THE LAST FEW DECADES HAVE SEEN two important strides in the study of political leadership. In the first place, students of the subject have become more cautious in their attempt to find leadership potentials in an individual’s heredity, and they have turned increasingly to environmental factors that selectively shape the nature of leadership. Secondly, they have de-emphasized the once common notion that leadership embraces a constellation of universal, innate traits and have substantially agreed that leadership involves a reciprocal relationship between personality and culture and is specific to a given situation. Both these developments have shifted emphasis from the leader as such and have directed more attention to the context in which the leader operates.1
This progress in the study of leadership is all the more welcome in an era when democratic peoples seek to understand the difficulties and possibilities of political leadership both in order to handle social and economic problems and to meet certain psychological needs of the people.2 Unhappily, both the promising developments mentioned above have enormously increased the complexities involved in the study of leadership, especially in the political arena. This note seeks to describe some of those complexities and to suggest that facing up to them may nevertheless make possible better understanding of political leadership in a democratic society. The case of Franklin D. Roosevelt will be used to illustrate certain aspects of the matter.