Conclusion: the Study of Political Leadership in France

Abstract

This work is an attempt to straddle an academic divide; that between the comparative study of political leadership (a field still in development), and the study of the nature of specifically French political leadership. In this series of studies of political leadership in France, our research has entered the domain of comparative politics, while remaining rooted in case studies. Comparison, or else clustering case studies, provide the only way so far devised of getting around the problem of the social sciences’ inability to conduct scientific experiments. What the natural sciences can do with an experiment is to change the variables and study different outcomes, as well as to repeat it — as many times as is needed — in order to verify conclusions. This procedure is excluded in political studies; mercifully, laboratory conditions cannot apply. In consequence, conclusions are always conditional and provisional; interpretation, however rich, tentative; and certainties, the stuff of revelation, and, therefore, of serious doubt. This is why we have drawn upon several disciplines — comparative political leadership, biography, symbolic politics, history, and cultural studies — to begin to elucidate and capture the nature of leadership in this most puzzling of political leadership case studies: France (Doig and Hargrove 1990, Chapter 1).