This is an argumentative book and one of the main contentions is already suggested by the title. The central misconception, which I set out to expose, is the notion that strong leaders in the conventional sense of leaders who get their way, dominate their colleagues, and concentrate decision-making in their hands, are the most successful and admirable. While some leaders who come into that category emerge more positively than negatively, in general huge power amassed by an individual leader paves the way for important errors at best and disaster and massive bloodshed at worst. Although the book also examines many other aspects of political leadership, what I call the myth of the strong leader is a central thread which unifies the discussion of democratic, revolutionary, authoritarian and totalitarian leaders. Those in the first of these categories can do far less damage, precisely because there are constraints upon their power from outside government. It is, nevertheless, an illusion – and one as dangerous as it is widespread – that in contemporary democracies the more a leader dominates his or her political party and Cabinet, the greater the leader. A more collegial style of leadership is too often characterized as a weakness, the advantages of a more collective political leadership too commonly overlooked.
The evidence is drawn from many different democracies – with Great Britain and the United States bulking large – and from a variety of authoritarian and totalitarian systems. When I turn to such dictatorial regimes, Communist leaders, as well as Hitler and Mussolini, get special attention. The scope is much broader, though, than the countries and leaders already mentioned. The chapter on revolutions in authoritarian systems ranges from Mexico to the Middle East. In its historical reach, the book aims to cover the whole of the twentieth century and what has happened thus far in the twenty-first. Notwithstanding the necessary element of selectivity, the conclusions I come to are intended to be of some general validity. The book’s arguments are addressed to any citizen who thinks about how we are governed. My hope is that they may have an impact also on politicians themselves and on those who write about politics.
During the writing, and especially in the longer-term gestation, of this book, I have drawn not only on political memoirs, archives, newspapers and other mass media, and on the work of historians, political scientists and social psychologists, but also on many of my own meetings with politicians from different countries. These have included ad hoc consultation by prime ministers and secretaries of state for foreign affairs from different political parties in Britain, participation in the 1980s in policy seminars in Britain and the United States, taking part in twenty-first-century conferences with former heads of government, and meetings with senior figures within ruling Communist parties (usually, but in the case of some Communist reformers not only, after they had left or had been removed from office).
The book is a product of more than fifty years of study of politics, and of research and lecturing on the subject in different parts of North America, Europe and Asia. Great Britain apart, the country in which I have spent most time has been the United States where I have learned much during teaching and research spells as a Visiting Professor of Political Science at Yale, the University of Connecticut, Columbia University (New York) and the University of Texas at Austin, as well as during a Visiting Fellowship at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies of the University of Notre Dame (Indiana). I have spent almost as much time in Russia, in both the Soviet and the post-Soviet periods. I first arrived in Moscow on a British Council exchange scholarship in January 1966. That three-month visit was followed by an academic year in Moscow State University in 1967–68, also under the auspices of the British Council. I have made some forty visits to Russia since then.
Political leadership is an important subject and one I have been concerned with for a very long time. One of my earliest articles for an academic journal – in the 1960s – was on the powers, and especially the constraints upon those powers, of the British prime minister.1 It drew not only on library research but also on my interviews with senior politicians – in that case prominent members and former members of the Cabinet from both of the major British political parties. As long ago as 1980 I taught a graduate course in the Department of Political Science at Yale which compared chief executives, especially American and French presidents, British prime ministers and leaders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
My interest in studying the powers – and their limitations – of democratic leaders was already aroused when I was a student at the London School of Economics. Indeed, when I was being interviewed for an undergraduate place there, the chair of the admissions committee, Reginald Bassett (a specialist on British politics), recommended the reading of politicians’ memoirs. I followed that advice, and in the years since then have acquired a large collection of political autobiography (as well as biography) from different countries. Their purchase during my student days was greatly facilitated by the fact that so many memoirs by politicians were remaindered and could be bought for next to nothing. The selective recollections and reminiscences of politicians have their limitations, but they can also be revealing, and not always in ways that their authors intended.
An engagement with leadership politics was further provoked when, in my first teaching post at Glasgow University, a departmental colleague during the 1964–65 academic year was John Mackintosh (later a Member of Parliament) who had recently published his influential book, The British Cabinet. It was because I disagreed with Mackintosh’s – and Richard Crossman’s – central thesis that the British political system could best be described as ‘prime ministerial government’ that I came to write the long response to which I have already referred. That old debate – on whether the UK has prime ministerial or Cabinet government – is not, however, what concerns me in this book. I am interested in whether democratic leaders more generally are as powerful as they are often assumed to be and whether, for example, it is leaders who determine electoral outcomes. I am still more concerned with questioning the tendency to assume that one person, the head of the government, is entitled to have the last and most decisive word on all important issues. Some leaders, more than others, have been eager to foster this view and to act as if it were true. I argue that this is neither sensible, in terms of effective government and judicious political outcomes, nor normatively desirable in a democracy.
There are numerous books on political leadership, and many more on leadership in the business world. The focus in this work is very much on party and government leaders, although some of the argument has a bearing on leadership more broadly. Leadership styles matter in all organizations. Even in one as hierarchical as the Catholic Church, the defects of government by one man have been voiced – and from the very top of that hierarchy. In an interesting self-criticism, and statement of intent, Pope Francis observed in a recent interview that when he was appointed the superior of a Jesuit province in Argentina ‘at the “crazy” young age of 36’, his leadership style had been too autocratic. It was, he said, ‘my authoritarian way of making decisions that created problems’, giving the misleading impression that he was a ‘right-winger’ or even ‘ultraconservative’. Now, said the Pope, he prefers a more consultative style. He had, accordingly, appointed an advisory group of eight cardinals, a step urged on him by the cardinals at the conclave which elected him to the papacy. They had been demanding reform of the Vatican bureaucracy. Therefore, he intends his meetings with the eight to be ‘a real, not ceremonial, consultation’.2
An unusual feature of the pages that follow is that they pay almost as much attention to totalitarian and authoritarian regimes as to democracies. Since there are nearly as many people in the world today living under some form of dictatorship as under democratic rule, that is appropriate. Real autocratic rule, moreover, puts in different and useful perspective the talk from time to time of ‘an imperial presidency’ in the United States or of ‘prime ministerial government’ in Britain, Canada or Australia. A leader who comes to power in an authoritarian system has not only the possibility of wreaking havoc and imposing suffering within his own country on a scale that could not be perpetrated by even the worst democratic leader but also, with rare individuals and in conducive circumstances, a greater chance of making qualitative change for the better. Some leaders, it goes without saying, are much more consequential than others. And, as I shall argue, those who deserve the greatest respect are frequently not the most domineering. Good leadership requires many attributes, whose relative importance varies according to time, place and context. It should never be confused with the overmighty power of overweening individuals.