Abstract
During the time of my interim assessments of Nehru as a political leader (1959 and 1964), continuing into the 1970s and 1980s, there was a revival of scholarly interest in the concepts and phenomena of political leadership and charisma, after a period in which they lay dormant.1 Most of the relevant literature took as its point of departure Max Weber’s classic typology of traditional, rational-legal, and charismatic leadership. The first rests on ‘an established belief in the sanctity of immemorial traditions and the legitimacy of the status of those exercising authority under them’; the second, on a ‘belief in the “legality” of patterns of normative rules and the right of those elevated to authority under staunch rules to issue commands’; and the third, on ‘a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart by ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers and qualities’. Viewed from the perspective of followers, charisma refers to ‘devotion to the specific and exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person, and of the normative patterns or order revealed or ordained by him’.2
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Notes
- 1.
The most notable publications on political leadership during that period are:
B.M. Bass, Leadership and Performance beyond Expectations, New York, 1985.
J.M. Burns, Leadership, New York, 1978.
L.J. Edinger (ed.), Political Leadership in Industrialized Societies, New York, 1967.
A. Gouldner (ed.), Studies in Leadership, New York, 1965.
G.D. Paige, The Scientific Study of Political Leadership, New York, 1977.
———, (ed.), Political Leadership: Readings for an Emerging Field, New York, 1972.
D.A. Rustow (ed.), Philosophers and Kings: Studies in Leadership, Daedalus, 97, 3, summer 1968.
R.M. Stogdill, Handbook of Leadership: A Survey of Theory and Research, New York, 1974.
R.C. Tucker, Politics as Leadership, New York, 1981.
———. ‘The Theory of Charismatic Leadership’. In Rustow, D.A., Philosophers and Kings: Studies In Leadership, Daedalus, 97, 3 Summer 1968, 731–756.
A.R. Willner, The Spellbinders: Charismatic Political Leadership, New Haven, CT, 1984.
S.S. Wolin, Politics and Vision, Boston, 1960.
- 2.
M. Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. by Talcott Parsons, New York, 1947, pp. 328, 358.
- 3.
Rustow, op. cit., p. 687.
- 4.
D.E. Apter, ‘Nkrumah, Charisma and the Coup’, in Rustow, op. cit., 762. For a defense of Weber’s concept of charismatic leadership, see R.C. Tucker, ‘The Theory of Charismatic Leadership’, in Rustow, op. cit., pp. 731–756, esp. p. 73a. In a later work, Tucker went as far as equating politics with leadership. Politics as Leadership, op. cit.
- 5.
E. Shils, ‘The Concentration and Dispersion of Charisma’, World Politics, 11, 1, October 1958.
- 6.
Apter, op. cit., p. 765.
- 7.
Willner, op. cit., p. 8.
- 8.
Ibid., p. 38.
- 9.
R. Bierstedt, ‘The Problem of Authority’, in M. Berger, T. Abel, and C. Pup (eds.), Freedom and Control in Modern Society, New York, 1954, pp. 71–72, as quoted in R. Bendix, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait, New York, 1962.
- 10.
Bierstedt, ibid. See Chaps. X–XIII in Bendix for an elaborate treatment of Weber’s three types of domination.
- 11.
Willner, op. cit., p. 16.
- 12.
Brecher, The New States of Asia, New York, 1963, 215.
- 13.
Burns, op. cit., 19–20.
- 14.
Ibid., 244.
- 15.
Ibid., 418, 420.
- 16.
L.A. Coser, Continuities in the Study of Social Conflict, NewYork, 1967, p. 28, as quoted in Burns, op. cit., p. 418.
- 17.
M. Keren, Introduction to ‘Visionary Realism and Political Leadership’, International Political Science Review, 9, 1, 1988, p. 5.
- 18.
A. Wildavsky, The Nursing Father: Moses as a Political Leader, Montgomery, AL, 1984; M. Walzer, Exodus and Revolution, New York, 1985; Keren, ‘Moses as a Visionary Realist’, in International Political Science Review, op. cit., pp. 71–84.
