“Politics is increasingly a personality contest.” (Henry Nicholls/WPA Pool/Getty)
What is it with Britain and the word “leadership” these days? We have had seven prime ministers in 10 years — four of whom were unelected, one of whom won 411 seats only to sink to a -66 net approval rating within a year, and one of whom failed to outlast a rotting lettuce — and yet our pundit class sometimes seems convinced that all our problems can be solved by putting someone new in charge. Politics is increasingly a personality contest, a mad scramble to find the right mixture of working-man relatability, glib TikTok presence, and good taste in pub snacks, to bring Britain’s decades of post-imperial flailing to an end. In civilian Britain, the obsession with leadership is even worse: head teachers have been rebranded “school leaders”, the NHS has set up a “Leadership Academy” to train its lanyard-noosed functionaries, and the Civil Service — not usually an institution renowned for housing too many trailblazers and free-thinkers — descends to outright oxymoron on its leadership-fixated website: “Everyone in the Civil Service is a leader and you can demonstrate leadership at all levels.”
Entrepreneurial types have started to get wise to this national obsession, too. Britain’s “leadership” industry has become vast and lucrative: podcasters and influencers throughout the land churn out self-help manuals and Diary-of-a-CEO-type podcasts, selling their listeners the dream that they might one day be as irresistibly charismatic as Steven Bartlett or Jake Humphrey; exclusive private networks promise to put aspiring board members in touch with real-life “NEDs”; historic stately homes are shuttered so that self-important middle-managers can take them over for residential leadership getaways. Any serious author who can get recognized as some kind of thought-leader in the theory of leadership can count on a flurry of sales — both to wonkish political commentators desperate to work out what makes someone fit to rule, and to ambitious young tech and business types, keen for someone to teach them how to sell their SAAS products with the might of Marcus Aurelius and Genghis Khan.
This, at any rate, seems to have been the main consideration behind the decision to publish Jared Diamond’s Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings: (When) Do Leaders Make a Difference?, which is released by Allen Lane this September. Diamond shifts books: his 1997 inquiry into why the West became so powerful, Guns, Germs and Steel, sold over two million copies, and became the prototype for the other middlebrow blockbusters, like Sapiens and Prisoners of Geography, that dominated the bookshelves of the corporate-boardroom autodidacts in the pre-podcast era. His foray into the science of “leadership” promises to prise this old audience back into Waterstones with one weird trick: a nifty thought experiment that he calls “The Hamlet Test”. By posing the question of whether anyone else would have written Hamlet if Shakespeare had died of smallpox at the age of 10, argues Diamond, “we can make a strong argument that Shakespeare was uniquely talented”; in the same way, we can make a strong argument that a leader was effective by asking not whether he or she effectively represented a particular group, or achieved something noble, but whether he or she managed to make a difference in the world.
Once we define effective leadership this way, Diamond seems to think, then the perennial question of “what makes a good leader?” can be reduced to “under what conditions do leaders make a difference?”. Conveniently, this gives Diamond the chance to conduct lots of nice, big, multivariate analyses of the kind that social scientists love. Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings contains several mad charts “ranking” different leaders according to how much they could be said to have “made a difference” to their countries’ economies: good leaders in this regard include Lee Kuan Yew and the military dictators Chun Doo Hwan and Georgios Papadopoulos; bad leaders, meanwhile, include Idi Amin and Harold Wilson. Occasionally, he goes into more depth — most convincingly his chapter on Seretse Khama, Botswana’s first president after independence, who almost, uniquely in sub-Saharan Africa, managed to steward a relatively peaceful handover of power, keep a lid on ethnic conflicts, and integrate the Botswanan economy reasonably effectively into the global system of trade.
Whenever Diamond does try to go into depth, however, some pretty serious problems start to emerge. In the Khama chapter, for instance, he diligently lists a few obvious factors that helped Khama’s success — his chieftaincy of Botswana’s largest ethnic group, the discovery of diamonds shortly after independence — but totally neglects some of the most important factors of all. There were, in fact, plenty of other similarly promising leaders across sub-Saharan Africa in the Sixties, whether Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, or Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso — it’s just that they were all killed or overthrown in coups that Western powers were rumored to have sponsored. This, needless to say, seems important for anyone claiming to be conducting an empirical study of the factors that led to Khama’s success. Arguably, what really set Khama apart from his pan-African counterparts was his willingness to renounce leadership on a global level — distancing himself from the non-aligned movement, refusing to intervene against apartheid South Africa, and generally toeing the line drawn by the world’s greatest, pushiest power. Yet Diamond barely grapples with this possibility. Instead, he simply reproduces the hagiographies that liberal NGO-workers and development economists have been churning out for years.
There is, I suspect, something paradigmatic about this failing. All attempts to analyze “leadership” in terms of the different factors that contribute to it end up sounding rather nonsensical: after all, if a leader’s capacity to “make a difference” is reducible to certain structural conditions, or obedience to certain rules, then “making a difference” doesn’t really count as making a difference at all. Can you really be a leader by virtue of having been in the right place at the right time? Are you really a leader if you have got to where you are by following a simple five-step plan laid out for you by some podcast? No sooner does the literal-minded investigator start to ask questions about leadership than he or she starts to run up against an ancient antinomy: to make a difference, they must be free from the forces that determine events; but if they are free from those forces, there can be no science capable of explaining why they succeed. In Diamond’s case, this leads to some genuinely embarrassing formulations: Hitler was an effective leader because of “four qualities: anti- Semitism, speaking ability, tactical cleverness, and risk-taking”.
