Philosophers and Kings - Studies in Leadership

By Henry Kissinger

About The Book

“The Essays gathered in this volume seek to throw light on the process of leadership in the modern world. Some deal with leadership in politics, others with leadership in ideas. Several trace the links between these spheres of thought and of political action: the views of society that inspire the founding of a state or the formulation of an ideology and the measures of organization that help ensure the victory of a new scientific theory or method.

Most of the men whom the reader will encounter in these pages were innovators. They did not just rule; they founded a new nation-state or recast its institutions. They did not just order or spread the teachings of others; they created new systems of thought. Whatever the particular feat of innovation, it was closely bound up with the most intimate hopes, memories, and fears of the statesman on thinker. The major themes of this volume, then, are leadership as a process of innovation and leadership as the recurrent interplay between private personality and public performance.

The portraits included do not form a statistical sample. When taken together, however, they illustrate the scope of statesmanship and of intellectual pioneering in the modern world- from Isaac Newton to Charles Merriam, from James Mill to William James, from Bismark, Lenin and Gandhi to Nkrumah and de Gaulle. The intellectual and political forces these men set in motion range from the theory of gravitation in physics to the behavioral method in social studies, from utilitarianism and pragmatism to communism and postcolonial nationalism.

ISBN : 81-7154-070-8

Format : Book