Course description

We begin with an attractive American example: the inexperienced 34-year-old Harry Truman commanding a battalion of 194 men in World War I. Next we consider two models much discussed in the academy: the “expert” trained in policy science and the “charismatic” leader, as defined by the seminal German social scientist Max Weber (1864–1920). But two narratives comprise the core of the reading. One profiles Ataturk, the general who founded the modern Turkish republic; the other, by the ancient philosopher Xenophon, recounts how the author himself led an army of 10,000 Greeks, trapped by the Persians somewhere south of present-day Baghdad, more than 1,000 miles across largely hostile territory toward safety.

Required books

Truman

(1992)

By David McCullough, H’08

Harry Truman. Photograph: Strauss-Peyton, courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library

Chapter four of McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biography recounts Captain Truman’s transformation of a recalcitrant artillery battalion, in 1918 in eastern France. It is a demonstration of leadership firm but fair. “Stirred heart and soul,” as Truman described himself, by Woodrow Wilson’s call to make the world “safe for democracy,” this Missouri farmer volunteered for service out of a sense of duty and out of ambition to be a hero. Terrified at first of his rowdy troops, he demoted the ringleaders and malcontents and then mixed steady discipline with care, provision, and friendliness. Truman protected his men from a domineering and profane superior (“no gentleman,” he said) who ordered a pointless double-time march up a long hill. And he fired cunningly on an enemy incursion outside his allotted area, though he risked court-martial. He grew fond of his troops and they of him. Truman maintained order while acknowledging that “justice could be a tyrant” and was proud of not losing a soldier in battle. The experience of authority sobered this good man’s military ambition and awakened his political ambition.

Bureaucrats, Policy Analysts, Statesmen: Who Leads?

(1980)

Edited by Robert Goldwin

Can the soul of good leadership be anatomized into a “policy science”? In eight essays assembled by Goldwin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, prominent students of leadership debate the pros and cons of the quantitative approach now influencing schools of public affairs. Those pro contend that quantitative methods and formal modeling are necessary to serve expanded modern government and to remedy the deficiencies of common sense. They cite, variously, the need to calculate the impact of social programs and the advantage of an administrator’s trained appraisal over the intuitions and values of politicians or statesmen. Those con dwell on the necessity of good judgment. They contend that social scientists’ efforts to quantify effects rarely work and are in any case largely beside the point. One author, reviewing the 1977–78 struggle in Congress over natural gas policy, concludes that the massive econometric studies produced by legislative staffers harmed, rather than helped, debate. All those numbers baffled Congressmen and discouraged reexamination of clashing assumptions. Two final essays point to the deterioration of our country’s founding political science of popular consent and constitutional government. This tradition has been weakened not only by notions of scientific management but also by a simpler populism fueled in part by polling. Both developments slight the statesman’s educative role and the moral component of leadership, especially the duty that goes with office.

“Politics as a Vocation”

(1919)

By Max Weber

In Essays in Sociology (1947), translated by H.H. Gerth & C. Wright Mills

This lecture, delivered at Munich University two months after the end of World War I, helped turn “charisma” from a religious term into a political one. While Weber was instrumental in shaping social science into a pursuit of verifiable fact, he believed that in life and politics values were paramount. In “Politics as a Vocation” he classifies leaders as either traditional (ancient patriarchs and monarchs), rational and rule-bound (modern administrators), or charismatic. But he commends especially the charismatic leader who draws people to some value, some “cause,” outside the ordinary. Such leaders—Robespierre, Luther—are not mere glory-seekers, but neither are they statesmen in the usual, governmental sense; they are, Weber says, “prophets of revolution,” “crusader[s], religious and political alike.” Weber encourages Germany’s students to work for the “future of socialism” and international peace. Still, his tone is dark, and not only because he foresees a resurgence of the political right in his country. Weber knows that the revolutions he recommends will have terrible and bloody costs, and he supposes also that revolutionary fervor will be fleeting, greed and selfishness abiding. Nevertheless, he doesn’t question whether revolution is worthwhile. Unlike Truman, he can take little pleasure in statesmanlike provision for a decent community.