If you are really interested in the phenomenon of leadership, you will have to look elsewhere this autumn. Crowds and Power, the 1960 masterwork of the German theorist Elias Canetti that has just been republished by Fitzcarraldo, will probably not attract too many ambitious young politicos or corporate middle managers. It is a strange, unclassifiable document: a mixture of Victorian comparative anthropology, Jungian psychoanalysis and the just-so stories of modern-day evo-psych. It isn’t hard to see why it has been so thoroughly overlooked by mainstream social scientists: its main champions were literary and philosophical figures, including Susan Sontag and Iris Murdoch, and its first part is basically just one, vast typology of all the different types of “crowd” which human beings can amass themselves into — “closed crowds”, “open crowds”, the wolf-like “packs” that dominated human social organization in the days of prehistoric game hunts — interspersed with pieces of mad speculation about how certain deeply ingrained mythic symbols inform and determine real-world mass events. To give one gloriously unfalsifiable example, Canetti explains the Third Reich via the fact that Germany is a forested country, whose inhabitants have as their essential “crowd symbol” lots of tall, upright things standing to attention like coniferous trees. Thus, he concludes, Germans were particularly susceptible to militarism in the 19th century, and felt the disbanding of the German army by the Treaty of Versailles as a vast, existential humiliation that demanded redress.
What would the contemporary consumer of leadership-content make of this kind of explanation? Clearly, Canetti’s account is massively unsatisfactory to the empirically minded reader — how exactly does one measure a “crowd symbol”? — and could certainly not be condensed into any kind of how-to guide for would-be Elon Musks or Seretse Khamas or Hitlers. But it does, I think, have one distinct advantage over almost every other invocation of leadership one might encounter in today’s media. By layering hundreds of apparently mutually exclusive explanations like the Hitler story — many of them seemingly self-sufficient in their own right — Canetti hints at the fact that psychic causation doesn’t work quite like physical causation. Human actions are, as Freud might have put it, overdetermined: the same act can be simultaneously caused by a dozen different motives, memories, fantasies and psychic mechanisms, none of which can straightforwardly be isolated as the variable which “made the difference”. In this sense, in fact, Canetti’s lunatic profusion of explanations is more realistic than Diamond’s sober attempt to rank them: the closer we look at why anybody does anything, the more their psychic life seems exempt from the laws of causation entirely.
Once we start to see human action in this light, questions like “what makes a good leader?” start to look very different indeed. Perhaps the most striking effect of Crowds and Power is the way it induces the reader to think of the great men of history as mere conduits for impersonal psychological and social mechanisms — as mere vessels, in whom vast, unpredictable “crowd energies” temporarily reside. It is a truth that we all notice from time to time: one only has to look at the last few parliaments to see the range of animal instincts and bizarre psychosexual neuroses that send people careening towards power. It is also, in a sense, the project that more mainstream leadership-theorists, Diamond among them, seem to be wanting to ask — even if the demands of reader-flattering liberal good manners never quite allow them to do so.
The genius of Canetti’s account, by contrast, is to assign priority to the deepest, strangest mechanisms of all, and totally ignore what leaders say their interests might be, almost as a matter of methodological principle. The true common factor among leaders, he argues, is a kind of primal, evolutionary obsession with being the sole survivor of an atrocity, standing over a pile of dead — a terrified, animal desire to claw one’s way to a position where one can send others to die in one’s place. The archetypical political leader, in fact, is the Jewish historian Josephus, who, trapped with 40 fellow rebels during a siege, deceitfully engineered their suicide pact so that he emerged one of its only two survivors, then surrendered to the Romans, prospered, and wrote the history of his own lies. Josephus’s deception, writes Canetti, “is the deception of all leaders. They pretend that they will be the first to die, but, in reality, they send their people to death, so that they themselves may stay alive longer. The trick is always the same.”
Of course, this kind of thinking will not be acceptable to today’s leadership-fetishists. One suspects Diamond’s book will outsell Canetti’s, and however much I would like to switch on Newsnight and see Andy Burnham locate the reason for his recent leadership campaign in his despotic compulsion to stand over a heap of corpses, I have to admit this will probably not come to pass. And yet, if there is one lesson of Canetti’s that is worth retaining, it is that people’s interests and fixations are never quite what they seem to be — especially when leadership is involved.
The irony of Britain’s current fascination with “leaders” and “leadership” is that in many ways, it is born of a dissatisfaction with the way in which most people think about the role of human freedom in political and commercial affairs. Why else would you single out leadership as the thing that needs to change, if you were not hungry for some streak of pure, overdetermined madness to shock those in power out of their unimaginative ways? Perhaps, in their bottomless appetite for leadership manuals and corporate podcasts, the British public are channeling something deeper and more dangerous than we realize. Consider it, next time you are cornered by one of them at a party: look into your smarmy interlocutor’s eyes, and tell me you can’t see the piles of dead, smell the pine forests, hear the packs of howling wolves.