Leadership

From Weber to Lasswell: Classic Reflections on the Nature of Political Leadership

All the theoretical assessments of political leadership refer to the well-known tripartite typology developed by Max Weber, which is very often labeled as an ideal-typical classification of political leadership—traditional, legal-rational, and charismatic rule. Actually, this celebrated piece of work is an analysis of legitimated rule—not of leadership. Indeed, Weber's influence is due to his intuition about the growing presence within modern leadership of peculiar elements, which determine the leader's capability to “change history.” According to Weber, charismatic authority is that particular feature of leadership which explains the development of single figures and new styles of command, justifying exceptional changes in political life. Legal-rational rule, on the other hand, is the ideal type of continuity, constraining the behaviors of the innovators. Moving from this argument, the study of leadership within the democratic environment has been expanded all along the course of the 20th century, focusing on the causal links between democratization, crises, transitions, and types of legitimate rule.

If Weber's work is a crucial step in the analysis of the link between leaders and power, other classic social scientists of the 20th century have renovated the study of the link between political leadership and political personality. Probably the first modern attempt to define the qualities pertaining to political leadership can be found in the work of Robert Michels, who critiques and illuminates the characters of leaders from the Platonic tradition to the 19th century—initially focusing on the art of rhetoric. However, it was Harold Lasswell who provided an important basis for the empirical study of leadership behaviors. According to Lasswell, whose theories had been initially influenced by classic elite theorists and by Freud's psychoanalysis, personality is a crucial variable shaped by a system of interactions between the values of the social and the political system at the macrolevel and the cultural and social/familial environment at the individual level. Although Lasswell was never concerned with the notion of leadership, his work had much influence on future reflections on such a notion, and his call for a more attentive study of biographies and social connections of political leaders was decisive in the development of behavioralism.

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