The problem with heroic leaders
Harvard’s Matthew Andrews argues in a recent working paper that the concept of heroic leadership — figures like Deng Xiaoping or Lee Kuan Yew credited with single-handedly reinventing their countries’ economies — is overrated in economic development discussions: It suggests first that heroes have not emerged in many countries for a long period and individuals ...
Harvard's Matthew Andrews argues in a recent working paper that the concept of heroic leadership -- figures like Deng Xiaoping or Lee Kuan Yew credited with single-handedly reinventing their countries' economies -- is overrated in economic development discussions:
Harvard’s Matthew Andrews argues in a recent working paper that the concept of heroic leadership — figures like Deng Xiaoping or Lee Kuan Yew credited with single-handedly reinventing their countries’ economies — is overrated in economic development discussions:
It suggests first that heroes have not emerged in many countries for a long period and
individuals who may have been considered heroes in the past often turned out less than heroic. It posits second that heroes are actually at least as much the product of their contexts as they turned out to be the shapers of such. It proposes third that the stories about hero-leaders doing special things mask the way such special things emerge from the complex interactions of many actors-some important and some mundane.
Just as the executive branch often gets too much attention in U.S. politics, I think there’s something to the idea that Great Men (and occasional women, such as Liberia’s Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Malawi’s Joyce Banda) get too much of the attention when it comes the rise or fall of a country’s fortunes. In the case of leaders like Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan or Paul Kagame, the hero model has often lead U.S. politicians to overlook growing problems and forgive undemocratic behavior.
As Andrews pointed out, even Hosni Mubarak was once something of a "hero" in Western development circles, named one of the world’s top reformers by the World Bank in 2007 and a Doing Business reform leader in 2010.
Even if the reversal isn’t quite that dramatic, it’s hard to stay a hero for very long in politics, no matter where you are.
Joshua Keating was an associate editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @joshuakeating
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