As indicated in my post of August 21, I am giving a very short course, specifically on this site, on the classics of leadership literature. (See the post for how “classic” is defined.)
The posts will be drawn from my edited collection, Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence (McGraw-Hill, 2010). While here I can provide only short bursts of texts, my hope is they prompt 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.
In the coming weeks, the entries are in Part I. They are About Leadership.
Today we are turning not to one contributor to the great leadership literature but to three: Thomas Carlyle, Herbert Spencer, and Leo Tolstoy. The reason is they come down on different sides of the great debate: Do leaders make a difference? Or are even the greatest of leaders merely pawns on the chessboard of the cosmos?
Carlyle, a mid-nineteenth century Scottish philosopher and historian was and still is the most famous proponent of the importance of great men (yes, men). Specifically of the dominant role of the hero in the so-called “the hero in history” debate. Carlyle believed that the role of great men is not just important but all-important. It was so important that it far transcended the importance of anything or anyone else. Carlyle was, however, ecumenical and expansive in his conception of who the hero was and what the hero did. Alongside the king stood the poet; alongside the revolutionary stood the man of letters. To the degree that each was great each was a great leader. And to the degree that each was a great leader each made the world spin on its axis.
Herbert Spencer in contrast, another figure from the mid-nineteenth century, was a scientist and social scientist before he was a philosopher. So, he felt perfectly qualified to take on someone like Carlyle and to do so with all the intellectual clout he could summon. As we will see below, Spencer made mincemeat of Carlyle, or at least he tried to, the former finding the latter’s insistence on the importance of any single individual not just erroneous but ridiculous.
In this view he stood alongside none other than peerless Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy, who similarly thought that the effort to attribute what happens to decisions made by great men was a fool’s errand. So, this post will end with some lines from Tolstoy.
From Carlyle’s, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History:
- For, as I take it, Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modelers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in this world are properly the outer material result, the practical realization and embodiment of thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world’s history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these.
From Spencer’s, The Study of Sociology:
- But now, if dissatisfied with vagueness, we demand that our ideas shall be brought into focus and exactly defined, we discover the hypotheses [Carlyle’s hypothesis] to be utterly incoherent. If, not stopping at the explanation of social progress as due to the great man, we go back a step and ask whence comes the great man, we find that the theory breaks down completely.
From Tolstoy’s War and Peace:
- The actions of Napoleon and Alexander, on whose words the event seemed to hang, were as little voluntary as the actions of any soldier who was drawn into the campaign by lot or by conscription. This could not be otherwise, for in order that the will of Napoleon and Alexander… should be carried out, the concurrence of innumerable circumstances was needed without any one of which the event could not have taken place…. We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational events…. A king is history’s slave.