- 19.
Keren, ibid., pp. 80, 81, 82.
- 20.
See R. H. Jackson and C. G. Rosberg, Personal Rule in Black Africa: Prince, Autocrat, Prophet, Tyrant, Berkeley, CA, 1982.
- 21.
L. Adamolekun, ‘Political Leadership in Sub-Saharan Africa: From Giants to Dwarfs,’ in International Political Science Review, 9, 2, April 1988, pp. 103–105. See also J. Dunn (ed.), West African States, Failure and Promise: A Study in Comparative Politics, Cambridge, 1978; R. Sanbrook, The Politics of Africa’s Economic Stagnation, Cambridge, 1985.
- 22.
For an assessment of Asian leaders in terms of charisma—Sihanouk and Kim Il-Sung, as well as Nehru and Mao—along with further reflections by Bendix on charismatic leadership, see ‘Charismatic Leadership in Asia: A Symposium’, in Asian Survey, VII, 6, June 1967, pp. 341–388.
- 23.
J. S. Migdal, ‘Vision and Practice: The Leader, the State, and the Transformation of Society’, International Political Science Review, 9, 1988, p. 40.
- 24.
Ibid., p. 36.
- 25.
See R. W. Baker, Egypt’s Uncertain Revolution under Nasser and Sadat, Cambridge, MA, 1978; and J. Waterbury, The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat: The Political Economy of Two Regimes, Princeton, NJ, 1983.
- 26.
Migdal, op. cit., p. 40.
- 27.
A.O. Hirschman, ‘Underdevelopment, Obstacles to the Perception of Change, and Leadership’, in Rustow, op. cit., 934–935.
- 28.
The title of a book by Indian Communist leader, Hiren Mukerjee, Calcutta, 1964.
- 29.
The title of a book by Bertram Wolfe, Boston, 1948.
- 30.
For perceptive reflections on the Gandhi–Nehru relationship by three Indian scholars, see B.R. Nanda, P.C. Joshi, and Raj Krishna, Gandhi and Nehru, Delhi, 1979.
- 31.
A. Doak Barnett, in a wide-ranging assessment of the post-Mao era, refers to his successors’ goals as ‘a liberalized form of authoritarianism and … a distinctive form of socialism (that, if achieved,) will be the second far-reaching transformation of the country’s post-1949 political and economic systems’. ‘Ten Years After Mao’, Foreign Affairs, 65, 1, Fall 1986, pp. 64.
A more explicit view of de-Maoization was expressed by one of contemporary China’s widely read and respected writers, Liu Binyan, near the end of the 20th century: ‘Mao’s prestige has been completely discredited only 12 years after his death.’ Interview with Fox Butterfield, New York Times, Week in Review, 19 February 1989.
- 32.
Nehru: A Political Biography, op. cit., p. 629. A similar view was expressed by Canada’s most visible and enterprising diplomat to India since independence, in his ‘Reconsiderations’ of 1980, more than 20 years after an initial admiring assessment: ‘Taking all these criticisms into consideration … where are we left when we try to assess Nehru’s role as Prime Minister? We are left, it seems to me, with a man whose accomplishments greatly outweighed his failures.’ E. Reid, Envoy to Nehru, Delhi, 1981, p. 272.
Prof. Gopal, too, concluded his three-volume biography of Nehru with a sensitive appraisal in 1984 (Vol. III, Chap. 12) and a moving farewell: ‘Rousseau described the maker of a Commonwealth as one who toils in one century so as to reap in another. Nehru was of that category. He is India’s once and—we may hope—future king’ (p. 302).
Reference
Wilkenfeld, Jonathan, and Michael Brecher. 1988. Crises in the twentieth century, vol. II. Handbook of foreign policy crises. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
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Brecher, M. (2016). Charismatic Leadership: Concepts and Comparisons: Nehru and Ben-Gurion; Other Leaders. In: Political Leadership and Charisma. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32627-6_6
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