supposition. Thus, in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, ‘certain military “leaders” begin behaving like big men, particularly by relying on a wider network of acquaintances than the ordinary mass of individuals’, and a ‘warrier-organizer’ gradually ‘turns into a manipulator of social relations and wealth’. See Pierre Lemonnier, ‘From great men to big men: peace, substitution and competition in the Highlands of New Guinea’, in Maurice Godelier and Marilyn Strathern (eds.), Big Men and Great Men: Personifications of Power in Melanesia (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991), pp. 7–27, at p. 19.
13. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, edited by R.H. Campbell and A.S. Skinner (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1976), Vol. 2, p. 711.
14. Ibid.
15. Anthropological research carried out in the twentieth century was consonant with a number of Smith’s generalizations. Thus, for example, discussing the emergence of leaders among the Neur of southern Sudan, Lucy Mair writes: ‘The kind of man who attracts people to attach themselves to him will probably be . . . the eldest of a group of brothers who themselves have adult children living in the village.’ Such an informal leader would be comparatively wealthy – measured by ownership of cattle – and would have gained prestige ‘from a reputation for prowess in fighting in his youth, for skill in debate, or for ritual powers (which are believed to be inherited)’. See Mair Primitive Government (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1962), p. 64. The Neur, however, did not have chiefs. There was no single person with ultimate power. Rather, some individuals gained authority as people ‘worth listening to’. Here, and elsewhere in Africa, colonial administrators (not least British District Commissioners) set about creating chiefs, bringing with them their own culture of hierarchy and a desire to have a recognized leader with whom to interact (Mair, ibid., pp. 257–258). Mair’s work remains unusual in that she brought together the findings of anthropological research on many different tribes in geographically dispersed countries of Africa, focusing on their leadership, distribution of power, and conflict resolution. She makes clear that chieftainship was by no means a universal phenomenon. The Alur of western Uganda had ‘recognized hereditary chiefs’, but neighbouring peoples, the Lendu and Okebu, had no chiefs of their own. The Alur chiefs supposedly had the mystical power of controlling rain, but their secular function was to settle disputes that had led to fighting. Accordingly, neighbours without chiefs would turn to them, and sometimes request one of their chief’s sons to come to them as a chief in order to resolve conflict (Mair, ibid., pp. 120–121). Even within a particular group of people with a common sense of identity, the absence of authoritative means of settling serious disputes can be deadly. By the end of the 1970s, the Fayu hunter-gatherers of New Guinea had reduced themselves from around 2,000 people to about 400, divided into four clans, as a result of killing each other in the absence of social or political mechanisms for conflict-resolution. See Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel, pp. 205–266.
16. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Weatlh of Nations, p. 712.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., pp. 712–713.
19. Ibid., p. 713.
20. Ibid. There never was, Smith adds, ‘a great family in the world’ whose illustriousness ‘was entirely derived from the inheritance of wisdom and virtue’ (ibid., p. 714).
21. Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, p. 323.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid. The Russian ‘revolutions’ to which Smith refers, insofar as they were successful, were more in the nature of palace coups. Peasant risings in eighteenth-century Russia ended very badly for the rebels. Interestingly, this course of lectures, in which Smith referred to recent Russian experience, was attended by two Russian students, Semyon Efimovich Desnitsky and Ivan Andreevich Tretyakov, who spent six years at the University of Glasgow. Both of them subsequently became professors of law at Moscow University. See A.H. (Archie) Brown, ‘Adam Smith’s First Russian Followers’ in A.S. Skinner and T. Wilson (eds), Essays on Adam Smith (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975), pp. 247–273.
24. John Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, 3rd edition, 1779, reprinted in William C. Lehmann (ed.), John Millar of Glasgow 1735–1801: His Life and Thought and his Contributions to Sociological Analysis (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1960), p. 254. John Locke had earlier justified people’s right to rebel against tyrannical government (with characteristic concern for property rights). ‘The end of government is the good of mankind,’ he wrote, ‘and which is best for mankind, that the people should be always exposed to the boundless will of tyranny, or that the rulers should be sometimes liable to be opposed when they grow exorbitant in the use of their power, and employ it for the destruction, and not the preservation, of the properties of their people?’ (Locke, Two Treatises of Civil Government, p. 233.)
25. Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, p. 250.
26. Ibid., p. 271.
27. Ibid., pp. 263 and 271 (italics in the original).
28. Locke surmised in 1690 that ‘if we look back, as far as history will direct us, towards the original of commonwealths, we shall generally find them under the government and administration of one man’ (Two Treatises of Civil Government, p. 168).
29. The most ambitiously comprehensive scholarly account of government from its origins until the twentieth century is that of S.E. Finer, The History of Government From the Earliest Times, 3 volumes (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997).
30. Finer, The History of Government, Vol. III, p. 1476.
31. The phrase, ‘democracy on the installment plan’ is that of Dankwart A. Rustow, ‘Transitions to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Model’, Comparative Politics, Vol. 2/3, 1970, pp. 337–363, at p. 356. On the argument in nineteenth-century Britain that further democratization would be a threat to liberty, see Albert O. Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1991), pp. 86–101.
32. It was Sir Walter Scott, rather than James Boswell, who reported this particular exchange in a conversation between Johnson and Alexander Boswell (Lord Auchinleck). The great Boswell scholar Frederick Pottle was not prepared to vouch for the accuracy of Scott’s account of the Auchinleck–Johnson conversation. See Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D., edited by Frederick A. Pottle and Charles H. Bennett (Viking Press, New York, 1936), pp. 375–376.
33. Robert A. Dahl notes that only one delegate at the constitutional convention, Alexander Hamilton, looked favourably on monarchy, and this stance reduced his influence. See Dahl, How Democratic Is the American Constitution? (Yale University Press, New Haven, 2nd ed., 2003), p. 11.
34. Dahl, How Democratic is the American Constitution?, p. 16.
35. Ibid., p. 31. Dahl is referring to the election of George W. Bush for his first term as President when his Democratic opponent, Al Gore, obtained about 540,000 more votes nationally than Bush (approximately 0.5 per cent of all votes cast) but lost narrowly to his Republican opponent in the electoral college.
36. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, translated by George Lawrence, edited by J.P. Mayer (Anchor Books, New York, 1969), p. 101.
37. Finer, The History of Government, Vol. III, p. 1526.
38. The proposed legislation was not very radical to begin with, and it was further watered down in its passage through Congress, with numerous concessions made to legislators and special interests. More generally, as John Kay noted, ‘Americans . . . engage in a healthcare debate on issues that in Europe are not even open to discussion. Yet experience around the world is that only the rich can buy physical or economic security for themselves. Others must look to the state, more successfully in Sweden than Somalia’ (Kay, ‘Only market evangelists can reconcile Jekyll with Hyde’, Financial Times, 6 June 2012).
39. Edward Luce, ‘Obama wins a healthcare battle, but the war rages on’, Financial Times, 2 July 2012.
40. Dworkin’s suggestion was that Chief Justice Roberts wanted ‘to blunt the anticipated accusations of political partisanship’ in a series of contentious matters – including abortion and the Voting Rights Act 1965 – which before long would be coming to the Supreme Court. See Ronald Dworkin, ‘A Bigger Victory Than We Knew’, New York Review of Books, Vol. LIX, No. 13, 16 August– 26 September 2012, pp. 6–12, at p. 8.
41. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. 270.
42. While the French Revolution divides opinion to this day, there is also a school of thought which sees its break with the past as nothing like as momentous as the revolutionaries insisted. Tocqueville stands out as the first and most famous of those who have emphasized continuities between the Ancien Régime and post-revolutionary France. His emphasis on the ‘futility’ of the French Revolution, Hirschman suggested, did not endear him to either set of protagonists or to later historians who were devoting their lives to the study of the Revolution and perceiving it to be the pivotal event of modern times. See Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction, pp. 48–49 and 138–139.
43. See, for example, Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography 1988–1938 (Wildwood House, London, 1974), especially pp. 131 and 144; and Baruch Knei-Paz, The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1978), pp. 392–410.
44. Finer, The History of Government, Vol. III, p. 1540.
45. Jonathan I. Israel, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750–1790 (Oxford University Press, New York, 2011), p. 928.
46. The statistic is based on a comparison of 2004 and 2008 exit polls. See Kate Kenski, Bruce W. Hardy and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, The Obama Victory: How Media, Money, and Message Shaped the 2008 Election (Oxford University Press, New York, 2010), p. 103. The authors add that they ‘found evidence that race-based perceptions played a role in the votes of some. But Obama’s campaign boosted black turnout and white votes outside the Deep South enough to compensate for these anti-Obama ballots’ (ibid.). It is worth noting that the Republicans have had the support of a majority of white American voters ever since 1968, but that this is a declining asset for them, as the ethnic composition of the United States changes. Not only did more black and Hispanic voters go to the polls in 2008, but they supported the Democratic candidate still more strongly in that year than in 2004 with 7 per cent more of the African-American vote going to Obama, as compared with their votes for the Democratic candidate in 2004, and a remarkable 14 per cent more of Hispanics voting for Obama than they did for Kerry four years earlier.
47. If, as John Dunn, argues, ‘democracy is above all the name for political authority exercised solely through the persuasion of the greater number’, then democratization indeed made important strides in the nineteenth century, in part under the impact of both the American and the French Revolutions. See Dunn, Setting the People Free: The Story of Democracy (Atlantic Books, London, 2005), p. 132.
48. Cf. W.G. Runciman, The Theory of Cultural and Social Selection (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009), pp. 42–45; and Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel, pp. 271–278.
49. Barnard, Social Anthropology and Human Origins, pp. 49–50.
50. Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel, p. 272. Diamond also observes: ‘In traditional New Guinea society, if a New Guinean happened to encounter an unfamiliar New Guinean while both were away from their respective villages, the two engaged in a long discussion of their relatives, in an attempt to establish some relationship and hence some reason why the two should not attempt to kill each other’ (ibid., pp. 271–272).
51. Sahlins was influenced at the time by a Marxism that he later abandoned. This summary of his view of the transition from big-men to chiefs is drawn from Adam Kuper, Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2001), pp. 163–164.
52. Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel, p. 273.
53. Thus, chiefs emerged in the highlands of Mexico, Guatemala, Peru and Madagascar, but not in New Guinea. Ibid., p. 423.
54. Paul Chaisty, Nic Cheeseman and Timothy Power, ‘Rethinking the “presidentialism debate”: conceptualizing coalitional politics in cross-regional perspective’, Democratization (2012) DOI: 10.1080/13510347.2012.710604.
55. Paul Collier, War, Guns and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places (Bodley Head, London, 2009), pp. 230–231. Collier also observes that fashionable enthusiasm for multiculturalism has tended to obscure the point that ‘the rights of minorities rest on systems that depend upon the prior forging of an overriding sense of common nationality’ (ibid., p. 185). Anti-colonialism made a useful contribution to building national unity. A factor specific to Julius Nyerere’s success in promoting a sense of common nationality was the presence of a lingua franca in Tanzania – Swahili in this case. That was an asset that many other African leaders did not possess. In some cases the attempt to create a single nation, as distinct from state-building, is counterproductive. On this, see Alfred Stepan, Juan J. Linz and Yogendra Yadav, Crafting State-Nations (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2011).
56. Collier, War, Guns and Votes, pp. 51–52.
57. Ibid., p. 52.
58. That does not, of course, invalidate it. If lack of agreement in delineating a concept were to be enough to damn it, we should have to stop taking seriously such fundamentally important notions as freedom and democracy. An influential formulation has been that of Clifford Geertz: ‘Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.’ See Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (Basic Books, New York, 1973), p. 5. For an interesting critique of both ‘the deployment of the attitude survey method by positivists’ and the deployment of ‘semiotic “reading” of culture by interpretivists’, see Stephen Welch, The Theory of Political Culture (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013).
59. Or, as Richard W. Wilson observes: ‘In the most general sense political cultures are socially constructed normative systems that are the product of both social . . . and psychological . . . influences but are not reducible to either. They have prescriptive qualities that stipulate not only desirable ends but also appropriate means to achieve those ends. The norms are not coterminous with legal codes, although they often overlap.’ See Wilson, ‘The Many Voices of Political Culture: Assessing Different Approaches’, World Politics, Vol. 52, No. 2, 2000, pp. 246–273, at p. 264.
60. Values need to be distinguished from mere attitudes. Far fewer in number than attitudes, they are, as Stanley Feldman puts it, nevertheless ‘more numerous than the single ideological dimension that is typically used to understand political conflict’. Feldman observes that while value priorities ‘may change slowly over time’ as people adapt to a changing environment, they tend to be ‘inertial enough . . . to lend stability to evaluations and behavior’. See Feldman, ‘Values, Ideology, and the Structure of Political Attitudes’, in David O. Sears, Leonie Huddy and Robert Jervis (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology (Oxford University Press, New York, 2003), pp. 477–508, at p. 479.
61. Strong evidence to support that contention (in the context of culture, more broadly) is to be found in Geert Hofstede, Culture’s Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values (Sage, Beverly Hills and London, 1980).
62. Le Monde, 13 September 2010; and Financial Times, 14 September 2010.
63. Robert Putnam, in a notable study, has compared historically conditioned political cultures in different regions of Italy and documented the importance of public engagement in northern Italy and the link between the strength of civic associations and more effective democratic institutions. See Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1993).
64. Vztah Čechů a Slovaků k dějinám (ČSAV, Prague, 1968), p. 7; and Archie Brown and Gordon Wightman, ‘Czechoslovakia: Revival and Retreat’ in Brown and Jack Gray (eds.), Political Culture and Political Change in Communist States (Macmillan, London, 1977), pp. 159–196, at p. 164.
65. It was the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union, Aleksey Kosygin, who referred to Dubček as the ‘Number One Scoundrel’. See Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism (Bodley Head, London, and Ecco, New York, 2009), pp. 395–396.
66. Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes, ‘An Autopsy of Managed Democracy’, Journal of Democracy, Vol. 23, No. 3, 2012, pp. 32–45, at pp. 35–36.
67. Boris Dubin, ‘Stalin i drugie. Figury vysshey vlasti v obshchestvennom mnenii sovremennoy Rossii’, Monitoring obshchestvennogo mneniya, No. 2 (64), March–April 2003, pp. 26–40, at p. 34.
68. Timothy J. Colton and Michael McFaul, Popular Choice and Managed Democracy: The Russian Elections of 1999 and 2000 (Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, 2003), pp. 220–223.
69. Jeffrey W. Hahn, ‘Yaroslavl’ Revisited: Assessing Continuity and Change in Russian Political Culture’, in Stephen Whitefield (ed.), Political Culture and Post-Communism (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 148–179, at p. 172.
70. Dubin, ‘Stalin i drugie’, esp. p. 34.
71. Yuriy Levada, Ishchem cheloveka. Sotsiologicheskie ocherki, 2000–2005 (Novoe izdatel’stvo, Moscow, 2006), p. 140. There is evidence supporting the idea of ‘political generations’ as a more general phenomenon, partly based on testing the hypothesis that individuals are particularly susceptible to influence on their political attitudes in late adolescence and early adulthood. See David O. Sears and Sheri Levy, ‘Childhood and Adult Political Development’, in Sears, Huddy and Jervis (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology, pp. 60–109, at pp. 84–87.
