Moral Leadership and Practical Wisdom

James MacGregor Burns's comprehensive study of Leadership [1], which pivots on a contrast between the coercive exercise of raw power, on the one hand, and what he calls “transforming leadership”, on the other, establishes genuine leadership as a morally charged conception that systematically refuses to include Hitler, for example, on its list. By profession, Burns is a political scientist and historian who has repudiated the positivist myth of value-free enquiry, and his axiological framework draws widely from humanistic psychology (e.g. Maslow, Erikson, Piaget, Kohlberg and Freud) and even psychobiography (e.g. of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Gandhi, Lenin and Hitler). He aims to analyse and evaluate the personalities, qualities of character, social scenes, opportunities, successes, failures and aspirations of people whose claims to the mantle of leadership are historically well established, as well as dozens of other players and commentators.