NOTE: I REGRET THE INTERMITTENT INTERRUPTIONS IN THIS SERIES. BLAME THE LACK OF TIME – AND THE OTHER INDIVIDUALS AND ISSUES ON WHICH I CHOOSE TO COMMENT. BUT AS YOU SEE, THE VERY SHORT COURSE CONTINUES.
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The first post of this course – exclusive to this site – was in August 2025. The most recent post – on Betty Friedan – was in June 2026. The course, specific to this site, is on classics of leadership literature. (See the first post for how “classic” is defined.)
The posts are all drawn from my edited collection, Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence (McGraw-Hill, 2010). While here I can provide only brief excerpts, my hope that they prompt some of you to dig deeper.
The selections are grouped into three parts. Part I comprises classics About Leadership. Part II is a compilation of Literature as Leadership. And Part III consists of selections by Leaders in Action. Leaders who have used words – written, oral, or both – as instruments of leadership.
Today’s classic of the leadership literature is in Part II of the book, Literature as Leadership. The idea that writing can be an act of leadership seems at first if not wrong then weird. But it is neither. After all, writing is communicating. It is using words to send a message, in this case about change. Specifically, every writer in this section of the book was a leader. An intellectual leader who sought to create change by so persuasively making their case that people felt compelled to react. To react by acting. Some intellectual leaders set out to right what they deeply believed was wrong. And some had an enduring impact – they wrote so well that we read them still.
Today’s writer as leader – or, if you prefer, leader as writer – is Peter Singer. Singer is an Australian-born philosopher who taught for many years at Princeton. Effectively singlehandedly, he started the modern animal rights movement with, like his immediate predecessor in this series, Friedan, a book. Singer’s book was published in 1975 – which in part explains why effectively immediately the animal rights movement took its place alongside other rights movements of the time, such as civil rights, women’s rights, and gay and lesbian rights.
Singer’s book – the bible of the modern animal rights movement – is titled Animal Liberation. It provided animal rights activists and sympathizers with the intellectual legitimacy that previously they had lacked, thereby converting Singer’s personal cause into a political movement.
In the last fifty years he has, of course, had his critics. But Singer has been nothing if not true to what he believes – expressing his views not just in theory but in practice. Singer’s conception of practical ethics led him, in addition to writing, to acting. To marching and demonstrating and “sitting in a cage in a city square to publicize the plight of battery hens.” Singer has been and so he remains at age 80, the real deal.
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From Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation – 1975:
- This book is about the tyranny of human over nonhuman animals. This tyranny has caused and today is still causing an amount of pain and suffering that can only be compared with that which resulted from the centuries of tyranny by white humans over black humans. The struggle against this tyranny is a struggle as important as any of the moral and social issues that have been fought in recent years….
- The portrayal of those who protest against cruelty to animals as sentimental, emotional “animal-lovers” has had the effect of excluding the entire issue of our treatment of non-humans from serious political and moral discussion. It is easy to see why we do this. If we did give the issue serious consideration…we might be made uncomfortable about ham sandwiches, roast beef, fried chicken, and all those other items in our diet that we prefer not to think of as dead animals….