72. Sears and Levy, ibid., p. 77.
73. The autocratic modernizer tsar, Peter the Great, has been consistently mentioned more often than any other person when Russians have been asked at five-yearly intervals to name the ‘most outstanding people of all times and nations’. See Boris Dubin, ‘Stalin i drugie. Figury vysshey vlasti v obshchestvennom mnenii v sovremennoy Rossii’, Monitoring obshchestvennogo mneniya, No. 1 (63), 2003.
74. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (Allen Lane, London, 2011), p. 342.
75. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1976 [first published 1759]), p. 52.
76. Ibid.
77. Ibid., p. 62.
78. Barbara Kellerman is a notable case in point. See, for example, Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters (Harvard Business School Press, Boston, Mass., 2004); and Kellerman, The End of Leadership (HarperCollins, New York, 2012).
79. S. Alexander Haslam, Stephen D. Reicher and Michael J. Platow, The New Psychology of Leadership: Identity, Influence and Power (Psychology Press, Hove and New York, 2011), p. 199.
80. Jean Lipman-Blumen, The Allure of Toxic Leaders: Why We Follow Destructive Bosses and Corrupt Politicians – and How We Can Survive Them (Oxford University Press, New York, 2005), p. 241.
81. Barbara Kellerman, Reinventing Leadership: Making the Connection between Politics and Business (State University of New York Press, Albany, 1999), p. 46.
82. James Fallows, cited in James MacGregor Burns, Running Alone. Presidential Leadership – JFK to Bush II. Why It Has Failed and How We Can Fix It (Basic Books, New York, 2006), pp. 126–127.
83. Drew Westen, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation (Public Affairs, New York, 2007), p. 125.
84. Haslam, Reicher and Platow, The New Psychology of Leadership, p. 200.
85. Ibid., p. 201.
86. Ibid., p. 200.
87. Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow, p. 217.
88. Harold Seidman, who worked for many years as a senior official in the Bureau of the Budget before becoming a Professor of Political Science at the University of Connecticut, coined the term ‘Miles’s law’ for this aphorism of Rufus Miles who was assistant secretary for administration within the Department of Health, Education and Welfare of the US government. In Seidman’s formulation it is: ‘Where one stands depends on where one sits.’ See Seidman, Politics, Position, and Power: The Dynamics of Federal Organization (Oxford University Press, New York, 3rd edition, 1980), p. 21. (The first edition of Seidman’s book was published in 1970.)
89. Roy Jenkins, Churchill (Pan Macmillan, London, 2001), pp. 219–222 and p. 397. It should be added that the circumstances, as well as Churchill’s institutional affiliation, had also changed. Before 1914 Germany had challenged Britain’s naval supremacy. In the mid-1920s that was not the case.
90. Jennifer L. Hochschild, ‘Where You Stand Depends on What You See: Connections among Values, Perceptions of Fact, and Political Prescriptions’, in James H. Kuklinski (ed.), Citizens and Politics: Perspectives from Political Psychology (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001), pp. 313–340.
91. Ibid., p. 321.
92. Ibid., p. 320.
93. Much of this comes under the heading of cognitive dissonance, on which there is a large body of experimental and theoretical literature. See, for example, J. Richard Eiser, Cognitive Social Psychology: A Guidebook to Theory and Research (McGraw-Hill, London and New York, 1980), esp. pp. 127–163; and Robert A. Baron and Donn Byrne, Social Psychology: Understanding Human Interaction (Allyn and Bacon, Boston, 5th ed., 1987), esp. pp. 132–138.
94. Howard G. Lavine, Christopher D. Johnston and Marco R. Steenbergen, The Ambivalent Partisan: How Critical Loyalty Promotes Democracy (Oxford University Press, New York, 2012), p. 125; and Charles S. Taber, Milton Lodge and Jill Glathar, ‘The Motivated Construction of Political Judgments’, in Kuklinski (ed.), Citizens and Politics, pp. 198–226, at p. 213.
95. See especially Westen, The Political Brain; and Roger D. Masters, ‘Cognitive Neuroscience, Emotion, and Leadership’, in Kuklinski (ed.), Citizens and Politics, pp. 68–102.
96. Westen, The Political Brain, p. 121.
97. Ibid., pp. 121–122.
98. See Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi: The Man, His People and the Empire (Haus, London, 2007); Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (HarperCollins, New York, 1997); B.R. Nanda, Mahatma Gandhi: A Biography (Allen & Unwin, London, 1958); Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (Abacus, London, 1995); Nelson Mandela, Conversations with Myself (Macmillan, London, 2010); Tom Lodge, Mandela: A Critical Life (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006); Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear (edited and introduced by Michael Aris, Penguin, London, new ed., 2010); Justin Wintle, Perfect Hostage: Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma and the Generals (Arrow, London, 2007); Bertil Lintner, Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma’s Struggle for Democracy (Silkworm Books, Chiang Mai, Thailand, 2011); Peter Popham, The Lady and the Peacock: The Life of Aung San Suu Kyi (Random House, London, 2011); and John Kane, The Politics of Moral Capital (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001).
99. Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 3: Master of the Senate (Vintage, New York, 2003), p. xxii.
100. Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 4: The Passage of Power (Bodley Head, London, 2012), p. 110.
101. Doris Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (Signet, New York, 1976), p. 171.
102. In his memoirs, Bush observed: ‘I didn’t look at the vice-president as another senior adviser. He had put his name on the ballot and gotten elected. I wanted him to be comfortable with all the issues on my desk. After all, it could become his at any moment . . . I hadn’t chosen [Cheney] to be a political asset; I had chosen him to help me do the job. That was exactly what he had done. He accepted any assignment I asked. He gave me his unvarnished opinions. He understood that I made the final decisions. When we disagreed, he kept our differences private. Most important, I trusted Dick. I valued his steadiness. I enjoyed being around him. And he had become a good friend.’ See George W. Bush, Decision Points (Crown, New York, 2010), pp. 86–87. For his part, Cheney notes: ‘History is full of examples of vice-presidents who were kept far from the center of power. Indeed, I’ve known a few personally. But at the beginning George W. Bush had said that I would be part of governing. He had been – as I had known he would be – a man of his word’ – Dick Cheney (with Liz Cheney), In My Name: A Personal and Political Memoir (Threshold, New York, 2011), p. 519.
103. See Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power, pp. 112–115.
104. Condoleezza Rice, No Higher Honour: A Memoir of My Years in Washington (Simon & Schuster, London, 2011), p. 23. After admitting to these errors of judgement, Rice somewhat disarmingly adds: ‘Fortunately, no one remembers that we wrote policy guidance questioning Gorbachev’s motives and setting up careful “tests” of Moscow’s intentions months before the collapse of Soviet power in Eastern Europe and the unification of Germany’ (ibid.).
105. Jack F. Matlock, Jr, Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended (Random House, New York, 2004), p. 314.
106. B. Guy Peters, Institutional Theory in Political Science: The ‘New Institutionalism’ (Pinter, London and New York, 1999), p. 115. Although party structures have somewhat weakened, there has been no let-up in party partisanship. Recent evidence suggests that among American citizens it has, if anything, ‘grown stronger over the past two decades’. See Lavine, Johnston and Steenbergen, The Ambivalent Partisan, p. 2.
107. Peters, Institutional Theory in Political Science, p. 115.
108. As the Australian political scientist Judith Brett notes: ‘Since 1990 Labor has twice ejected electorally popular prime ministers, and John Howard [who led the Liberal Party to four election victories] worked hard to prevent a challenge in his last term in office.’ See Brett, ‘Prime Ministers and their Parties in Australia’, in Paul Strangio, Paul ’t Hart and James Walter (eds.), Understanding Prime-Ministerial Performance: Comparative Perspectives (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013), pp. 172–192, at p. 177.
109. Neil Hume, ‘Rudd ousts Gillard as Labor leader’, Financial Times, 27 June 2013. In contrast to the cases noted by Judith Brett in note 108, Gillard’s public opinion poll standing was low at the time of her removal from the party leadership.
110. Brett, ‘Prime Ministers and their Parties in Australia’, p. 189.
111. ‘Australian PM Gillard in reshuffle after “unseemly” vote’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-21920762, 25 March 2013.
112. Financial Times, 25/26 February 2012; and ibid., 28 February 2012. Judith Brett noted Rudd’s ‘general unavailability to parliamentary colleagues and senior bureaucrats, his mania for control, and his rudeness to everyone from members of cabinet to airhostesses’ (Brett, ‘Prime Ministers and their Parties in Australia’, p. 188). In the view of Andrew Hughes, an analyst of Canberra politics from the Australian National University, Julia Gillard was ‘very efficient as prime minister. But that message hasn’t got through to the Australian public’. He added: ‘The problem is the way she seized power. It’s been an albatross round her neck and it’s still there’ (Financial Times, 22 March 2013). One observer of Australian politics, Erik Jensen, wrote soon after Rudd’s short-lived return to the premiership: ‘Rudd stands atop the ruins of a government he played no small part in wrecking.’ Jensen noted that a number of ministers had resigned rather than work with Rudd and that a former Labor leader had called for him to be expelled from the party. See Jensen, ‘The people’s psychopath’, New Statesman, 5–12 July 2013, p. 14.
113. The editors of a recent comparative study of prime ministers note that even before the Australian Labor Party’s election victory in 2007, ‘Rudd had signalled that he would not be beholden to his party in the way he led his government’ and announced that he would appoint ministers rather than have them elected by the parliamentary party (Strangio, ’t Hart and Walters, Understanding Prime-Ministerial Performance, p. 8). Following Labour’s defeat in 2013, election of the cabinet and shadow cabinet was restored to the parliamentary caucus.
114. The senator was Steve Hutchins; the Cabinet minister was speaking off the record. See the well-informed article by Annabel Crabb in the Australian journal The Monthly, August 2011, pp. 30–41. When the global financial crisis hit, decision-making became concentrated in what was, in effect, an inner Cabinet dominated by Rudd. Called the Strategic Priorities and Budget Committee, it contained just three Cabinet ministers in addition to the prime minister but was attended by a growing number of non-elected advisers. This body did not exist prior to Rudd’s first becoming prime minister. It was formed in late 2007 and abolished by Julia Gillard in 2010. However, Gillard had been a member of the ‘Gang of Four’ who belonged to the SPBC, and ‘she defended this system right up until the point at which she declared it intolerable’ (ibid., p. 37).
115. See, for example, Arend Lijphart (ed.), Parliamentary versus Presidential Government (Oxford University Press, New York, 1992); Alfred Stepan, Arguing Comparative Politics (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001), esp. Part III, ‘The Metaframeworks of Democratic Governance and Democratic States’; and Robert Elgie, Semi-Presidentialism: Sub-Types and Democratic Performance (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011).
116. Elgie, Semi-Presidentialism (p. 24) lists fifty-two countries with semi-presidential constitutions, as of December 2010.
117. This is one of the main arguments of Elgie, ibid., for which he provides much supporting evidence.
118. Elgie, ibid., pp. 151–152. Political scientists, including Elgie, use the term ‘premier-presidential’ for systems in which the prime minister and cabinet are responsible only to the legislature and ‘president-parliamentary’ for the form of semi-presidentialism in which prime minister and cabinet are responsible both to the parliament and to the president. The latter case prevails in Russia. On Putin as leader, see Richard Sakwa, Putin: Russia’s Choice (Routledge, London, 2004); Alex Pravda (ed.), Leading Russia: Putin in Perspective (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005), Chapters 2 and 6–13; Lilia Shevtsova, Putin’s Russia (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, DC, revised and expanded ed., 2005); Angus Roxburgh, The Strongman: Vladimir Putin and the Struggle for Russia (Tauris, London, 2012); and Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy, Mr Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, 2013).
119. Cf. Lilia Shevtsova and Andrew Wood, Change or Decay: Russia’s Dilemma and the West’s Response (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, DC, 2011); and Angus Roxburgh, The Strongman.
2 Democratic Leadership: Myths, Powers, Styles
1. Tony Blair, A Journey (Hutchinson, London, 2010), p. xvi.
2. Ibid., p. 50.
3. Anthony King (ed.), Leaders’ Personalities and the Outcomes of Democratic Elections (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002), p. 216.
4. See, for example, Lauri Karvonen, The Personalisation of Politics: A Study of Parliamentary Democracies (ECPR Press, Colchester, 2010), esp. pp. 4–5. Television has been a major new factor in the personalization of politics, for people are easier to portray than the issues. However, the way newspapers report politics has also changed. A study of how The Times reported British politics in the years since 1945 found that the ‘overall visibility of prime ministers has grown; references to their leadership qualities have become more common; and they are today referred to in clearly more personal terms than three decades ago’ (Karvonen, ibid., pp. 87–93, esp. p. 93).
5. See especially Thomas Poguntke and Paul Webb (eds.), The Presidentialization of Politics: A Comparative Study of Modern Democracies (Oxford University Press, Oxford, paperback 2007).
6. Occasionally political commentators recognize this – as, for example, Rafael Behr who wrote: ‘The view that Britain holds presidential elections disguised as parliamentary ones is commonplace in Westminster – and wrong, . . . It is the media coverage that is presidential but voters see beyond that’ (‘Project “Ed’s Charisma” – the mission to help Miliband loosen up’, New Statesman, 28 September–4 October 2012, p. 10).
7. Karvonen, The Personalisation of Politics, p. 102.
8. Amanda Bittner, Platform or Personality? The Role of Party Leaders in Elections (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011), p. 73. Bittner is, nevertheless, among the academic authors who emphasize the importance of leader evaluations, especially in closely contested elections. She observes that ‘the scholarly literature to date on party leaders is undecided as to whether or not party leaders actually matter in the first place’ (p. 139). It would be difficult, though, to find a serious scholar who argued that leaders were of no account. What the evidence-based literature does suggest, however, is that their role is much exaggerated by most political journalists – who have embraced a personalization of politics – and by many politicians.
9. Karvonen, The Personalisation of Politics, p. 20.
10. Ibid.
11. Sören Holmberg and Henrik Oscarsson, ‘Party Leader Effects on the Vote’, in Kees Aarts, André Blais and Hermann Schmitt (eds.), Political Leaders and Democratic Elections (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011), p. 47.
12. King (ed.), Leaders’ Personalities and the Outcomes of Democratic Elections, p. 214. King adds: ‘If anything, Kennedy as an individual was a handicap to his party. As a Catholic, he cost the Democrats substantial numbers of votes, mostly among southern Protestants.’ A recent scholarly study of American voters concludes: ‘As central as individual actors are, it is the political parties that are the enduring foundation of American political conflict. Political leaders enter and exit the public stage, but the parties and their symbols, platforms and group associations provide a long-term anchor to the political system.’ See Howard G. Lavine, Christopher D. Johnston and Marco R. Steenbergen, The Ambivalent Partisan; How Critical Loyalty Promotes Democracy (Oxford University Press, New York, 2012), p. 2.
13. Peter Brown of Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, cited in Kate Kenski, Bruce W. Hardy and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, The Obama Victory: How Media, Money, and Message Shaped the 2008 Election (Oxford University Press, New York, 2010), p. 14.
14. Kenski, Hardy and Jamieson, The Obama Victory, p. 289. The Democrats’ advertisements hammered home the ‘McSame’ message, but it was reinforced also in the mass media. Kenski et al. note: ‘The more one watched television news, read the newspaper, or went online for campaign information, the more likely one was to embrace the notion of McCain as McSame’ (pp. 288–289).
15. Ibid., p. 16.
16. Dieter Ohr and Henrik Oscarsson, ‘Leader Traits, Leader Image, and Vote Choice’, in Aarts, Blais and Schmitt, Political Leaders and Democratic Elections, pp. 187–214, at p. 197.
