Word: explaining
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Some come to find water, of course. But just as many others are in search of panaceas for depression, mysterious cures for stubborn ailments. Says Society Spokesman Ted Kaufmann: "It's the spirit of the times, a great belief in things that science can't seem to explain...
...himself..."much," but he talks endlessly about teaching, which he misses profoundly. In his new role as a university president, Giamatti feels he has lost "the possibility for completion--the kind of purposeful wandering that teaching is like, in some sense of the word." He goes on to explain: "Classes have a rhythm, the semester has a rhythm. A piece of work has a rhythm; and in this particular situation, there is never that sense of completion." He doesn't know why he chose to temporarily abandon Petrarch and Spencer--temporarily because he plans to go back to the classroom...
With the political scientist's zeal for systematizing and defining our political intuitions, Burns modestly attempts to establish a "school of leadership." His purpose is no less than to develop a set of "standards for assessing past, present and potential leaders," and to explain the role of human beings in history. However, given the gargantuan size of his undertaking, the book's failure to meet the high expectations raised in the prologue and Part One does not entirely negate its contribution to our common fund of knowledge on the subject...
SEMANTIC ARGUMENTS about leadership are not particularly enlightening. And Burns fails to go beyond them to explain the forces that shape the relation of leaders to followers. Factors such as the distribution of power resources between leaders and followers and their means of interaction--be it through elections, political parties or riots--are not clearly laid out or given relative weights. These complexities emerge in some of his historical discussion, but they are not linked by a common thread of theory...
...discussion of Mao's leadership in the Chinese revolution, he recognizes in a few paragraphs the importance of the Communist party hierarchy as the mediator between the masses and the leaders, but he does not explain why it worked when so many other attempts at leadership have failed...