Word: leadership
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...defining leadership as a relationship between leaders and followers--not as a state attained by a vacuum-packed individual--Burns transcends the old assumption that either leaders or followers make history...
...competitor in "a political marketplace," a leader must also have moral purpose to appeal and respond to his followers' wants and needs. In Burns's judgment, the Spiro Agnews and Adolph Hitlers of the world who pander to "the base instincts of persons" embody "the very negation of leadership." Leadership moves humanity towards betterment, not destruction...
...Finally, leadership, which is an historical process of ceaseless interaction between leaders and followers, would result in a "change in leaders' and followers' motives and goals," which in turn would produce "a causal effect on social relations and political institutions" much as the interaction of chemicals changes their composition. The person without followers is not a leader, no matter how stirring his oratory or how right his cause may be, because he does not make a difference; he cannot change how people...
Burns's standards of leadership are provocative, but inadequate both in theory and historical applications. Leaders will be beloved by the "bar of history" because they are moral and successful, but Burns neglects the role of human interaction--between the leader and the led--in his theory of human leadership. He lets the historian's job of separating the good from the evil take precedence over helping us to understand how the relationship between the leader and the led changes peoples' lives for better or worse...
Hitler and his followers, morally repugnant though they are, should not be excluded from the annals of leadership because their end was the destruction of human beings...