17. Roy Pierce, ‘Candidate Evaluations and Presidential Election Choices in France’, in King (ed.), Leaders’ Personalities and the Outcome of Democratic Elections, pp. 96–126, at pp. 124–126.
18. Ibid., p. 126.
19. Sören Holmberg and Henrik Oscarsson, ‘Party Leader Effects on the Vote’, in Aarts, Blais and Schmitt (eds.), Political Leaders and Democratic Elections, pp. 35–51, at p. 50.
20. Ibid., p. 49.
21. John Bartle and Ivor Crewe, ‘The Impact of Party Leaders in Britain: Strong Assumptions, Weak Evidence’, in King (ed.), Leaders’ Personalities and the Outcomes of Democratic Elections, pp. 70–95, esp. pp. 77–78.
22. Neil O’Brien, ‘The Language of Priorities’, New Statesman, 9 July 2012, pp. 22–25, at p. 22.
23. Ibid.; and Dennis Kavanagh and Philip Cowley, The British General Election of 2010 (Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, 2010), p. 378.
24. David Butler and Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, The British General Election of 1970 (Macmillan, London, 1971), pp. 24 and 64.
25. See Kenneth O. Morgan, Callaghan: A Life (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997), pp. 692–693. See also Anthony King in King (ed.), Leaders’ Personalities and the Outcomes of Democratic Elections, pp. 214–215.
26. Ohr and Oscarsson, ‘Leader Traits, Leader Image, and Vote Choice’, in Aarts, Blais and Schmitt (eds.), Political Leaders and Democratic Elections, pp. 197–198. An interesting finding that holds good across countries and over time is that leaders of Conservative parties tend to be rated more highly on ‘competence’ and leaders of Left parties on ‘character’ (Bittner, Platform or Personality, pp. 78–84). In a reversal, however, of the general cross-national Left–Right trend, Howard was rated more highly than Keating for empathy (Ohr and Oscarsson, ‘Leader Traits, Leader Image, and Vote Choice’, p. 197).
27. Blair interview with Lionel Barber, ‘Waiting in the Wings’, ft.com/magazine, 30 June/1 July 2012.
28. Bartle and Crewe, ‘The Impact of Party Leaders in Britain’, p. 94.
29. John Major, The Autobiography (HarperCollins paperback, London, 2000), p. 312.
30. Peter Mandelson, The Third Man: Life at the Heart of New Labour (Harper Press, London, 2010), p. 150.
31. John Curtice and Michael Steed, ‘The Results Analysed’, in David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh (eds.), The British General Election of 1997 (Macmillan, Houndmills, 1997), pp. 295 and 320.
32. Bartle and Crewe, ‘The Impact of Party Leaders in Britain’, p. 90.
33. David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh, The British General Election of 2001 (Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, 2002), p. 241. Elaborating the point, Butler and Kavanagh write: ‘An analysis by ICM found that, out of a number of issues determining the vote, Labour’s economic performance was most influential, followed by education, health, law and order, with Europe the least significant.’
34. David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh, The British General Election of 2005 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 204.
35. Dwight Eisenhower made a similar distinction, but without Macmillan’s or Truman’s irony, when, after retiring from the presidency, he wrote of Nikita Khrushchev: ‘In our use of the word, he is not . . . a statesman, but rather a powerful, skillful, ruthless, and highly ambitious politician.’ See Jim Newton, Eisenhower: The White House Years (Doubleday, New York, 2011), p. 195.
36. Quoted by Bill Clinton in his speech to the Democratic Party Convention of 1984, cited in Stephen Graubard, The Presidents: The Transformation of the American Presidency from Theodore Roosevelt to George W. Bush (Allen Lane, London, 2004), p. 626.
37. Harold M. Barger, The Impossible Presidency: Illusions and Realities of Executive Power (Scott, Foreman & Co., Glenview, 1984), p. 227.
38. Harold Seidman, Politics, Position, and Power: The Dynamics of Federal Organization (Oxford University Press, New York, 3rd ed., 1980), pp. 85–86.
39. See Bill Clinton, My Life (Hutchinson, London, 2004), pp. 523–524; and Taylor Branch, The Clinton Tapes: A President’s Secret Diary (Simon & Schuster, London, 2009), p. 70.
40. ‘Obama’s trust wasn’t enough to save Rice appointment’, International Herald Tribune, 15–16 December 2012. Obama did, however, see off congressional resistance in 2013 to his nomination of Chuck Hagel (himself a Republican) as Secretary for Defense in succession to Leon Panetta.
41. William E. Leuchtenburg, ‘Franklin D. Roosevelt: The First Modern President’, in Fred I. Greenstein (ed.), Leadership in the Modern Presidency (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1988), pp. 7–40, at pp. 13 and 23. See also Charles M. Cameron, ‘The Presidential Veto’, in George C. Edwards III and William G. Howell (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the American Presidency (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009), pp. 362–382.
42. George C. Edwards III, ‘The Study of Presidential Leadership’, in Edwards and Howell (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the American Presidency, pp. 816–837, at p. 833. Roosevelt was also losing the confidence of many Southern Democrats, but that (as is discussed in Chapter 3) was because of their concern that the longer-term effect of some New Deal legislation was to undermine the racist order over which they reigned in the South. See Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (Norton, New York, 2013), esp. pp. 156–194.
43. Graubard, The Presidents, pp. 807–808; and Jim Newton, Eisenhower: The White House Years (Doubleday, New York, 2011), p. 86.
44. Newton, Eisenhower: The White House Years, p. 218.
45. Ibid., pp. 250–252.
46. Ibid., p. 202.
47. Randall Woods, LBJ: Architect of American Ambition (Harvard University Press paperback, Cambridge, Mass., 2007), p. 440.
48. Ibid., pp. 512 and 570.
49. Joseph S. Nye, Jr, The Powers to Lead (Oxford University Press, New York, 2008), p. 80.
50. Michael Schaller, Ronald Reagan (Oxford University Press, New York, 2011), p. xiii.
51. William K. Muir, Jr, ‘Ronald Reagan: The Primacy of Rhetoric’, in Greenstein (ed.), Leadership in the Modern Presidency, pp. 260–295, at p. 260.
52. Schaller, Ronald Reagan, pp. 45–46.
53. Ibid., p. 39.
54. Ibid., p. 78.
55. Ibid., pp. 77–80.
56. Alonzo L. Hamby, ‘Harry S. Truman: Insecurity and Responsibility’, in Greenstein (ed.), Leadership in the Modern Presidency, pp. 41–75, at pp. 73–74.
57. Joe Klein, The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton (Hodder & Stoughton, London, 2002), pp. 123–124.
58. Klein, The Natural, pp. 179–180. Clinton’s approval rating for the performance of his presidential duties was around 60 per cent at the end of his second term, and when voters were asked how they would vote if the 1996 election were to be run again, ‘the results were almost the same as they’d been: 46 percent said Clinton, 36 percent said Dole, 11 percent said Perot’ (ibid., p. 180). The term ‘special persecutor’, applied to Starr, appears in Drew Westen, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation (Public Affairs, New York, 2008), p. 372.
59. Klein, The Natural, p. 209.
60. Earl of Swinton (in collaboration with James Margagh), Sixty Years of Power: Some Memories of the Men Who Wielded It (Hutchinson, London, 1966), p. 49.
61. Lord Beaverbrook, The Decline and Fall of Lloyd George: And Great Was the Fall Thereof (Collins, London, 1963), p. 40.
62. Philip Ziegler, ‘Churchill and the Monarchy’, in Robert Blake and Wm. Roger Louis (eds.), Churchill (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1993), pp. 187–198. ‘But for the war,’ Ziegler observes, ‘it seems likely that George VI would have continued to view Churchill with some unease as a man to be, if not kept at arms’ length, then at least not embraced as a trusted confidant’ (p. 194).
63. Swinton, Sixty Years of Power, p. 116.
64. Iain Macleod, Neville Chamberlain (Muller, London, 1961), p. 165.
65. A.G. Gardiner, Certain People of Importance (Jonathan Cape, London, 1926), p. 58.
66. Robert Blake, ‘How Churchill became Prime Minister’, in Blake and Louis (eds.), Churchill, pp. 257–273, at p. 264.
67. Ibid., p. 266.
68. Robert Blake, The Conservative Party from Peel to Churchill (Fontana, London, 1972), p. 248.
69. John Colville, The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries 1939–1955 (Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1985), pp. 126–127.
70. David Reynolds, ‘Churchill in 1940: The Worst and Finest Hour’, in Blake and Louis (eds.), Churchill, pp. 241–255, at p. 254.
71. Attlee’s involvement in the allocation of posts is confirmed in his brief and rather dry autobiography, As It Happened (Odhams, London, 1954), pp. 132–133.
72. Robert Crowcroft, Attlee’s War: World War II and the Making of a Labour Leader (Tauris, London, (2011), p. 231.
73. Ibid., p. 174.
74. Roy Jenkins, Churchill (Pan Macmillan, London, 2002), pp. 775–777.
75. Colville, The Fringes of Power, p. 555.
76. Ibid., p. 554.
77. Ibid., pp. 554–555.
78. Jenkins, Churchill, p. 777.
79. Lord Moran, Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, 1940–1965 (Constable, London, 1966).
80. My interview with R.A. (Lord) Butler, when he was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, on 23 September 1966. (It was on a non-attributable basis during Butler’s lifetime.)
81. Ibid.
82. Lord Butler, The Art of the Possible: The Memoirs of Lord Butler K.G., C.H. (Hamish Hamilton, London, 1971). p. 164.
83. Moran, Winston Churchill, p. 404.
84. Ibid., p. 553.
85. Alan Bullock, Ernest Bevin: Foreign Secretary 1945–1951 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1985), p. 87.
86. Ibid.
87. Ibid., p. 89.
88. Ibid., p. 55.
89. Bernard Donoughue and G.W. Jones, Herbert Morrison: Portrait of a Politician (new edition, Phoenix, London, 2001), p. 490; and Attlee, As It Happened, p. 239. Donoughue and Jones express doubts about Attlee’s ability in this case to calm the troubled waters, saying ‘it is difficult to see how Attlee or anyone else could have devised a formula which would enable Bevan to stay without forcing Gaitskell to go’.
90. Clement Attlee, Leader’s Speech to Labour Party Conference at Scarborough, 1948, http://www.britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech-archive.htm?speech=158.
91. Ibid.
92. David Cameron has been the most overtly constrained of the four leaders mentioned, as he is the first prime minister since the Second World War to be presiding over a coalition government in Britain. This has also added to tensions and discontent among backbench MPs in his own Conservative Party.
93. Harold Wilson, The Governance of Britain (Weidenfeld & Nicolson and Michael Joseph, London, 1976), p. 9.
94. David Cameron conducted a reshuffle of ministerial responsibilities in the late summer of 2012, and Lansley was moved from the Department of Health to the non-departmental role of Leader of the House of Commons.
95. Butler, The Art of the Possible, p. 184.
96. D.R. Thorpe, Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan (Pimlico, London, 2010), p. 86.
97. Ibid., pp. 345–346. Hoosier is the popular name for a native of the mid-Western state of Indiana.
98. My source for this was Selwyn Lloyd. I interviewed him on 7 July 1966, on a non-attributable basis at the time. He is cited, as ‘a very senior member of Macmillan’s Cabinet’, saying this in my article, ‘Prime Ministerial Power’, Public Law, Part I, Spring 1968, pp. 28–51, at p. 41. In the same interview, Lloyd, who had served under all three men, described Churchill and (perhaps more surprisingly) Eden as ‘more Cabinet-minded than Macmillan’.
99. My 7 July 1966 interview of Selwyn Lloyd.
100. Thorpe, Supermac, p. 519.
101. The Macmillan Diaries, Volume II: Prime Minister and After, 1957–1966, edited with an introduction by Peter Catterall (Pan Macmillan, London, 2012), p. 89.
102. Reginald Bevins, The Greasy Pole: A Personal Account of the Realities of British Politics (Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1965), pp. 137–138. Lord (R.A.) Butler made a similar point, albeit less dogmatically, when he wrote that such an action could stimulate countervailing forces within the government party ‘because all the people who go out have friends who mobilize round them’ (The Listener, 16 September, 1965, p. 409). Lloyd later remarked on Macmillan’s ‘utter ruthlessness’, which led him to attempt to conciliate him not out of friendship but ‘because I had become a possible danger’ (Thorpe, Supermac, p. 524).
103. Percy Cradock, In Pursuit of British Interests: Reflections on Foreign Policy under Margaret Thatcher and John Major (John Murray, London, 1997) pp. 100 and 201.
104. Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (HarperCollins, London, 1993), p. 840.
105. Ibid., p. 851.
106. Ibid., p. 847.
107. Ibid., pp. 860–861.
108. Blair, A Journey, p. 119.
109. Ibid., p. 201.
110. Ibid., p. 287.
111. Ibid., p. 486. Blair claimed an emotional link with the British people, and he felt this dissipating the longer he was in office. ‘For me and for the people’, he writes, ‘this was sad. My relationship with them had always been more intense, more emotional, if that’s the right word, than the normal relationship between leader and nation’ (p. 658). He attributed the disenchantment to his increasing unwillingness to modify policy in the face of opposition and disagreement: ‘“Being in touch” with opinion was no longer the lodestar. “Doing what was right” had replaced it’ (ibid., p. 659).
112. Ibid., p. 609.
113. Ibid., p. 117.
114. Tony Wright, Doing Politics (Biteback, London, 2012), p. 31.
115. Ibid.
116. Holmberg and Oscarsson, ‘Party Leader Effects on the Vote’, in Aarts, Blais and Schmitt (eds.), Political Leaders in Democratic Elections, p. 50.
3 Redefining Leadership
1. Jean Blondel uses the term ‘redefiners’, but differently. He regards leaders in that category as promoters of ‘moderate change’ as distinct from ‘reformists’ who produce ‘large change’. In the way I use the term, redefining leaders are radical reformers. Cf. Blondel, Political Leadership: Towards a General Analysis (Sage, London, 1987), p. 97.
2. Theodore Roosevelt’s tenure of the White House added lustre to the presidency, and his grasp of foreign policy and the world beyond America’s shores was much greater than that of many of his predecessors and not a few of his successors.
3. Cf. James MacGregor Burns, Leadership (Harper & Row, New York, 1978); and Burns, Transforming Leadership: A New Pursuit of Happiness (Atlantic Books, London, 2003).
4. James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1970), p. 351.
5. Ibid., p. 352.
6. Stephen Graubard, The Presidents: The Transformation of the American Presidency from Theodore Roosevelt to George W. Bush (Allen Lane, London, 2004), p. 272. There was no love lost between Franklin Roosevelt and Joe Kennedy, and Harry Truman, for his part, retained to the end of his life an intense dislike for the elder Kennedy. Referring to Jack Kennedy’s Catholicism, when JFK became a serious contender for the Democratic nomination as presidential candidate, Truman quipped to his daughter: ‘It’s not the pope I’m afraid of, it’s the pop’ (David McCullough, Truman, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1992, p. 970).
7. Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (Norton, New York, 2013), pp. 302–303.
8. Ibid., pp. 336–337.
9. Quoted by Katznelson, ibid., p. 337.
10. George McJimsey, The Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 2000), p. 41.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., p. 288.
