As indicated in my post of last 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.
Today’s leadership literacy classic is in Part II of the book, Literature as Leadership. The idea that writing can be an act of leadership at first seems astonishing. But it is not, or it should not be. 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 making a case so convincingly that people would feel compelled to act.
The eight men and four women who fall into this category all set out to right what they deeply believed was a wrong. Remarkably they did. Moreover, they wrote so well that we read them still.
Today’s writer as leader – or, if you prefer, leader as writer – is Thomas Paine. Paine was born in England – but he was among the fiercest and certainly most articulate defenders of American independence from the British crown. His revolutionary tract, Common Sense, was so widely read, and so incendiary, that it was called “the match that lit the revolution.”
Context always matters. So, no surprise that Common Sense was published in just the right place at just the right time – in Philadelphia, in 1776. Most Americans still had to be persuaded that the fight for American independence from Great Britain was worth the cost. After all, as I wrote in the above-mentioned book, “their ties to England were close and long-standing, their future as a separate state was uncertain at best, and they did not hunger for war against His Majesty’s troops.”
Paine though had no doubt. He was fervent and fiery in his conviction that England was rapacious and that the colonists would be far, far better off on their own. If they declared their independence from the British crown.
Paine was, as was the previous writer-as-leader in this series, Mary Wollstonecraft, a figure of the Enlightenment. He, though, was an in-your-face radical. A rabid revolutionist who used his pen to trigger fear and loathing in his readers, fear and loathing so overwhelming that they would be ready if not eager to overturn the old order and build an entirely new one.
Paine’s pen was so fluid and persuasive he was the envy of his contemporaries. Benjamin Franklin believed that the impact of Common Sense had been “prodigious.” Benjamin Rush declared that the treatise seemed to have “burst from the press with an effect which has rarely been produced.” John Adams was envious, complaining to Thomas Jefferson that history would “ascribe the American Revolution to Thomas Paine.” And Jefferson, no slouch with a pen himself, effectively conceded the point. “No writer has exceeded Paine,” Jefferson admitted, “in ease and familiarity of style, in perspicuity of expression, happiness of elucidation, and in simple and unassuming language.”
Excerpts from Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776,
- I have heard it asserted by some that as America has flourished under her former connection with Great Britain, the same connection is necessary towards her future happiness…. Nothing could be more fallacious than this kind of argument. We may as well assert that because a child has thrived upon milk, that it is never to have meat, or that the first twenty years of our lives is to become a precedent for the next twenty.
- But Britain is the parent country, say some. Then the more shame upon her conduct. Even brutes do not devour their young nor make war upon their families.… This new World hath been the asylum for persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from EVERY PART of Europe. Hither have they fled, not from the tender embraces of the mother, but from the cruelty of the monster; and it is so far true of England, that the same tyranny which drove the first emigrants from home pursues their descendants still.”