Books
Books: THE LOGIC OF LEADERSHIP * AMES MacGregor Burns, a biographer J of presidents, predicates his innovative study of leadership on the premise that leaders (and followers) are actually people,...
...His focus, throughout, is on human decisions, not on sub-human causal factors...
...Burns succeeds brilliantly...
...What is projected as a radically experiential study thus sets out one step removed from experience...
...As Plutarch before him, he seeks not Commonweal: 760 to "explain" the phenonemon of leadership but to grasp the inner "logic," the coherence and meaning of the subject experience of leadership...
...Burns set out to write when he promised us a "conceptual" study of the moral and volitional structure of leadership and followership—a book which he is most qualified to write and which, I hope, he will yet write...
...The humanistic social scientists—like Mr...
...The lessons which emerge are both descriptive and normative...
...But it does not make for crisp writing...
...Books: THE LOGIC OF LEADERSHIP * AMES MacGregor Burns, a biographer J of presidents, predicates his innovative study of leadership on the premise that leaders (and followers) are actually people, free moral agents rather than bound variables in a behavioral equation...
...In contrast with the usual level of social scientific writing, Mr...
...To be sure, some reasons for concern do appear at the start...
...Burns's starting point is indeed subject experience, but not as lived—rather, as represented in the psychology of Abraham Maslow and Lawrence Kohlberg...
...It is glorious to find oneself, with Burns, doing social science in the context of human reality...
...Yet we also do describe our acts as if "man" [sic] were something out there—a non-conscious a-moral organism whose acts, far from explaining anything, must themselves be explained in terms of Nature or History...
...They do speak of the subject—but in the third person...
...Burns's editor was not brave...
...Burns but also like Mr...
...Leadership articulate actuality...
...If to a present-day reader it is likely to appear startlingly innovative and perhaps a bit suspect, that gives us some indication of the huge gap between our allegedly "empirical" sciences and any genuine empiria, the primordial reality LEADERSHIP James MacGregor Burns Harper & Row, $15 [531 pp.] Erazim Kehak of lived experience...
...Yet they still present a psychology of the subject, not a phenomenology of subject-experience...
...Maslow and Kohlberg present a psychology of the human as a subject, not as a product of drives and stimuli...
...The leaders Burns speaks about are real humans—and leadership, as Burns demonstrates in detail and at length, faces them as a moral problem, intelligible in terms of the demands and constraints of the growth of humans and of societies to a full humanity which would give meaning to nature and thus constitute history...
...Burns's text...
...The reason, I suspect, is the methodological state of the art...
...The result is not the clear grasp of the human meaning of social phenomena to which they aspire but rather a diluted, impressionistic empiricism which inevitably appears jejune...
...The price we pay is that our sciences become irrelevant and our lived experiences incomprehensible...
...That is a great pity, since Burns's insight and scholarship are anything but jejune...
...It, of course, isn't so, but it is neater that way...
...Their motives are not necessarily instinctual and archaic...
...That is a most welcome and most promising proposal, and Burns deserves great credit just for making it...
...Burns seeks to be genuinely experiential, taking as his datum the human lived experience of leading and following rather than some theoretical reconstruction of externally observed behavior...
...The book is heavily burdened with redundance of both words and materials...
...The result is a book wholly admirable in conception, material and conclusion...
...It would take a brave editor indeed to send a Pulitzer Prize winner back to bluepencil his manuscript to one-third its length— and Mr...
...For, theory aside, we do in fact lead and follow as humans, as subjects...
...This is definitely a book to buy, to read and reread, to underline and to quote...
...In part, the problem is literary...
...Rather, he traces it in one context after another, building up a compendium of humanistic reinterpretations of virtually every aspect of the sociology of leadership...
...There is nothing so power-ful, nothing so effective, nothing so causal as common purpose if that purpose informs all levels of a political system...
...Throughout, Burns inverts the usual perspective and focuses on the human meaning of the act, illuminated with a wealth of examples...
...The choice of authors seems wise (though the omission of Gordon Allport's Pattern and Growth in Personality is puzzling...
...He does not simply present a thesis...
...But it is not yet the book which Mr...
...The '' name'' leaders soon yield pride of place to nameless leader-types: the leaders who transform and those who facilitate the functioning of a community, leaders of opinion and leaders of action, leaders of small groups and those of historic wholes...
...The glory of the Burns study is that it breaks free of that methodological hobble...
...Besides, the contrast between profound insight and jejune presentation is endemic in humanistic social science, quite independently of the literary merits of Mr...
...From the proposal, it would be reasonable to expect that Burns will begin with a rigorous phenomenology of the lived experience of leading and following...
...Explanation of the phenomenon we observe, as he points out both at the start and at the end of his study, becomes possible after we have understood the experience we live...
...His initial models are the "name" leaders—Wilson, Roosevelt, Stalin, Hitler...
...To Plutarch, that would appear obvious...
...This, indeed, is humanistic social science at its finest...
...But precisely because it is that, unmar-red by shoddy scholarship or muddled thought, it poses the painful question of all humanistic scholarship most acutely: why does a book so wholly excellent and admirable on reflection seem so tediously jejune on the reading...
...Maslow—reject the natural scientific model of "empiricism," for the excellent reason that that model excludes the component which makes human and social phenomena intelligible—the human subject as a meaning-bestowing moral agent, an /. Yet they do not avail themselves of the alternative model, a rigorous descriptive phenomenology which would focus on the eidetic pattern of lived experience...
...Burns recognizes leadership as a moral task: not simply a matter of power and eminence but of leading, discerning the higher dimension implicit in human aspirations and bringing it out from a vague longing to Paradoxically, it is the exercise of leadership rather than that of ' 'naked power'' that can have the most comprehensive and lasting causal influence as measured by real change...
...But his inquiry goes far beyond the biography of the great...
...Burns, a profoundly cultured and erudite intellectual, brings to the task a wealth of both psychological and historical insight...
...And, in any case, surely it is not necessary to repeat every assertion at least four times...
...Perhaps, given the utter collapse of liberal education in America in the late sixties, it is necessary to give the reader a liberal education as a background to presenting a thesis, say, to retell, yet once more, the weary events of the French revolution before referring to them...
...They are capable of functional autonomy, reflecting the intentionality of moral growth...
...No less important, he both points out and documents the basic recognition that leadership effective not simply in terms of seizing power but in terms of realizing long-range transformation is not the leadership which manipulates others by force or bribery for spectacular and superficial results, but leadership which respects the autonomy of the other and seeks to facilitate his growth...
...But that is a petty ungracious criticism unworthy of the work and aimed more at the editor than the author...
...The leaders and followers he describes are the humans of lived experience, not the theoretical constructs defined by primary drives, repressions and secondary processes...
...Not that it seems to matter: Burns succeeds brilliantly...
Vol. 105 • November 1978 • No. 23