13. Ibid., pp. 287 and 293.
14. Katznelson, Fear Itself, p. 162.
15. Ibid., p. 486.
16. McJimsey, The Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, p. 154.
17. Ibid., p. 163.
18. Katznelson, Fear Itself, pp. 178–179.
19. McJimsey, The Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, p. 169; and more generally on the role and influence of Eleanor Roosevelt, pp. 151–170.
20. Graubard, The Presidents, pp. 258–259.
21. Harold M. Barger, The Impossible Presidency: Illusions and Realities of Executive Power (Scott, Foresman & Co., Glenville, Ill., 1984), pp. 101–102.
22. Ibid., p. 102.
23. David McCullough, Truman (Simon & Schuster, New York 1992), p. 972; and Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963–65 (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1998), p. 295.
24. See Alfred Stepan and Juan J. Linz, ‘Comparative Perspectives on Inequality and the Quality of Democracy in the United States’, Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 9, No. 4, December 2011, pp. 841–856, at p. 843. Since the early 1970s, the same authors note, inequality in the USA has got much worse, both by comparison with the 1960s and by international standards: ‘From an all-time best measure on the Gini index of .388 in 1968, by 2009 the US Census Bureau had put the US Gini at .469, America’s worst Gini index in many decades’ (ibid., p. 844).
25. Graubard, The Presidents, pp. 456–457.
26. Randall B. Woods, LBJ: Architect of American Ambition (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., paperback, 2007), pp. 440 and 442.
27. Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 4: The Passage of Power (Bodley Head, London, 2012), p. 352. On Johnson’s relative lack of education (Southwest Texas State Teachers College versus Harvard or Oxford Rhodes Scholars), Caro adds, ‘Nothing the Kennedys felt about Lyndon Johnson could be any worse than what Lyndon Johnson felt about himself.’
28. Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 3: Master of the Senate (Vintage paperback, New York, 2003), p. xxiii.
29. Ibid., pp. xv–xvi.
30. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 4, p. xvi.
31. Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 2: Means of Ascent (Bodley Head, London, 1990), p. xxi.
32. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 4, pp. 419–420. By including ‘the Johnsons of Johnson city’, Johnson was talking also about poor whites – and about his own far from privileged youth.
33. Ibid., p. 488.
34. Ibid., p. 484.
35. Ibid., pp. xvii–xviii.
36. Randall B. Woods, LBJ, p. 884.
37. Michael Schaller, Ronald Reagan (Oxford University Press, New York, 2011), pp. 88–89.
38. Ibid., p. 90.
39. Brian Harrison, The Transformation of British Politics 1860–1995 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996), p. 69.
40. Ibid.
41. Quoted in Roy Jenkins, Churchill (Pan Books, London, 2002), p. 146.
42. Rhodri Walters, ‘The House of Lords’, in Vernon Bogdanor (ed.), The British Constitution in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press for the British Academy, Oxford, 2003), pp. 189–235, at p. 192.
43. Jenkins, Churchill, p. 160.
44. Ibid., p. 144.
45. Kenneth O. Morgan, Labour in Power 1945–1951 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1984), p. 37.
46. Ibid., p. 37.
47. Kingsley Martin, Harold Laski: A Biography (Jonathan Cape, London, new edition, 1969), p. 153.
48. Ibid., p. 173. I can add one anecdote on Attlee and Laski. When I was studying at the London School of Economics, I attended a function organized by the Department of Government at which Reginald Bassett – a professor in that department (and author, inter alia, of a notable book, The Essentials of Parliamentary Democracy, first published in 1935) – told a small group of us about a return visit Attlee made to the School when he was Prime Minister. Attlee, who had done a lot of practical social work in East London, lectured on local government to prospective social workers at the LSE in the years just before the First World War (for which he immediately volunteered and served as an officer, being several times wounded). Bassett was in the circle around Attlee when another member of the staff, a former military man who had drunk more than was wise, came up to Attlee and said: ‘Clem, Clem, I believe I’m the only man alive who has ever kicked Harold Laski up the arse.’ The deference accorded prime ministers was greater then than now, and the familiarity of this address to someone as formal as Attlee embarrassed the speaker’s (and Laski’s) colleagues. Attlee was unperturbed. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘We need more men like you.’
49. Morgan, Labour in Power, pp. 99 and 117.
50. Ibid., pp. 370–371.
51. Ibid., p. 172.
52. Nicklaus Thomas-Symonds, Attlee: A Life in Politics (I.B. Tauris, London, 2010), p. 167.
53. Archie Brown, ‘The Change to Engagement in Britain’s Cold War Policy: The Origins of the Thatcher–Gorbachev Relationship’, Journal of Cold War History, Vol. 10, No. 3, 2008, pp. 3–47. (I used the UK Freedom of Information Act to have Cabinet Office and Foreign Office documents, as well as the papers of the academics for the Chequers seminars discussed in that article, declassified. They contain revealing annotations by Thatcher.) See also Rodric Braithwaite, ‘Gorbachev and Thatcher’, Journal of European Integration History, Vol. 16, No. 1, 2010, pp. 31–44; and Archie Brown, ‘Margaret Thatcher and Perceptions of Change in the Soviet Union’, ibid., pp. 17–30.
54. Richard Aldous, Reagan and Thatcher: The Difficult Relationship (Hutchinson, London, 2012), p. 207.
55. Quoted in Geoffrey Howe, Conflict of Loyalty (Macmillan, London, 1994), p. 332.
56. See Howe, Conflict of Loyalty; and Douglas Hurd, Memoirs (Little, Brown, London, 2003). It is worth noting that although not even Nelson Mandela’s personal advocacy, when he met with her, could shift Margaret Thatcher’s opposition to sanctions against the apartheid South African regime, Mandela was pleasantly surprised by her. In a recorded interview he said: ‘She was very warm, you know; she was just the opposite of what I was told . . . I was also tremendously impressed by her . . . I was impressed by her strength of character – really an iron lady . . .’ See Nelson Mandela, Conversations with Myself (Macmillan, London, 2010), p. 385.
57. The reluctance of political commentators to see governments as other than extensions of the political will of their party leaders means that even Attlee, a consensus-seeking leader of the Labour Party and a prime minister who did not attempt to dictate to ministers, is all too often portrayed as if he were the dominant figure in all areas of policy during the Labour governments of 1945–51. Thus the BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson, writing on the eve of the 2012 Labour Party conference, in an article headed ‘Is Ed Miliband a Churchill or an Attlee?’, writes: ‘It was the Labour man, as his successor may well remind us on Tuesday, who built the NHS, strengthened the welfare state and created the Arts Council even at a time when there was “no money left”’ (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-19773185, 29 September 2012).
58. Ian Gilmour, Dancing with Dogma: Britain under Thatcherism (Simon & Schuster, London, 1992), p. 5. Gilmour also observes: ‘Faced with a Prime Minister who disliked cabinet government and sought to evade it in order always to prevail, her most senior colleagues had either to acquiesce in what was going on – in so far as they knew what it was – or to present her with an ultimatum that unless she changed tack they would resign their offices. Since to act in such a way might well have split the Conservative party, they would have been in a serious dilemma, had they ever confronted it. In fact they did not’ (ibid., p. 33).
59. For accounts, inter alia, of their political relations with Margaret Thatcher, see Nigel Lawson, The View from No. 11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical (Transworld, London, 1992); and Michael Heseltine, Life in the Jungle: My Autobiography (Hodder and Stoughton paperback, London, 2001).
60. In his resignation speech to the House of Commons on 31 October 1989, Lawson also said that ‘for our system of Cabinet government to work effectively, the Prime Minister of the day must appoint Ministers whom he or she trusts and then leave them to carry out the policy. When differences of view emerge, as they are bound to do from time to time, they should be resolved privately and, whenever appropriate, collectively’ (Lawson, The View from No. 11, p. 1063).
61. Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography. Volume One: Not for Turning (Allen Lane, London, 2013), p. 423.
62. Tony Blair was less willing to spend time in the House of Commons than was Margaret Thatcher and other earlier prime ministers. During his premiership, prime minister’s questions were reduced from twice a week to once a week (although the session itself became longer) and so they have remained.
63. Moore, Margaret Thatcher, p. 424.
64. Ibid., p. 422.
65. The fullest account of the rise of Margaret Thatcher and of her premiership from 1979 to 1982 is to be found in Moore’s authorized biography, Margaret Thatcher, which contains much fresh information. In addition to Moore’s substantial volume, Gilmour’s critical assessment, Dancing with Dogma, and the memoirs of other ministers who served in governments headed by Mrs Thatcher, two especially valuable accounts of the Thatcher years, from quite different points of view, are those of Geoffrey K. Fry, The Politics of the Thatcher Revolution: An Interpretation of British Politics, 1979–1990 (Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, 2008); and Hugo Young, One of Us: A Biography of Margaret Thatcher (Macmillan, London, 1989).
66. Anthony King, The British Constitution (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007), p. 316.
67. David Butler and Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, The British General Election of 1970 (Macmillan, London, 1971), p. 195.
68. Lawson, The View from No. 11, p. 7.
69. Peter Hennessy, The Prime Minister: The Office and its Holders since 1945 (Penguin, London, 2001), pp. 105–106.
70. Lawson, The View from No. 11, p. 561.
71. Ibid., p. 574. Describing the poll tax as Margaret Thatcher’s greatest political blunder of her eleven years as prime minister, Lawson adds that ‘at the time of its initiation in 1986, she had openly boasted to her favourite journalists about how she had “seen me off”. Ironically in the end it played a large part in seeing her off as Prime Minister’ (ibid., p. 584).
72. David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh, The British General Election of 1992 (Macmillan, London, 1992), pp. 10 and 72–75.
73. D.R. Thorpe, Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan (Pimlico, London, 2011), pp. 321–322.
74. The Macmillan government accepted the Robbins Report in principle. It was left to the Labour government, elected in 1964 and headed by Harold Wilson, to find the money to implement a dramatic increase in the number of universities and of students attending them. ‘This’, noted Ben Pimlott, ‘it unflinchingly did . . . and the result was the biggest proportionate increase in the number of students in full-time higher education ever’. See Pimlott, Harold Wilson (HarperCollins paperback, London, 1993), p. 513.
75. Roy Jenkins, A Life at the Centre (new edition, Politico, London, 2006), p. 206. As Jenkins pointed out, the law had long been different in Scotland where majority verdicts were allowed.
76. As Patricia Hollis noted, ‘Wilson, characteristically, was not very keen on lifting censorship – he thought playwrights might say rude things about the royals.’ See Hollis, Jennie Lee: A Life (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997), p. 274.
77. Soskice was a relatively conservative Home Secretary and much less ready to challenge the views of his department and, in particular, loath to overrule his formidable Permanent Secretary, Sir Charles Cunningham. Jenkins, from the outset, made clear that he would be running the Home Office, not the department running him.
78. See Emrys Hughes, Sydney Silverman: Rebel in Parliament (Charles Skilton, London, 1969), esp. pp. 96–112 and 171–192.
79. See Roy Jenkins, The Labour Case (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1959), esp. pp. 135–146; and Jenkins, A Life at the Centre, esp. pp. 175–213. The House of Lords amended Silverman’s abolition bill, so that it would apply only for five years, after which it would have to be reviewed. By that time James Callaghan had succeeded Jenkins as Home Secretary. Although more socially conservative than Jenkins, Callaghan was a firm opponent of capital punishment of long standing. He said that he ‘would resign rather than order any more executions’. And on a free vote in the House of Commons the abolition of the death penalty was made permanent (by a majority of 158) in December 1969. See Kenneth O. Morgan, Callaghan: A Life (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997), p. 297.
80. Jenkins, A Life at the Centre, p. 196.
81. Ibid., pp. 208–209. The Cabinet was divided on both issues. Although a substantial majority of ministers favoured both reforms, ‘three or four were opposed, and another larger group wished the issues would go away’ (ibid., p. 208).
82. Jennie Lee was a national figure and highly regarded by many Labour Party activists. She was less popular with her own local electorate and the party members in the Staffordshire constituency of Cannock. A Scots miner’s daughter, she had a somewhat regal style, and did not much concern herself with local issues or her constituents’ particular problems (Hollis, Jennie Lee, pp. 371–380).
83. See Hollis, Jennie Lee, pp. 297–359; Ben Pimlott, Harold Wilson, pp. 513–515; and Philip Ziegler, Wilson: The Authorised Life of Lord Wilson of Rievaulx (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1993), p. 201. On the Open University, Ziegler sums up: ‘Bevan’s widow, Jennie Lee, was put in charge of the enterprise. Without her energy and enthusiasm it would have got nowhere, but without Wilson’s continued support she would have had no chance to do what she did’ (ibid.). This new educational institution was granted university status in 1969 and admitted its first students in 1971. Within the next four decades more than one and a half million people were to become Open University students.
84. Vernon Bogdanor, The New British Constitution (Hart, Portland, Oregon, and Oxford, 2009), p.62.
85. Tony Blair, A Journey (Hutchinson, London, 2010), pp. 516–517. Even at the time, one senior Cabinet minister from those years told me, Blair made it clear that he was ill-disposed towards the Freedom of Information Act, and the original draft was watered down by two ministers, David Clark and Jack Straw. ‘Fortunately,’ said the same minister, ‘Parliament restored some of the substance to the Act which had been taken out of it.’ In his memoirs, Straw makes clear that he was personally horrified by the implications of the Freedom of Information Act and was active in reducing its scope, but he portrays the minister in charge, Clark, as having become evangelical in support of the FoI Act, under the strong influence of his special adviser, James Cornford. See Jack Straw, Last Man Standing: Memoirs of a Political Survivor (Macmillan, London, 2012), pp. 275–282 and 285–287.
86. Derry Irvine has written illuminatingly on the background to the constitutional legislation. See Lord Irvine of Lairg, PC, QC, Human Rights, Constitutional Law and the Development of the English Legal System: Selected Essays (Hart, Oxford and Portland, Oregon, 2003); and on Scottish devolution specifically in ‘A Skilful Advocate’ in Wendy Alexander (ed.), Donald Dewar: Scotland’s first First Minister (Mainstream, Edinburgh and London, 2005), pp. 125–129. Irvine and Dewar (the latter became Secretary of State for Scotland and subsequently the first of the First Ministers of Scotland after devolution was enacted) had ‘a shared view that the renaissance in Scotland’s sense of its national identity demanded the amplest devolution of legislative authority to a Scottish Parliament consistent with the maintenance of the Union’. They were, however, over-optimistic in their belief that a consequence would be ‘the marginalization of the SNP [Scottish National Party]’ (p. 127).
87. Kenneth O. Morgan, Ages of Reform: Dawns and Downfalls of the British Left (I.B. Tauris, London, 2011), p. 75. Irvine had been picked out as Labour’s future Lord Chancellor while Neil Kinnock still led the Labour Party. As a brilliant Labour-supporting barrister who was a close friend of John Smith, his central role in constitutional reform would have been even more assured had Smith not died in 1994. Irvine was also the person who gave Blair his first job – as a pupil in the legal chambers he headed. The other young pupil he took on in 1975 was Cherie Booth who married Blair five years later. While noting this, Philip Stephens gets the chronology and Blair’s supposed patronage of his former mentor wrong when he writes: ‘After the 1997 election, Irvine was amply rewarded by his young pupil with a seat in the House of Lords and the post of Lord Chancellor, the head of the nation’s judicial system’ (Philip Stephens, Tony Blair: The Price of Leadership, Politico’s, London, revised edition 2004, pp. 44–45). In fact, Irvine became a life peer when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister and Neil Kinnock was Leader of the Opposition – in 1987.