Ataturk

(1964)

By Patrick Kinross

Mustafa Kemal. Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images

Mustafa Kemal (1881–1938), better known as Ataturk—meaning “father of the Turks”—exemplifies a successful modern revolutionary who tended to the republic he founded. In 1919, as the European victors were carving up the defeated Ottoman state, and the sultan (and Muslim caliph) Mehmed VI reigned in Istanbul, Kemal started a nationalist government in Ankara, 300 miles nearer to what is now Turkey’s geographic center. Within three years he’d driven the European powers from Anatolia (Asiatic Turkey) and sent the sultan into exile. More rational, humane, and hopeful than Weber’s cherished revolutionary, Kemal disdained communism and fascism and held his cause to be a strong (but not imperial) nation, a representative republic, and progress in the modern secular mode. A dictator, he nonetheless unfolded his plan to transform Turkey’s people in prudently calculated stages. As Kinross relates with a novelist’s flair, Turkey became a school, and Kemal its schoolmaster. Between 1924 and 1934, Kemal abolished the religious courts and schools; in new state schools he replaced the supra-national traditions of Islam with a positivistic curriculum and a grand history of the Turks, which he devised; he promoted universal literacy; and he fostered economic enterprise and self-reliance. Kemal also directed the emancipation of women (setting an example, he danced in public with his unveiled wife), and gave them the vote. He replaced the Arabic alphabet with the Latinate, cleansed Arabic and Persian words from the Turkish language, and replaced the Muslim holy day of Friday with Sunday as the official day of rest. Kemal had a warm spot for ordinary Turks, but his fierce resoluteness in the cause of modernization sacrificed many on battlefields (against the rebellious Muslim Kurds, for example) and provoked a deep and enduring religious resentment.

The Anabasis of Cyrus

(c. 380 B.C.)

By Xenophon

Translator, Wayne Ambler, 2008

Xenophon. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Xenophon (c. 430–c.350 B.C.) was an Athenian and, with Plato, one of the two leading students of Socrates. Anabasis means ascent, and this history is ostensibly about the rise of Cyrus the Younger, a Persian prince who battled his brother for the throne. But it is more about the ascent of Xenophon himself. He first appears in the narrative as a gentleman-adventurer accompanying Cyrus’s mercenary Greek army. But after Cyrus is killed by his brother’s troops, and the Greeks’ commanding generals are trapped and beheaded, Xenophon rouses the disheartened soldiers and they make him their guiding general. What follows is a lesson in leadership within limits—external and self-imposed. True to his Socratic education, Xenophon proves neither foolishly impulsive nor thought-lessly trusting. He knows that humans can differ in what they think right and good, and so he appeals in his speeches to both honor and the common desire for safety and gain. While preferring to use quickness and deceptive tactics against the Persians, he fights head-on when need be; and while preferring to persuade and inspire his men, he punishes the slack and is quick to defend his predominance against slanders and plots. Xenophon never forgets the importance of justice and piety, but he recognizes superior force. Because Sparta rules Greece at this time, he makes a point of sharing preeminence with a Spartan, and as the army nears Greece he keeps his increasingly disgruntled soldiers obedient to Sparta’s officials. Though as a leader he sometimes saw the need for subterfuge, Xenophon was neither as ruthless nor as careless with human blood as Kemal, probably because he lacked Kemal’s devotion to a “cause” and his political ambition. Kemal, his public work largely accomplished, turned increasingly to alcohol and women. Xenophon departed the public arena when he could, probably for a philosophic life (he wrote four charming accounts of Socrates). A Socratic general, he was more Socratic than general.

Robert Faulkner is a professor of political science at Boston College and the author of The Case for Greatness: Honorable Ambition and Its Critics (2007).