Several months ago, I was asked to endorse a book written by a colleague of mine, Haig Patapan. The book is titled: The Modern Tyrant: Authoritarian Leadership in Theory and Practice.
Patapan is Professor of Political Science at Australia’s Griffith University. Without hesitating I said yes to the publisher’s request, knowing that Patapan is a first-rate scholar and that most of what interests him interests me.* He, like me, writes about leadership; and he, like me, is interdisciplinary. Patapan tends to weave the classics through what he writes, for example, in this book he references Plato and Aristotle, religion and rhetoric. As I thought I would be, after reading The Modern Tyrant, I was glad to provide the blurb – a highly enthusiastic one.
I would do so again. But it is also true that since my initial reading of the book, I’ve become more sensitive to the fact that Patapan omitted from his discussion any substantive reference to gender. Throughout his book he assumes that tyrants are men and he refers to them as “he.” Patapan does address the gender issue – though only in a single footnote. The note reads as follows: “I refer to tyrants throughout as ‘he’ as they have been predominantly male. Whether this is an historical accident or reflects deeper psychological, institutional or cultural factors is an important question that has not received the scholarly at tension it deserves.” (p.5)
It’s true that as it pertains to power, authority, and influence, the issue of gender has been severely shortchanged, including among academics. Or, better, as in Patapan’s book, gender is a given. It is a given – an assumption – that as it pertains to power women are an endnote. And it is a given – an assumption – that as it pertains to combat women are similarly no more than a sidebar. Why? For the simple reason that men are virtually always the tyrants and men are virtually always the aggressors.
We are so used to men being the tyrants or the despots, the totalitarians or the authoritarians, the invaders or the attackers that we refer to them, effectively mindlessly, as “strongmen.” Not – for example, when referencing Russia or China, Turkey or Egypt, North Korea or Cuba or Sudan, as “strongwomen.”
During the heyday of the women’s rights movement (in the late 1960s and early 1970s) attention was paid to the fact that nearly always it was men who made war. Further was the widespread idea that if only women ruled the world, the world would be different. It would be better. But nothing much came of it. Overwhelmingly, everywhere in the world, and in every sector, it is still men who do the leading and women the following. And, overwhelmingly, it is still men who employ force. They do so first to attain and then to maintain, control.
Hard then to blame Patapan for using “he” – never “she” or even “they” – when writing about the modern tyrant. So far as we know it was not President Putin’s mother who decided to launch an unprovoked attack on Ukraine. Nor was it his erstwhile wife, nor either of his two daughters, nor any of the several other women in his life. It was Putin. Putin whose advisors and close cronies have always been male. Putin who, during his 25 years in power, has presented himself as nothing so much as very, very virile. As All-Man All the Time.**
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*The Modern Tyrant was published in 2026 by Edinburgh University Press.