88. The constitutional implications are that, increasingly, the euro’s longer-term survival is seen as likely to depend on less fiscal disparity and on movement towards still closer economic and political union of the member states.
89. Hennessy, The Prime Minister, p. 477.
90. Giles Radice, Trio: Inside the Blair, Brown, Mandelson Project (Tauris, London, 2010), pp. 174–176.
91. Tony Blair was quite explicit in his approval of much of what Margaret Thatcher achieved as prime minister. In his memoirs he writes that ‘Britain needed the industrial and economic reforms of the Thatcher period’ (Blair, A Journey, p. 99).
92. Robin Cook, The Point of Departure (Simon & Schuster, London, 2003), p. 121. Cook added: ‘Part of Gordon’s tragedy is that he is an old believer in redistribution, but stuck within a Blairite ideology which only allows him to do it by stealth.’
93. Blair, A Journey, pp. 116 and 508. As Chancellor, Brown had blocked or severely modified a number of changes to public services that Blair favoured and which were, in many ways, a logical extension of the remodelling of the welfare state begun by Thatcher. Brown successfully resisted changes, backed by Blair, which Alan Milburn as Secretary of State for Health attempted to introduce, to ‘deliver genuine competition and choice’ in the National Health Service. See Peter Mandelson, The Third Man: Life at the Heart of New Labour (HarperPress, London, 2010), pp. 364–365.
94. Radice, Trio, p. 220. For very distinctive accounts of how the Labour government dealt with the impact of the global financial crisis which became apparent in 2008, see Gordon Brown, Beyond the Crash: Overcoming the First Crisis of Globalisation (Simon & Schuster, London, 2010); and Alistair Darling, Back from the Brink (Atlantic Books, London, 2011).
95. The deputy leader of the party, in particular – Nicola Sturgeon – established a reputation as a very able minister and talented politician.
96. David Torrance, Salmond: Against the Odds (revised ed., Birlinn, Edinburgh, 2011), p. 227
97. On Harold Wilson as a ‘role model’ for Salmond, ibid., pp. 339–340.
98. As noted in Chapter 1, that is a central argument of Drew Westen, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation (Public Affairs, paperback edition, New York, 2008).
99. Frank Brettschneider and Oscar W. Gabriel, ‘The Nonpersonalization of Voting Behavior in Germany’, in Anthony King (ed.), Leaders’ Personalities and the Outcomes of Democratic Elections (Oxford University Press, New York, 2002), pp. 127–157, at p. 138.
100. Robert Elgie, Political Leadership in Liberal Democracies (Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, 1995), pp. 81–86.
101. Peter Pulzer, German Politics 1945–1995 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995), pp. 46–47.
102. Mary Fulbrook, History of Germany 1918–2000: The Divided Nation (Blackwell, Oxford, 2nd ed., 2002), p. 52. Immediate post-war Germany was divided into zones administered by the occupying powers. In the American zone, the overseers were presented with a dilemma when in one town a Nazi mayor was re-elected by majority vote. As Fulbrook observes (pp. 115–116): ‘It was not immediately clear whether the most “democratic” thing to do would be to reject the democratic vote for an undemocratic person, or to install, undemocratically, a democratic candidate against the wishes of the majority. What was clear, however, was that many Germans had little conception of what was meant by “democracy”: it was associated for all those who were old enough to have experienced it as adults in the Weimar Republic with national defeat and humiliation, economic crisis, and political chaos.’
103. Cologne was within the British zone of Germany when the country was administratively divided up at the end of the war. Adenauer was actually dismissed as Mayor of Cologne by the British in 1945. Freed to devote more time to the Christian Democratic Party, he took full advantage of the opportunity and became the party’s Chairman.
104. Germany has, indeed, been described as ‘Europe’s oldest welfare state’. See Pulzer, German Politics 1945–1995, pp. 63–64.
105. Ibid.
106. Gordon A. Craig, cited by Giles Radice, The New Germans (Michael Joseph, London, 1995), p. 79.
107. Willy Brandt, My Life in Politics (Penguin, London, 1993), p. 74.
108. Ibid., p. 78.
109. Thomas A. Bayliss, Governing by Committee: Collegial Leadership in Advanced Societies (State University of New York Press, Albany, 1989), p. 76.
110. Fulbrook, History of Germany 1918–2000, p. 168.
111. I say this partly on the basis of personal experience and countless conversations in Russia in those years. I spent three months in the Soviet Union in 1966, ten months in 1967–68 and two months in 1976, and noted the big difference in attitudes to Germany in the third of these academic exchange visits as compared with the first two. There is little reason to doubt that it was Willy Brandt and his change of German foreign policy which played a major role in bringing about that development.
112. Archie Brown, ‘Did Gorbachev as General Secretary Become a Social Democrat?’, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 65, No. 2, 2013, pp. 198–220.
113. Shortly after Brandt’s death, Gorbachev published a journal article of warm tribute to his German colleague in the broader context of the role of the individual in the making of politics and history. See Mikhail Gorbachev, ‘Delaet li chelovek politiku? Delaet li chelovek istoriyu: razmyshleniya o nasledii Villi Brandta’, Svobodnaya mysl’, No. 17, 1992, pp. 17–21. Of Brandt’s Ostpolitik, Gorbachev wrote: ‘There is no doubt that it exerted an appreciable influence on the spiritual and political atmosphere not only in Germany itself, but also in Europe as a whole, including on us. The “Eastern Policy” promoted deepening reflection in our society, reflection on the relationship between freedom and development, on democracy and the future of our country’ (p. 19).
114. Brandt, My Life in Politics, p. 200.
115. Ibid.
116. Ibid., p. 6.
117. Kohl’s Newsweek interview is quoted in Helga Haftendorn, ‘The Unification of Germany, 1985–1991’, in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Volume III: Endings (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010), pp. 333–355, at p. 335.
118. Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague (Random House, New York, 1990), p. 72.
119. Haftendorn, ‘The Unification of Germany, 1985–1991’, p. 351.
120. Bush later wrote that ‘Thatcher’s lack of sympathy for and even distrust of reunification was obvious’, but added: ‘While I did not agree with Margaret’s concern about the implications of a united Germany, to some degree I did share her worry about the adverse political effect reunification could have on Gorbachev.’ See George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (Knopf, New York, 1998), pp. 192–193. See also Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1995).
121. Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall 13 August 1961–9 November 1989 (Bloomsbury, London, 2006), p. 645.
122. George C. Edwards III, The Public Presidency: The Pursuit of Popular Support (St Martin’s Press, New York, 1983), p. 208.
123. Stephen Skowronek, ‘The Paradigm of Development in Presidential History’, in George C. Edwards III and William G. Howell (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the American Presidency (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009), pp. 749–770, at p. 761.
124. Richard Rose, The Postmodern President: George Bush Meets the World (Chatham House, Chatham, N.J., 2nd ed., 1991), p. 183.
125. Ibid.
126. Hugh Heclo, ‘Whose Presidency is This Anyhow?’, in Edwards and Howells (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the American Presidency, p. 776.
127. That was scarcely less true even a generation ago. See Edwards, The Public Presidency, pp. 187–210.
128. I have in mind the readmission to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of Stalin’s right-hand man, Vyacheslav Molotov, and the proposal at a Politburo meeting presided over by Chernenko to restore to the city of Volgograd its famous wartime name of Stalingrad. The idea was to do this as part of the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany in May 1985. These were symbolic gestures (Molotov himself was aged ninety-three by that time), but of political significance – moves towards rehabilitation of Stalin which would bolster anti-reformist forces within the party and society. However, although Molotov was duly readmitted to the party in 1984, by May 1985 Gorbachev was General Secretary. The principal advocate of a return to ‘Stalingrad’, Marshal Dmitriy Ustinov, was dead, and no such name-change took place. See Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism (Bodley Head, London, 2009), p. 484.
129. For this quotation and a much more detailed study of Cardoso’s leadership, I am indebted to Alfred Stepan’s forthcoming chapter, ‘Cardoso as Academic Theoretician and Democratic Leader’, in Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Richard Snyder (eds.), Cardoso and Approaches to Inequality (Lynne Rienner, Boulder, 2014).
130. As Adrian Guelke put it, the government led by the National Party in South Africa had become ‘increasingly reliant on anti-communism to justify its policies internationally, particularly as any residual sympathy for racial oligarchy in the Western world faded’ (Guelke, ‘The Impact of the End of the Cold War on the South African Transition’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, Vol. 14, No. 1, 1996, p. 97).
131. Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (Abacus, London, 1995), p. 660.
132. See David Welsh and Jack Spence, ‘F.W. de Klerk: Enlightened Conservative’, in Martin Westlake (ed.), Leaders of Transition (Macmillan, London, 2000), pp. 29–52. The fact that in the years following Mandela’s retirement, South African politics and society have hardly lived up to the high hopes of 1994 does not lessen the scale of Mandela’s – and, indeed, de Klerk’s – achievement.
133. Ching-fen Hu, ‘Taiwan’s Geopolitics and Chiang Ching-Kuo’s Decision to Democratize Taiwan’, Stanford Journal of East Asian Affairs, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2005, pp. 26–44, at p. 43.
134. See The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (Grosset & Dunlap, New York, 1978), pp. 544–580; Henry Kissinger, The White House Years (Little, Brown, Boston, 1979), pp. 684–787; Margaret MacMillan, Seize the Hour: When Nixon Met Mao (John Murray, London, 2006); Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith: The Memoirs of a President (Bantam Books, New York, 1982), pp. 186–211; and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Adviser 1977–1981 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1983), pp. 401–425.
135. Ching-fen Hu, ‘Taiwan’s Geopolitics and Chiang Ching-Kuo’s Decision to Democratize Taiwan’, p. 38.
136. Ibid., p. 42.
4 Transformational Political Leadership
1. Charles de Gaulle, The Complete War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle (Carroll & Graf, New York, 1998), p. 3.
2. Ibid., p. 233. Writing about himself in the third person was characteristic of de Gaulle.
3. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War: Volume II: Their Finest Hour (Cassell, London, 1949), pp. 136–137, 141–142.
4. Churchill, The Second World War: Volume II, p. 142.
5. Quoted by Philip M. Williams and Martin Harrison, De Gaulle’s Republic (Longmans, London, 1960), p. 75.
6. Vincent Wright, The Government and Politics of France (Unwin Hyman, London, 3rd ed., 1989), p. 4.
7. Williams and Harrison, De Gaulle’s Republic, pp. 3–4.
8. Ibid., p. 35.
9. Ibid., p. 41.
10. John Gaffney, Political Leadership in France: From Charles de Gaulle to Nicolas Sarkozy (Palgrave Macmillan paperback, Houndmills, 2012), p. 15.
11. Especially memorable was de Gaulle’s opening sentence of his war memoirs: ‘Toute ma vie, je me suis fait une certaine idée de la France’ (quoted by Sudhir Hazareesingh, Le Mythe gaullien, Gallimard, Paris, 2010, p. 58).
12. Gaffney, Political Leadership in France, p. 11.
13. See Michel Debré, Entretiens avec le général de Gaulle 1961–1969 (Albin Michel, Paris, 1993).
14. Gaffney notes (Political Leadership in France, p. 32): ‘Opinion polls at the time suggested that 50 per cent of the French – as with most texts of this kind – had not even looked at the draft constitution they would vote upon, and only 15 per cent claimed to have properly read it at all.’
15. Wright, The Government and Politics of France, pp. 53–54.
16. Ibid., p. 60.
17. Gaffney, Political Leadership in France, pp. 33–34.
18. Presidential power was also drastically reduced during the times when the incumbent did not have the support of a majority in the legislature and had to ‘cohabit’ with a prime minister of a different political persuasion. This did not happen, however, during de Gaulle’s eleven years in the presidency.
19. Robert Elgie, Political Leadership in Liberal Democracies (Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, 1995), p. 64.
20. Wright, The Government and Politics of France, p. 37.
21. Williams and Harrison, De Gaulle’s Republic, p. 209.
22. Wright, The Government and Politics of France, p. 28.
23. Sudhir Hazareesingh, In the Shadow of the General: Modern France and the Myth of De Gaulle (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012), pp. 172–173.
24. Ibid., pp. 179 and 182.
25. Ibid., p. 104.
26. De Gaulle advised Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy not to become embroiled in Vietnam and subsequently publicly opposed Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the war (Gaffney, Political Leadership in France, pp. 54–55).
27. Hazareesingh, In the Shadow of the General, p. 107.
28. Wright, The Government and Politics of France, pp. 18–20.
29. Survey research showed that de Gaulle’s standing remained relatively high. When in April 1968 French citizens were asked whether, all things considered, de Gaulle’s return to power in 1958 had been a good thing or a bad thing, 67 per cent said it had been good. Even in November 1969 when respondents were asked if they were satisfied with what de Gaulle did in the years 1958–1969, 53 per cent were either ‘very satisfied’ or ‘more satisfied than dissatisfied’. See Jean Charlot, Les Français et de Gaulle (Plon, Paris, 1971), pp. 165–166.
30. González, who had become Socialist Party leader while his party was still a banned organization under Franco’s rule, was one of Suárez’s strongest critics and himself a politician who played an important part in the transition from authoritarianism and a still greater role in the consolidation of Spanish democracy. He was to become Spain’s longest-serving democratic prime minister, holding the premiership continuously for fourteen years – from 1982 until 1996. His popularity at home and impact abroad was much greater than that of Suárez, but it was the latter who played the most indispensable part in the transition from authoritarian rule.
31. The ‘Eurocommunist’ parties distinguished themselves by being prepared to criticize some of the actions of the Soviet Union. Most notably, they were critical of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, having been themselves sympathetic to the Prague Spring reformers. See Paulo Filo della Torre, Edward Mortimer and Jonathan Story (eds.), Eurocommunism: Myth or Reality? (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1979); and Richard Kindersley (ed.), In Search of Eurocommunism (Macmillan, London, 1981).
32. Simon Parlier, ‘Adolfo Suárez: Democratic Dark Horse’, in Martin Westlake (ed.), Leaders of Transition (Macmillan, London, 2000), pp. 133–155, at p. 144.
33. Quoted in Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1996), pp. 96–97.
34. The quotations are from Adolfo Suárez González, Un nuevo horizonte para España: Discursos del Presidente del Gobierno 1976–1978 (Imprenta del Boletín Oficial del Estado, Madrid, 1978). I owe these references to Alfred Stepan. The entire section on Suárez has benefited greatly from my conversations with Professor Stepan and from his generous sharing of the insights he gained from his long interview with Suárez on 24 May 1990.
35. Ibid., p. 101.
36. Should Catalonia, or even the Basque country, become independent states in the future, there is every reason now to suppose that both they and the Spanish state would still be democracies.
37. Parlier, ‘Adolfo Suárez, pp. 148–149.
38. Quoted in Linz and Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, p. 114.
39. Parlier, ‘Adolfo Suárez’, p. 149.
40. Ibid., p. 150. The Basque National Party called on its supporters to abstain and 50 per cent of the electorate did so.
41. Linz and Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, p. 89. Some evidence came to light as recently as early 2012 which suggested that the king had become somewhat disenchanted with Suárez by the time of the attempted coup. He told the German ambassador to Madrid on 26 March 1981, in documents declassified only in February 2012, that the military plotters had ‘wanted what we are all striving for, namely, the re-establishment of discipline, order, security and calm’. He also blamed Suárez for failing ‘to establish a relationship with the military’. See Fiona Govan, ‘Juan Carlos was “sympathetic” to 1981 coup leaders’, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/spain/9072122/Juan-Carlos, 9 February 2012. The quoted remarks notwithstanding, the heading does not do justice to the king’s role at the time when his actions spoke louder than his later words.
