Leaders Weren’t Always Nice

October 13, 2007

Although most contemporary scholarship is focused on leaders who are blemish-free, it was not always that way. Throughout history nearly all the great political theorists have recognized the reality of bad leaders, often accentuating the need to control their malicious tendencies. Influenced by religious traditions that focus on good and evil, and often personally affected by the trauma of war and internal disorder, political thinkers in former times took rather a jaundiced view of human nature.

Consider Machiavelli, a player in fifteenthand sixteenth-century Florentine politics and often a witness to brutal warfare. Famous for his advice to political players in his classic book The Prince, Machiavelli outlined opportunities associated with forceful leadership. For most of us, coercive leadership almost by definition equals bad leadership. But as someone who was familiar both with the ways of the world and with the human psyche, Machiavelli argued that the only truly bad leadership is weak leadership. His philosophy was predicated on the assumption that some leaders need to use force to hold personal power and to maintain public order.

Machiavelli, therefore, actually admired unscrupulous leaders who exercised power and authority with an iron fist. And in The Prince, he wrote with apparent calm about the occasional need judiciously to apply “cruelties”: “When he seizes a state, the new ruler ought to determine all the injuries that he will need to inflict.…Whoever acts otherwise, either through timidity or bad advice, is always forced to have the knife ready in his hand, and he can never depend on his subjects because they, suffering fresh and continuous violence, can never feel secure with regard to him.”

Like Machiavelli, the Founding Fathers of the United States had personal experience of bad leadership, and they thought about it a great deal. Indeed, they were some of the greatest students of leadership of all time. But their reaction to bad leadership could hardly have been further from that of the author of The Prince. They understood that leadership is easily corrupted and often malign, and therefore they went to extraordinary lengths to construct a constitution that makes it hard for leaders to accomplish much without the negotiated consent of their followers. Thus, in contrast to modern leadership experts who focus on how leaders can be more effective, the Founding Fathers looked for ways to rein leaders in, to ensure that leaders could act only after building a coalition of partners.

In The Federalist, for example, Alexander Hamilton dedicated an entire paper to exploring the differences between the proposed presidency and the distant, detested monarchy with which his American audience had struggled.

The king of Great Britain was a dreaded hereditary monarch; by contrast, the American president would be elected for only four years. The king’s position was sacred and inviolable, but the president could be impeached, tried, and, under certain conditions, even removed from office. In short, the U.S. Constitution was created to preclude the possibility that bad leadership could become entrenched. The very idea of checks and balances grew out of the framers’ suspicion that unless the proposed government had a balance of power, then power would almost certainly be abused.

We know this. How could we not, after the twentieth century, with not just Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot but Idi Amin, Mao Tse-tung, and Sloboban Milosevic? As the late Leo Strauss, a professor of political philosophy at the University of Chicago, bitterly put it in his classic treatise On Tyranny, the tyrannies of the twentieth century are so horrendous that they “surpass the boldest imagination of the most powerful thinkers of the past.”Having barely escaped the Holocaust, Strauss recognized what our leadership experts seem to have forgotten: Capricious, murderous, high- handed, corrupt, and evil leaders are effective and everywhere – except in the literature of business leadership.

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