Abstract
Winston Churchill’s performance as Prime Minister during the Second World War seems to challenge many assumptions about the low salience of personal leadership in British politics. To write of him, particularly in 1940, has been an invitation to parade superlatives. He has become, in Isaiah Berlin’s words, ‘a public image who is no longer distinguishable from the inner essence … a mythical hero who belongs to legend as much as to reality, the largest human being of our time’ (Berlin, 1949, p. 39). The purpose of this chapter is to review the leadership of Winston Churchill during the Second World War and to see whether it meets the criteria for charismatic political leadership. Was he, for instance, a charismatic figure at a time of acute crisis in 1940? If not, is one entitled to suggest that charisma has very little place in the British political system?
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© 1990 Dennis Kavanagh
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Kavanagh, D. (1990). Crisis, Charisma and British Political Leadership: the Case of Winston Churchill. In: Politics and Personalities. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20961-3_9
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