42. Many of the points made briefly in the Gorbachev section of this chapter I have elaborated at length elsewhere. Beginning with a volume published in the early 1980s (Archie Brown and Michael Kaser, eds., Soviet Policy for the 1980s, Macmillan, London, 1982), I have written extensively about Gorbachev and perestroika in books and articles over the years. See especially Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996); Brown, Seven Years that Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007); and Brown, ‘The Gorbachev Factor Revisited’, Problems of Post-Communism, Vol. 58, Nos. 4–5, 2011, pp. 56–65.
43. New York Times, 13 March 2010.
44. The head of Soviet space research, Roald Sagdeev, was among the specialists extremely sceptical about SDI. When, at a meeting with Gorbachev, a representative of the Soviet space industry told the Soviet leader that ‘We are losing time while doing nothing to build our own counterpart of the American SDI program’, Sagdeev says, ‘I nearly died from suppressing my laughter.’ See Sagdeev, The Making of a Soviet Scientist: My Adventures in Nuclear Fusion and Space From Stalin to Star Wars (John Wiley, New York, 1994), p. 273.
45. Ronald Reagan, An American Life (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1990), p. 608.
46. He had, however, shared some of his critical views with Eduard Shevardnadze, the First Secretary of the Georgian party organization and a candidate (or non-voting) member of the Politburo, and, still more, with Aleksandr Yakovlev, the Director of the think-tank IMEMO and a former high official of the Central Committee. Two years earlier, at Gorbachev’s behest, Yakovlev had been brought back to Moscow after a ten-year dignified exile as Soviet ambassador to Canada.
47. On the process by which Gorbachev became General Secretary in March 1985, see Brown, Seven Years that Changed the World, pp. 29–67, esp. 39–40.
48. Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy (Novosti, Moscow, 1995), Volume 1, p. 395.
49. Mikhail Gorbachev in XIX Vsesoyuznaya konferentsiya Kommunisticheskoy partii Sovetskogo Soyuza: Stenograficheskiy otchet (Politizdat, Moscow, 1988), Volume 1, p. 43.
50. Jean Blondel makes the general point that ‘leaders whose goals change are among those who are the most important’, suggesting that they are ‘drawn primarily from the relatively small group who stay in office for substantial and even very long periods’. See Blondel, Political Leadership: Towards a General Analysis (Sage, London, 1987), p. 85. Gorbachev’s goals, however, changed within quite a short time – in a period of little more than three years after he had become Soviet leader.
51. Mikhail Gorbachev, Ponyat’ perestroyku . . . Pochemu eto vazhno seychas (Al’pina, Moscow, 2006), p. 180.
52. Aleksandr Yakovlev, Predislovie, Obval, Posleslovie (Novosti, Moscow, 1992), p. 267.
53. ‘Zasedanie Politbyuro TsK KPSS, 15 Okybrya 1987 goda’, Volkogonov Collection, National Security Archive, Washington, DC, pp. 149–150 and 155. Gorbachev had already used the term ‘socialist pluralism’ at a meeting with representatives of the mass media, reported in Pravda on 15 July 1987. Once he had given the hitherto taboo word ‘pluralism’ his imprimatur, reformist intellectuals began to use it, sometimes dropping the ‘socialist’ qualifier. Gorbachev himself, by February 1990, was speaking not of ‘socialist pluralism’ but of ‘political pluralism’.
54. The top foreign policy officials whom Gorbachev replaced were the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the heads of the International Department and the Socialist Countries Department of the Central Committee, and his own principal foreign policy adviser. Especially important were the first of these and the last (Eduard Shevardnadze replacing Andrey Gromyko as Foreign Minister and Anatoliy Chernyaev taking the place of Andrey Aleksandrov-Agentov as foreign policy aide to the General Secretary). It was much harder to replace the key officials in the economic sector, there were so many of them. Half of the more than twenty departments of the Central Committee were concerned with the economy. (In the autumn of 1988, three and a half years after he became Soviet leader, Gorbachev managed to abolish all but two of them.) There were dozens of economic ministries, and every regional party official and manager of a large factory was involved in the implementation of economic policy, in most cases representing an obstacle to reform.
55. V.I. Vorotnikov, I bylo eto tak . . . Iz dnevnika chlena Politbyuro TsK KPSS (Sovet veteranov knigoizdanie, Moscow, 1995), p. 260. See also pp. 460–461.
56. Aleksandr Yakovlev, Sumerki (Materik, Moscow, 2003), p. 501.
57. Ibid.
58. Vorotnikov, I bylo eto tak, p. 461.
59. Ibid., p. 260.
60. By the time he came to write his memoirs (The Making of a Soviet Scientist), Sagdeev was living in the United States. An event in his personal life had occurred which, earlier than the late perestroika era, would have been unimaginable for a high-ranking Soviet scientist who had close contacts with the Soviet military-industrial complex. Sagdeev had become the husband of Susan Eisenhower, the granddaughter of President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
61. Sagdeev, The Making of a Soviet Scientist, p. 272. Gorbachev came up against the limits of his powers of persuasion when he tried to convince Lithuanians in 1990–91 that they would be better off in a democratized and genuinely federal Soviet Union than in the separate state they were seeking.
62. Ibid.
63. According to the survey research of the most reliable investigators of public opinion in those years, VTsIOM, led by Tatiana Zaslavskaya, Boris Grushin and Yuriy Levada. See Reytingi Borisa Yel’tsina i Mikhaila Gorbacheva po 10-bal’noy shkale (VTsIOM, Moscow, 1993).
64. These were not yet multi-party elections, and most of the deputies elected were members of the Communist Party. However, what was decisively important was that they competed against one another on fundamentally different political platforms, thus revealing the full extent of the political differences within the party which lay behind the monolithic façade that the party leadership had hitherto maintained before its own society and the outside world (and that had been justified by the doctrine of ‘democratic centralism’, which was now as dead as the dodo). An intra-party pluralism prepared the way for the rapid development of competing political parties which were fully legalized by a change to the Soviet Constitution in March 1990.
65. Georgiy Shakhnazarov, Tsena svobody: Reformatsiya Gorbacheva glazami ego pomoshchnika (Rossika Zevs, Moscow, 1993), pp. 77–78.
66. Ryzhkov claimed to have read Stalin’s copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince (in the Russian translation of 1869), complete with Stalin’s underlinings and annotations. See Nikolay Ryzhkov, Perestroyka: Istoriya predatel’stv (Novosti, Moscow, 1992), pp. 354–355.
67. Ryzhkov, Perestroyka, p. 364.
68. Mikhail Gorbachev and Zdeněk Mlynář, Conversations with Gorbachev: On Perestroika, the Prague Spring, and the Crossroads of Socialism (Columbia University Press, New York, 2002), p. 15.
69. Archie Brown, ‘Did Gorbachev as General Secretary Become a Social Democrat?’, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 65, No. 2, 2013, pp. 198–220. Of all the foreign heads of government with whom he came in contact while he was Soviet leader, Gorbachev’s favourite was the Spanish democratic socialist prime minister, Felipe González.
70. From time to time the absurd suggestion that Gorbachev was himself complicit in the coup is floated by Gorbachev’s enemies and by ill-informed authors, sometimes given more publicity than such nonsense deserves. For refutations of the conspiracy theories, see Anatoly Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev (Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, 2000), ‘Afterword to the U.S. Edition’, pp. 401–423; and Brown, Seven Years that Changed the World, pp. 319–324.
71. Aleksandr Dugin, ‘Perestroyka po-evraziyski: upushchennyy shans’, in V.I. Tolstykh (ed.), Perestroyka dvadtsat’ let spustya (Russkiy put’, Moscow, 2005), pp. 88–97, at p. 96.
72. Aleksandr Yakovlev, ‘Eto krupneyshiy reformator’, Ogonek, No. 11, March 1995, p. 45.
73. Ezra F. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2011), pp. 18–24 and 487.
74. Rana Mitter, A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004), p. 161.
75. See Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, pp. 15–36.
76. Ibid., p. 38.
77. See Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine (Bloomsbury paperback, London, 2011), pp. 88, 92 and 118–119.
78. Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2006), pp. 358–359.
79. Ibid., p. 359.
80. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, p. 313.
81. Ibid., p. 247.
82. Ibid., p. 377.
83. Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament, translated and edited by Strobe Talbott (Deutsch, London, 1974), p. 253.
84. MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution, p. 457.
85. Peter Nolan, China at the Crossroads (Polity Press, Cambridge, 2004), p. 3.
86. Ibid., p. 1.
87. For an excellent analysis of the ‘insurance policy’ against regime change which a number of senior Chinese officials maintain through businesses abroad, whereby publicly owned productive and financial assets are turned into private property (with the overseas enterprises run more often than not by their children), see X.L. Ding, ‘Informal Privatization Through Internationalization: The Rise of Nomenklatura Capitalism in China’s Offshore Business’, British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 30, No. 1, 2000, pp. 121–146.
88. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, pp. 703–704.
89. Zhao Ziyang, Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Zhao Ziyang, translated and edited by Bao Pu, Renee Chiang and Adi Ignatius (Simon & Schuster, London, 2009), pp. 25–34, esp. p. 28.
90. Some military commanders refused to take part in the violent suppression of young demonstrators, among them a general who was, as a consequence, court-martialled and sentenced to five years of imprisonment. See Richard McGregor, The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers (Penguin, London, 2011), pp. 109–110.
91. Green Cross International, Mikhail Gorbachev: Prophet of Change. From Cold War to a Sustainable World (Clareview, East Sussex, 2011), p. 243. De Klerk also notes that, quite apart from the changes in Europe, under Gorbachev’s leadership ‘the Soviet Union played a constructive role in the negotiations between South Africa, Angola and Cuba, which resulted in the withdrawal of Cuban forces from Angola and the successful implementation of the United Nations independence process in Namibia’ (ibid.).
92. Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (Abacus, London, 1995), p. 24.
93. Ibid.
94. Ibid., p. 25.
95. Ibid., p. 134.
96. Ibid., p. 436.
97. Ibid.
98. William Beinart, Twentieth-Century South Africa (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2nd ed., 2001), p. 166.
99. Tom Lodge, Mandela: A Critical Life (Oxford University Press, Oxford, paperback edition, 2007), p. 82.
100. Also banned was the Pan African Congress, a militant group which had broken away from the ANC and had been involved in the protests that led up to the Sharpeville killings (ibid.).
101. Ibid., pp. 90 and 92.
102. Nelson Mandela, Conversations with Myself (Macmillan, London, 2010), p. 413.
103. Ibid.; and Lodge, Mandela, p. 99.
104. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, p. 438.
105. Frederick Cooper, Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002), p. 153.
106. Mandela, Conversations with Myself, p. 344.
107. Ibid., pp. 344–345.
108. Lodge, Mandela, p. 205.
109. Ibid., p. 211.
110. Ibid.
111. Ibid., p. 213.
112. Taylor Branch, The Clinton Tapes: A President’s Secret Diary (Simon & Schuster, London, 2009), pp. 303–304.
113. Stefan Hedlund, Russia’s “Market” Economy: A Bad Case of Predatory Capitalism (ICL Press, London, 1999). See also Hedlund, Invisible Hands, Russian Experience, and Social Science: Approaches to Understanding Systemic Failure (Cambridge University Press, New York, 2011).
114. See Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism Against Democracy (United States Institute of Peace, Washington, DC, 2001); and for a more sympathetic view of Russia’s first post-Communist president, Timothy J. Colton, Yeltsin: A Life (Basic Books, New York, 2008).
5 Revolutions and Revolutionary Leadership
1. Ludvík Vaculík speech at Writers’ Congress in Prague, June 1967: IV Sjezd Svazu československých spisovatelů, Praha 27–29 června 1967 (Československý spisovatel, Prague, 1968), p. 141 (translated in Dušan Hamšík, Writers Against Rulers, Hutchinson, London, 1971, p. 182).
2. Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1968), p. 266.
3. John Dunn, Modern Revolutions: An Introduction to the Analysis of a Political Phenomenon (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2nd ed., 1989), p. 12.
4. See, for example, Sharon Erickson Nepstad, Nonviolent Revolutions: Civil Resistance in the Late 20th Century (Oxford University Press, New York, 2011). In contrast, Chalmers Johnson has written that ‘“nonviolent revolution”, so long as these words retain any precise meaning whatsoever, is a contradiction in terms’. See Johnson, Revolutionary Change (University of London Press, London, 1968), p. 7. At the same time, Johnson defines ‘violence’ quite broadly to include revolutions accomplished ‘without any blood flowing in the gutters or a single death being caused’ (ibid.).
5. Nepstad, Nonviolent Revolutions, pp. 4–5. One survey of the use of the concept of revolution concluded that ‘there is a general consensus that violence is a necessary characteristic of revolution’, with only one author (Charles Tilly), among those surveyed, who did ‘not make it a defining characteristic’. See Christoph M. Kotowski, ‘Revolution’, in Giovanni Sartori (ed.), Social Science Concepts: A Systematic Analaysis (Sage, Beverly Hills, 1984), pp. 403–451, at p. 414.
6. For a useful review of these attempts, see Jack A. Goldstone, ‘Comparative Historical Analysis and Knowledge Accumulation in the Study of Revolutions’, in James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer (eds.), Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003), pp. 41–90.
7. I have used the term ‘institutional relationships’ to convey the meaning of what Marx called ‘the relations of production’.
8. See especially Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1959), p. 22. (Marx’s critique of the ‘Gotha Unity Congress’ of the German Social Democrats was written in London in 1875, and first published by Friedrich Engels in 1891.) Marx, it should be added, only rarely used the expression ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. It was Lenin who turned it into a much more central tenet of ‘Marxist-Leninist’ revolutionary theory.
9. Although not claiming the comprehensive explanatory power which Marx sought, two notable studies of revolutionary change written in the second half of the twentieth century were Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Peregrine, London, 1969); and Theda Scocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1979). Moore offers a non-Marxist class analysis, in which he is especially concerned to explore the circumstances in which peasants become the major revolutionary force. Scocpol’s emphasis is on the state, viewed as relatively autonomous from class interests. She compares both the state crises that paved the way for the three major revolutions within her purview – those of France, China and Russia – and the post-revolutionary use of state power.
10. Eric Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries (Abacus paperback, London, 1999), p. 295.
11. I have drawn here on several articles by the leading historian of the Mexican revolution, Alan Knight.
12. Alan Knight, ‘The Myth of the Mexican Revolution’, Past and Present, No. 209, November 2010, pp. 223–273, esp. p. 228; see also Knight, ‘The Mexican Revolution: Bourgeois? Nationalist? Or just a “Great Rebellion”?’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1985, pp. 1–37. The Mexican revolution, writes Knight, ‘was justified less as a leap into an unknown future, than as a restoration of a preferred status quo ante’ (‘The Myth of the Mexican Revolution’, p. 231).
13. When we speak of a ‘revolution from above’, such as occurred within the Soviet Union between 1985 and 1989, this is a figurative use of revolution. Similarly, ‘revolutionary change by evolutionary means’ indicates fundamental change, introduced gradually, rather than revolution more strictly defined.
