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Wellsprings of Political Leadership*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

James MacGregor Burns
James MacGregor Burns*
Affiliation:
Williams College
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Abstract

To develop a general theory of leadership we must locate the function of political leadership in a theory of historical causation. One may begin by identifying sources of leadership in the wants and needs, aspirations and expectations, of humankind. In helping to gratify these “motive-bases,” leaders move followers “up” the hierarchy of needs and other motivations and thus create new social configurations in which leaders act. As persons–especially children-move “up” through stages of morality, they also create structures of values that both empower and constrain would-be leaders. Leadership over human beings is exercised when would-be leaders, possessing certain motives of their own, mobilize their own psychological, institutional, pohtical, and other resources relevant to potential followers' motive bases in such a way as to satisfy the motives of both leaders and followers. The test of leadership is the achievement of goals of both leaders and followers in a context of open conflict over ends and means, with leaders and followers mutually and freely defining their values and purposes.

Type
Articles
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 71 , Issue 1 , March 1977 , pp. 266 - 275
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1977

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Footnotes

*

This paper, presented as the Presidential Address at the American Political Science Association Meeting in Chicago, in September, 1976, is an exploration of sources of leadership that lie in areas that are to some degree outside the traditional boundaries of political science. It is excerpted and summarized from a larger work in progress. I solicit comments and criticism, addressed to me at Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts 01267.

References

1 “Rather than finding a psychological science on which to draw for insight,” the political scientist “finds a congeries of more or less competing models and frames of reference, with imperfect agreement on the nature of man's inner dispositions, the appropriate terms for characterizing them, and the methodologies for observation….”in the view of Greenstein, Fred I., “Personality and Politics: Problems of Evidence, Inference, and Conceptualization,” American Behavioral Scientist, 11 (Nov.-Dec. 1967), 38–53, at p. 40 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Davies, James C. literally equates the terms want and need in his Human Nature in Politics (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1963), pp. 396–7,403 Google Scholar.

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9 Davies, op. cit., p. 291.

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11 Ted Robert Gun, cited in Knutson, op. cit., p. 248.

12 On definitions of values, cf. Rokeach, Milton, The Nature of Human Values (New York: The Free Press, 1973)Google Scholar.

13 Ibid., p. 14.

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18 In order to clarify references to “leader” and “follower”–and also to counter slightly the sexual partiality of traditional usage—I refer occasionally herein to the “leader” as “she” or “her” and to the follower as “he” or “him.” Those experiencing difficulty with this formulation might find it helpful to conjure up images of Joan of Arc, Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great, Eleanor Roosevelt, Golda Meier, Indira Gandhi, or Bella Abzug.

19 Simpson, Elizabeth Léonie, “Teachers of Justice: A Preliminary Report of Politico-Legal Socialization,” paper presented at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, Montreal, 1973, quoted at pp. 19–20 Google Scholar.

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22 McFarland, Andrew S., Power and Leadership in Pluralist Systems (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969), p. 174 Google Scholar.

23 Bell, Roderick, Edwards, David V., and Wagner, R. Harrison, Political Power (New York: The Free Press, 1969), p. 4 Google Scholar.

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