14. Knight, ‘The Mexican Revolution: Bourgeois? Nationalist? Or just a “Great Rebellion”?’, p. 8.
15. Knight, ‘The Myth of the Mexican Revolution’, pp. 237–238.
16. Alan Knight, ‘Populism and Neo-Populism in Latin America, especially Mexico’, Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2, 1998, pp. 223–248, at pp. 235–236.
17. Ibid., p. 237.
18. Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (Norton, New York, 2nd ed., 1999), pp. 244–253.
19. Ibid., pp. 262–263; and Jonathan Fenby, The Penguin History of Modern China: The Fall and Rise of a Great Power, 1850–2008 (Allen Lane, London, 2008), p. 121.
20. Fenby, The Penguin History of Modern China, pp. 125–126.
21. Spence, The Search for Modern China, pp. 274–276.
22. Fenby, The Penguin History of Modern China, p. 123.
23. Spence, The Search for Modern China, pp. 276–277; Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers: Six Months that Changed the World (John Murray paperback, London, 2002), pp. 331–353; and Rana Mitter, A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004), pp. 35–36.
24. See Spence, The Search for Modern China, pp. 277–289.
25. On the May Fourth movement, see Spence, ibid., pp. 299–313; and Mitter, A Bitter Revolution, pp. 6–11.
26. Spence, The Search for Modern China, pp. 284–285.
27. Ibid., p. 314.
28. Mitter, A Bitter Revolution, pp. 141–142.
29. Spence, The Search for Modern China, pp. 314–322.
30. Fenby, The Penguin History of Modern China, p. 144.
31. Andrew Mango, Atatürk (John Murray, London, 1999), p. 76.
32. Ibid., p. 176.
33. MacMillan, Peacemakers, p. 445.
34. Mango, Atatürk, pp. 300–304.
35. Albert Hourani, The Emergence of the Modern Middle East (Macmillan, London, in association with St Antony’s College, Oxford, 1981), p. 17. As Hourani noted: ‘Many of the early leaders (although not Atatürk himself) came from the families of the officers and bureaucrats who had been at the centre of Ottoman government and reform’, ibid.
36. Mango, Atatürk, p. 364.
37. Ibid., p. 406.
38. Erik J. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History (Tauris, London, 1993), p. 178.
39. Ibid., pp. 176–180.
40. Mango, Atatürk, p. 403.
41. Ibid., pp. 407 and 434–435.
42. Zürcher, Turkey, pp. 227–228; and Mango, Atatürk, p. 531.
43. Imperial Russia in 1917 was thirteen days behind the rest of Europe in its measurement of time. Until 1920 Russia used the Julian calendar (still employed by the Orthodox Church) before switching to the more generally used Gregorian calendar.
44. This was a recently invented tradition, established by socialist parties in several different countries, to focus attention on equal rights for women.
45. Ronald Grigor Suny, The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States (Oxford University Press, New York, 1998), p. 35.
46. The Bolshevik name dated back to 1903 when there was a split within the Russian revolutionary movement, instigated by Lenin, between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, with the former taking a harder and more uncompromising line than the latter. The official name of the party, led by Lenin, at the time of the 1917 revolutions was the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks). In 1918 the name was changed to Communist Party (although ‘Bolsheviks’ was retained in brackets until 1952).
47. S.A. Smith, ‘The Revolutions of 1917–1918’, in Ronald Grigor Suny (ed.), The Cambridge History of Russia: Volume III, The Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006), pp. 114–139, at pp. 124 and 138.
48. Suny, The Soviet Experiment, p. 38.
49. Ibid.; and Smith, ‘The Revolutions of 1917–1918’, pp. 114–115.
50. Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution (Oxford University Press, New York, 3rd ed., 2008), p. 49.
51. Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, p. 47.
52. Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography (Pan, London, 2002), pp. 300–301.
53. See Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects (Pathfinder Press, New York, 3rd ed., 1972).
54. Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, pp. 49–50.
55. Suny, The Soviet Experiment, p. 59.
56. Ibid., p. 52.
57. Ibid., pp. 64–65.
58. Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Methuen, London, 2nd ed., 1970), p. 183. Sheila Fitzpatrick, while accepting that in electoral democratic politics ‘a loss is a loss’, has noted a rationalization for the Bolsheviks’ spurning of the result of the election to the Constituent Assembly. She writes that ‘they could and did argue that it was not the population as a whole that they claimed to represent. They had taken power in the name of the working class’. And the elections both to the Second Congress of Soviets and to the Constituent Assembly suggested that in October–November 1917 the Bolsheviks ‘were drawing more working-class votes than any other party’ (Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, p. 67).
59. Phyllis Auty, Tito: A Biography (Longman, London, 1970), pp. 29–39.
60. Bertram D. Wolfe, A Life in Two Centuries: An Autobiography (Stein and Day, New York, 1981), p. 441.
61. See The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov 1933–1949 (introduced and edited by Ivo Banac, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2003).
62. Ibid., p. 474.
63. F.W.D. Deakin, The Embattled Mountain (Oxford University Press, London, 1971), pp. 79–80.
64. Deakin, having fought alongside him, noted Djilas’s ‘outstanding physical courage’ (ibid., p. 84).
65. Milovan Djilas, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System (Thames and Hudson, London, 1957), p. 47.
66. Milovan Djilas, Tito: The Story from Inside (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1981), pp. 13–15.
67. Auty, Tito, p. 266.
68. Apart from Tito, its members were Edvard Kardelj, a Slovene; the Serbs Moša Pijade (who was also of Jewish origin) and Aleksandar Ranković; and Djilas, who was a Montenegrin.
69. The Artful Albanian: The Memoirs of Enver Hoxha, edited and introduced by Jon Halliday (Chatto & Windus, London, 1986).
70. Jürgen Domes, ‘The Model for Revolutionary People’s War: The Communist Takeover of China’, in Thomas T. Hammond (ed.), The Anatomy of Communist Takeovers (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1975), pp. 516–533, at pp. 520–521.
71. Spence, The Search for Modern China, pp. 463–464.
72. Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (Rupert Hart-Davis, London, 1962), pp. 164–165.
73. Spence, The Search for Modern China, p. 467.
74. Roderick MacFarquhar in MacFarquhar (ed.), ‘Introduction’, in The Politics of China: The Eras of Mao and Deng (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2nd ed., 1997), pp. 1–4, at p. 1.
75. Ho’s original name was Nguyen Tat Than, but for many years he achieved fame as Nguyen Ai Quoc (Nguyen the Patriot). The last time he used that name was when he signed an ‘appeal to the people’ in 1945, calling for Vietnamese independence from France. See William J. Duiker, Ho Chi Minh (Hyperion, New York, 2000), p. 306.
76. Ibid., p. 75.
77. Ibid., p. 95.
78. Patrick J. Heardon, The Tragedy of Vietnam (Pearson Longman, New York, 3rd ed., 2008), pp. 18–19.
79. Ibid., pp. 20–23.
80. Ibid., p. 29.
81. Ibid., p. 181.
82. David W.P. Elliott, ‘Official History, Revisionist History, and Wild History’, in Mark Philip Bradley and Marilyn B. Young (eds.), Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars: Local, National, and Transnational Perspectives (Oxford University Press, New York, 2008), pp. 277–304, at p. 278.
83. Duiker, Ho Chi Minh, pp. 5 and 572. The author notes that he had been fascinated by Ho Chi Minh ever since he served as a young foreign service officer at the US Embassy in Saigon in the mid-1960s, when he was ‘puzzled by the fact that the Viet Cong guerrillas fighting in the jungles appeared to be better disciplined and more motivated than the armed forces of our ally, the government of South Vietnam’ (ibid., p. ix).
84. Ibid., p. 572.
85. Jean-Louis Margolin, ‘Cambodia: The Country of Disconcerting Crimes’, in Stéphane Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1999), pp. 577–635, at p. 581.
86. Nicholas Shakespeare, ‘Letter from Cambodia: How the dead live’, New Statesman, 15–21 February 2013, pp. 37–41, at p. 38.
87. Margolin, ‘Cambodia’, p. 582.
88. Ibid., pp. 630 and 635.
89. Ibid., p. 577.
90. Bradley K. Martin, Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (St Martin’s Press, New York, 2006), pp. 30–31. A Korean Communist Party had been set up in secret in 1925, but it was disbanded by the Comintern in 1928.
91. Christopher Bluth, Korea (Polity, Cambridge, 2008), p. 12.
92. Martin, Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader, pp. 56–57.
93. Volker Skierka, Fidel Castro, translated by Patrick Camiller (Polity, Cambridge, 2004), p. 30.
94. Castro, My Life, edited by Ignacio Ramonet and translated by Andrew Hurley (revised ed., Allen Lane, London, 2007), p. 157.
95. Skierka, Fidel Castro, p. 5.
96. Castro, My Life, pp. 80–81.
97. Skierka, Fidel Castro, p. 20.
98. Ibid., p. 24.
99. Ibid., pp. 35–36.
100. Fidel Castro, History Will Absolve Me: The Moncada Trial Defence Speech, Santiago de Cuba, October 16th, 1953 (Jonathan Cape, London, 1968).
101. Skierka, Fidel Castro, pp. 38–39.
102. Ibid., p. 51.
103. Ibid.
104. Ibid., pp. 53–54.
105. Ibid., p. 69.
106. Ibid., p. 183.
107. Ibid., pp. 96–97.
108. Ibid., p. 378.
109. Castro, My Life, p. 85.
110. For documentation of Gorbachev’s abandonment of Communist ideology and embrace of social democratic values while he was still Soviet leader, see Archie Brown, ‘Did Gorbachev as General Secretary Become a Social Democrat?’, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 65, No. 2, 2013, pp. 198–220.
111. See, for example, Jacques Lévesque, The Enigma of 1989: The USSR and the Liberation of Eastern Europe (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997), pp. 133 and 186.
112. The figure of 1,000 for those who took part in the main opposition movement, Charter 77, is given in H. Gordon Skilling, Charter 77 and Human Rights in Czechoslovakia (Allen & Unwin, London, 1981), p. 79.
113. Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague (Random House, New York, 1990), p. 90.
114. Ibid., pp. 89–90.
115. It is understandable that many of those who took part in the systemic transformation of Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 wish to call what occurred a revolution, since it would mean that they themselves were the main agents of change. They are joined, though, by a substantial number of academic authors who include the East European systemic transformations of 1989–90 under the rubric of revolution. See, for example, Goldstone, ‘Comparative Historical Analysis and Knowledge Accumulation in the Study of Revolutions’; Nepstad, Nonviolent Revolutions; and Stephen K. Sanderson, Revolutions: A Worldwide Introduction to Political and Social Change (Paradigm, Boulder and London, 2005). For my own interpretation of the events of 1989–91 in Eastern Europe, see Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism (Bodley Head, London, and Ecco, New York, 2009), esp. ch. 26, ‘The End of Communism in Europe’, pp. 522–548.
116. Timothy Garton Ash has observed that, compared with the events elsewhere in Eastern Europe, in its ‘immediate outcome (the transfer of power from one set of communists to another)’, what happened in Romania ‘was in substance one of the least revolutionary of them all’. Garton Ash retains sufficient attachment to the revolutionary ideal to wish to broaden its scope to include ‘new-style, non-violent transfers of power over states’ within ‘a new genre of revolution, qualitatively different from the Jacobin-Bolshevik model of 1789 and 1917’. See Garton Ash, ‘A Century of Civil Resistance: Some Lessons and Questions’, in Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash (eds.), Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-Violent Action from Gandhi to the Present (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009), pp. 371–390, esp. pp. 375–377.
117. International (Western) intervention has also played a part in the reconfiguration of the map of former Yugoslavia, especially in the case of Kosovo, which had the status of an ‘autonomous province’ within the republic of Serbia in Communist Yugoslavia. As Charles King has observed: ‘Kosovo is the first instance in the postcommunist world of a newly independent state that (1) achieved de facto independence in large measure because of the intervention of external powers, (2) has boundaries reflecting something other than the internal borders of a highest level administrative component of a preexisting federation, and (3) has achieved widespread de jure recognition’. See King, Extreme Politics: Nationalism, Violence, and the End of Eastern Europe (Oxford University Press, New York, 2010), p. 127.
118. The official figures for casualties from clashes between demonstrators and the army in Romania were 1,033 dead and 2,383 wounded, of whom a quarter were soldiers. See Robin Okey, The Demise of Communist East Europe: 1989 in Context (Hodder Arnold, London, 2004), p. 97.
119. See Christopher de Bellaigue, Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Very British Coup (Bodley Head, London, 2012).
120. Ervand Abrahamian, ‘Mass Protests in the Iranian Revolution, 1977–79’, in Roberts and Garton Ash (eds.), Civil Resistance and Power Politics, pp. 162–178, at p. 166.
121. Ibid., pp. 166–167.
122. Ibid., p. 168.
123. Ibid., pp. 173–174. See also Charles Tripp, The Power and the People: Paths of Resistance in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2013), pp. 77–82.
124. Abrahamian, ‘Mass Protests in the Iranian Revolution’, p. 177.
125. Ibid., pp. 174–177.
126. Jeremy Bowen, The Arab Uprisings: The People Want the Fall of the Regime (Simon & Schuster, London, 2012), p. 25.
127. Sudarsan Raghaven (for the Washington Post), ‘Powerful elite cast a shadow over reforms in Yemen’, republished in Guardian Weekly, 22 February 2013. Yemen’s branch of al-Qaeda has also been among the most threatening in the region.
128. Farhad Khosrokhavar, The New Arab Revolutions That Shook the World (Paradigm, Boulder and London, 2012), p. 154. The author notes that ‘Al Jazeera has not only voiced Arab public opinion but literally contributed to its shaping, helping to establish it by providing a vehicle for free expression.’ Khosrokhavar adds: ‘Of course, as it is financed by Qatari capital, when it comes to Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates, Al Jazeera loses its edge and becomes much less incisive and critical. On the major issues concerning the Arab world, however, it has played a crucial role in raising the public’s awareness and its capacity for critical assessment and reflexive thought’ (ibid.).
129. David Gardner, Preface to the Paperback Edition of Last Chance: The Middle East in the Balance (Tauris paperback, London, 2012), p. xxi.
130. Khosrokhavar, The New Arab Revolutions That Shook the World, p. 267.
131. Bowen, The Arab Uprisings, p. 293.
132. Khosrokhavar, The New Arab Revolutions That Shook the World, pp. 91–93.
133. Olivier Roy’s article is (controversially) titled ‘There Will Be No Islamist Revolution’, Journal of Democracy, Vol. 24, No. 1, 2013, pp. 14–19, at p. 15. Eugene Rogan, in contrast, emphasizes ‘the power of Islam’ as the inspirational force leading Arabs to believe that they ‘could overthrow autocrats and stand up to superpowers’ (Rogan, The Arabs: A History, Penguin, London, 2010, at p. 497; see also pp. 498–550). Except in relation to the West and, still more, to Israel, however, Islam divides as well as unites. As with all the world’s major religions, it contains many different strands. It has long been said that there are no Arab democracies, although this may or may not be changing, but, as Alfred Stepan has emphasized, even when it was clearly true as a generalization about the Arab world, that did not demonstrate an incompatibility between Islam and democracy. There are democracies in overwhelmingly Muslim countries (with Turkey probably the most successful example) and at least 435 million Muslims living under democracy, if ‘fragile’ and ‘intermittent’ democracies are included. Islam itself is not immune from change in an evolving global culture. See ‘The World’s Religious Systems and Democracy: Crafting the “Twin Tolerations”’, in Stepan, Arguing Comparative Politics (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001), pp. 213–253, esp. p. 237.
134. Mark Tessler, Amaney Jamal and Michael Robbins, ‘New Findings on Arabs and Democracy’, Journal of Democracy, Vol. 23, No. 4, 2012, pp. 89–103, at p. 97.
135. Ibid., pp. 95–101.
136. Heba Saleh, ‘A revolution betrayed’, Financial Times, 28 June 2013. This prescient article, written a week before a military coup toppled the Muslim Brotherhood government in early July 2013, convincingly outlined the failures of the Morsi government and the grave tensions it had generated.
137. I am very grateful to Professor Stephen Whitefield of Oxford University for the survey data and for his interpretation of them.
6 Totalitarian and Authoritarian Leadership
1. Abbot Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (Oxford University Press, New York, 1995), pp. 13–30; see also Leonard Schapiro, Totalitarianism (Pall Mall, London, 1972), pp. 13–17.
2. Schapiro, Totalitarianism, p. 13.
3. Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia (Penguin, London, 2005), p. 294.
4. Schapiro, Totalitarianism, pp. 13–14.
5. In the summer of 1991 the draft programme of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, overseen and strongly influenced by Gorbachev, did imply that the regime had been totalitarian. It included the statement that ‘our party indisputably bears responsibility for the fact that it was not able to erect a barrier to despotism and allowed itself to be used as an instrument of totalitarianism’. That programme itself, however, which a majority of party officials had no intention of implementing (and which was shortly thereafter overtaken by the August 1991 attempted coup, with Gorbachev placed under house arrest at his holiday home), was more social democratic than Communist. The draft, ‘Sotsializm, demokratiya, progress’, was published in Nezavizimaya gazeta, 23 July 1991. The Soviet Union had ceased to have a Communist system in the course of 1989–90.
6. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, as a political institution, was even more powerful within Soviet society than was the National Socialist Party within the German system. Yet Stalin had acquired a position of such power by the mid-1930s that, like Hitler, he could play off one institution against another. The party had a superior authority in principle to the political police, but Stalin was able to use the latter against the former, so that even members of the highest echelons of the party were liable to arrest and execution at his behest.
7. The differences between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia were also very great, and in a number of respects Germany in the 1930s was further removed from ideal typical totalitarianism than was the Soviet Union. In any event, the concept of totalitarianism, while of some classificatory utility, is of only limited explanatory value. As Ian Kershaw has observed, totalitarianism has become less fashionable as ‘an interpretation of the behaviour of ordinary Germans during the Third Reich’. Recent research has, rather, ‘increasingly tended to place the emphasis upon the enthusiastic support of the German people for the Nazi regime, and their willing collaboration and complicity in policies that led to war and genocide’. See Kershaw, The End: Hitler’s Germany (Penguin, London, 2012), p. 9. For an authoritative exploration of the regime–society relationship, see Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power 1933–1939 (Penguin, London, 2006). Two notable comparative studies of Hitler and Stalin by historians also largely eschew using the notion of totalitarianism. See Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (Fontana edition, London, 1993); and Overy, The Dictators.
8. Orwell’s novel was written in 1948 (hence 1984 was a reversal of the last two digits) and first published in 1949. For a scholarly edition of the book, see George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, with a Critical Introduction and Annotations by Bernard Crick (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1984).
9. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, translated and edited by H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1948), pp. 196–244.
10. See Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, ‘Dictatorship and Double Standards’, Commentary, November 1979. Kirkpatrick suggested that no ‘revolutionary “socialist” or Communist society’ had ever been democratized, but that ‘right-wing autocracies do sometimes evolve into democracies’ (p. 37). She turned the historical generalization into a prediction when she wrote that ‘the history of this century provides no grounds for expecting that radical totalitarian regimes will transform themselves’ (p. 44). Not surprisingly, the title of a book she published just over a decade later was The Withering Away of the Totalitarian State . . . and Other Surprises (American Enterprise Institute, Washington, DC, 1990).
11. This remark of Smith in one of his Glasgow lectures is cited in part in Chapter 1 of this volume. For the full context, see Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, edited by R.L. Meek, D.D. Raphael and P.G. Stein (eds.) (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1978), pp. 322–323.
12. R.W. Davies, ‘Stalin as economic policy-maker’, in Sarah Davies and James Harris (eds.), Stalin: A New History (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005), pp. 121–139, at p. 138.
13. David R. Shearer, ‘Stalinism, 1928–1940’, in Ronald G. Suny (ed.), The Cambridge History of Russia. Volume III: The Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006), pp. 192–216, at pp. 196–197.
14. Davies, ‘Stalin as economic policy-maker’, p. 131.
15. Oleg V. Khlevniuk, ‘Stalin as dictator: the personalization of power’, in Davies and Harris (ed.), Stalin: A New History, pp. 108–120, at p. 109.
16. The figures are those of the Russian NGO Memorial, which is dedicated to investigating the repression and preserving the memory of its victims (reported in Johnson’s Russia List, No. 203, 27 September 2007).
17. Shearer, ‘Stalinism, 1928–1940’, p. 214.
18. ‘Protokol No. 185. Zasedanie 1 fevralya 1956 g.’ in A.A. Fursenko (ed.), Presidium TsK KPSS, Tom 1: Chernovye protokol’nye zapisi zasedaniy. Stenogrammy (Rosspen, Moscow, 2004), pp. 96–97.
19. Ibid., p. 97.
20. Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan, Tak bylo: razmyshleniya o minuvshem (Vagrius, Moscow, 1999), pp. 597–598.
21. William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (Simon & Schuster, London, 2003), p. 616.
22. Ibid., p. 620.
23. The Brezhnev era fared best, for example, in a survey of 1999 conducted by the most professional of Russian pollster organizations, headed by Yuriy Levada. See Levada, Ishchem cheloveka: Sotsiologicheskie ocherki, 2000–2005 (Novoe izdatel’stvo, Moscow, 2006), p. 68.
24. Frederick C. Teiwes, ‘The Establishment and Consolidation of the New Regime, 1949–1957’, in Roderick MacFarquhar (ed.), The Politics of China: The Eras of Mao and Deng (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2nd ed., 1997), pp. 5–86, at pp. 14–15.
25. Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2006) pp. 9–10.
26. Rana Mitter, A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004) p. 189.
27. Lorenz M. Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2008), p. 72.
28. Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–62 (Bloomsbury paperback, London, 2011) p. 277. Dikötter’s is the most recent, specialist study of the Great Leap Forward and it is he who estimates (p. 325) that it was the cause of some forty-five million ‘excess deaths’.
29. Kenneth Lieberthal, ‘The Great Leap Forward and the Split in the Yan’an Leadership 1958–65’, in MacFarquhar (ed.), The Politics of China, pp. 87–147, at p. 117.
30. MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution, p. 10.
31. Andrew G. Walder and Yang Su, ‘The Cultural Revolution in the Countryside: Scope, Timing and Human Impact’, The China Quarterly, No. 173, 2003, pp. 74–99, at p. 76.
32. MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution, pp. 215–216.
33. Quoted in ibid., p. 3.
34. Walder and Su, ‘The Cultural Revolution in the Countryside’, pp. 95–96.
35. Harry Harding, ‘The Chinese State in Crisis, 1966–1969’, in MacFarquhar (ed.), The Politics of China, pp. 148–247, at p. 244.
36. Ibid., pp. 242–243.
37. MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution, p. 417.
38. Ibid., pp. 444–455.
39. Harding, ‘The Chinese State in Crisis’, pp. 246–247.
40. Joseph Fewsmith, ‘Reaction, Resurgence, and Succession: Chinese Politics since Tiananmen’, in MacFarquhar (ed.), The Politics of China, pp. 472–531, at p. 497.
41. Joseph Fewsmith, China Since Tiananmen: From Deng Xiaoping to Hu Jintao (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2nd ed., 2008), p. 284.
42. Milovan Djilas, Tito: The Story from Inside (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1981), p. 179.
43. Ibid., p. 23.
44. Bullock, Hitler and Stalin, p. 451.
45. ‘Sekretaryu TsK N.S. Khrushchevu’, APRF, f. 3, op. 24, Volkogonov Papers, National Security Archive (Washington, DC), R 1217. The date at the bottom of Chagin’s letter looks like 14.2.56, but it was evidently written in March 1956 (probably 14 March), for the letter opens by referring to Khrushchev’s speech to the Twentieth Congress on the cult of personality, which he delivered on 24–25 February. Chagin, who in 1926 was editor of the newspaper, Krasnaya gazeta, says he regarded it as his party duty to draw Khrushchev’s attention to Stalin’s remark. The document has the Central Committee stamp of 22 March 1956, consigning it to the archives of the General Department.
46. David Brandenberger, ‘Stalin as symbol: a case study of the personality cult and its construction’ in Davies and Harris (eds.), Stalin: A New History, pp. 249–270, at p. 250.
47. Ibid., p. 261.
48. For Kádár’s declaration, and its context, see Roger Gough, A Good Comrade: János Kádár, Communism and Hungary (Tauris, London, 2006), p. 135. Fedor Burlatsky, a reformist intellectual within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, quoted approvingly in the Soviet press Kádár’s ‘who is not against us is with us’, and (as Burlatsky told me some years later) he was severely rebuked by Leonid Ilyichev, a Secretary of the Central Committee with responsibility for ideology, for ‘trying to teach us lessons’.
49. Gough, A Good Comrade, pp. 249–253.
50. Ibid., p. 139.
51. Ibid., pp. xi and 255–256.
52. Julia E. Sweig, Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, New York, 2009), pp. 127–128.
53. Ibid., p. 128.
54. Gloria Giraldo, ‘Cuba Rising in Major UN Indices’, MEDICC Review, 9 April 2007; Marc Schenker, ‘Cuban Public Health: A Model for the US?’, CIA World Facebook, 2001 and schenker.ucdavis.edu/CubaPublicHealth.ppt; and Fidel Castro, My Life, edited by Ignacio Ramonet and translated by Andrew Hurley (Allen Lane, London, 2007), p. 585.
55. Sweig, Cuba, pp. 65–68.
56. Castro did not count González as a socialist and, certainly, González’s political outlook was far removed from Marxism-Leninism. Fidel, therefore, was surprised when Gorbachev told him ‘how much he admired Felipe González’, and strongly disagreed with the Soviet leader when he referred to him as ‘a Socialist’. Castro told Ignacio Ramonet (his questioner in an interview-based autobiography) that ‘Felipe was no socialist’. Castro, My Life, p. 487.
57. Sweig, Cuba, p. 130.
58. Bradley K. Martin, Under the Loving Care of the Great Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (Thomas Dunne, New York, 2006), p. 4.
59. Jasper Becker, Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea (Oxford University Press, New York, 2005), p. 77.
60. Martin, Under the Loving Care of the Great Fatherly Leader, p. 166.
61. Bruce Cumings, ‘Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’, in Bogdan Szajkowski (ed.), Marxist Governments: A World Survey, Vol. 2 (Macmillan, London, 1981), pp. 443–467, at p. 453.
62. Becker, Rogue Regime, p. 77.
63. Juan J. Linz, Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes (Lynne Rienner, Boulder, 2000), p. 35.
64. Quoted by Martin, Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader, p. 194.
65. Another Communist leader who succeeded in arranging a dynastic succession was Heidar Aliev who for many years headed the Communist Party organization in Azerbaijan. However, by the time he did this, it was 1993 and he was president of post-Soviet Azerbaijan. He was succeeded by his son, Ilham Aliev. On the broader issue of hereditary succession in countries other than monarchies, see Jason Brownlee, ‘Hereditary Succession in Modern Autocracies’, World Politics, Vol. 59, No. 4, 2007, pp. 595–628.
66. Carl Gershman, ‘A Voice from the North Korean Gulag’, Journal of Democracy, Vol. 24, No. 2, 2013, pp. 165–173, at p. 171.
67. Christopher Duggan, Fascist Voices: An Intimate History of Mussolini’s Italy (Bodley Head, London, 2012), p. 81.
68. Ibid., p. 30.
69. Ibid., pp. 50 and 57.
70. Ibid., pp. 59–60.
71. Ibid., pp. 87–90.
72. Ibid., pp. 91–94.
73. Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (Fontana, London, 1997), p. 75.
74. Duggan, Fascist Voices, p. 108.
75. Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (Penguin, London, 2005), p. 63.
76. Quoted by Linz in Authoritarian and Totalitarian Regimes, p. 166.
77. Duggan, Fascist Voices, p. 70.
78. Ibid., p. 101.
79. Ibid., p. 231.
80. Ibid., p. 280.
81. Ibid., p. 305. Mussolini was listed in 1933 by American Jewish publishers among the world’s ‘twelve greatest Christian champions’ of the Jews (Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, p. 166).
82. Duggan, Fascist Voices, p. 305.
83. F.W. Deakin, The Brutal Friendship: Mussolini, Hitler and the Fall of Fascism (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1962), p. 795.
84. Duggan, Fascist Voices, pp. 416–417.
85. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, p. 96.
86. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, translated by Ralph Manheim with an introduction by D.C. Watt (Pimlico, London, 1992; 2009 reprint), p. 296.
87. Ibid., p. 262.
88. Evans, The Third Reich in Power 1933–1939, p. 8.
89. Ian Kershaw, Hitler (Penguin, London, new edition, 2008), p. 204.
90. Ibid., p. 206.
91. Ibid., p. 227.
92. Ibid., pp. 276–277.
93. Ibid., pp. 281–282.
94. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, p. 11; and Kershaw, Hitler, pp. 274–282.
95. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, p. 16.
96. Ibid., pp. 7 and 16.
97. Kershaw, Hitler, p. 313; and for a fuller account of the showdown with the SA and the assassination also of leading conservative figures at Hitler’s behest in July 1934, ibid., pp. 301–319.
98. Ibid., pp. 317–318.
99. Ibid., pp. xl and 320–321.
100. Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp. 194, 217 and 137; and Kershaw, Hitler, pp. 909–910.
101. Kershaw, Hitler, pp. 212–215.
102. Ibid., p. 324; and Evans, The Third Reich in Power, p. 27.
103. Kershaw, Hitler, p. 511.
104. Ibid., p. 356.
105. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, p. 649.
106. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, pp. 219–220.
107. Ibid., p. 75.
108. Ibid., p. 149.
109. Ian Kershaw, The End: Hitler’s Germany, 1944–45 (Penguin, London, 2012), p. 13.
110. Overy, The Dictators, p. 100.
111. Ibid., p. 120.
112. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1976), p. 251.
113. Turgot on Progress, Sociology and Economics, translated and edited by Ronald G. Meek (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1973), p. 76.
114. David Hume, ‘Of the First Principles of Government’, in Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects Containing Essays Moral, Political and Literary: A New Edition, Vol. 1 (Cadell, London, 1788), p. 39.
115. Jason Brownlee, Authoritarianism in an Age of Democratization (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007), pp. 202–205.
116. William R. Polk, Understanding Iraq (Tauris, London, 2006), p. 109.
117. Joseph Sassoon, Saddam Hussein’s Ba‘th Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime (Cambridge University Press, New York, 2012), pp. 130–131.
118. Ibid., pp. 5 and 181.
119. Ibid., p. 5. Sassoon’s book is based on a detailed study of Baath Party documents, captured by the American occupying forces after the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
120. Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008), p. 49.
121. Kershaw, Hitler, p. 111.
122. Ibid., p. 201.
123. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (Allen Lane, London, 2011) p. 140.