Politics of the Lesser Evil

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In his pathbreaking book, Leadership, James MacGregor Burns defines a kind of leadership with an indistinguishable personal impact on society. He calls this "transformal" leadership, and sees it as more than routine and calculable responses to demands. In fact, he argues, the more stable a liberal democracy, the less freedom of action for transformal leadership. Anton Pelinka uses a wellspring of... Read more

In his pathbreaking book, Leadership, James MacGregor Burns defines a kind of leadership with an indistinguishable personal impact on society. He calls this "transformal" leadership, and sees it as more than routine and calculable responses to demands. In fact, he argues, the more stable a liberal democracy, the less freedom of action for transformal leadership. Anton Pelinka uses a wellspring of historical fact to argue that politics always means having to choose between the lesser of two evils and that democracy reduces any possibility of personal leadership.According to Pelinka, Jaruzelski's politics of democratization in Poland in the 1980s (which led to the first free and competitive elections in a communist system) illustrate personal leadership hampered by democracy. Jaruzelski initiated the roundtable process that transformed Poland into a democracy; yet, this process ultimately ended with his abdication. Pelinka further emphasizes contradictions between transformal leadership and democracy by comparing the leadership styles of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. He de-.scribes collaboration, resistance, and tensions between domestic and international leadership, using the American examples of Presidents Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon and the European examples of Petain and Churchill. Pelinka then turns to the tragic fate of the Judenrate under the Nazi regime to illustrate the "lesser-evil" approach. He closes with a discussion of "moral leadership" and how abstaining from office, just as Gandhi and King did, may be particularly suited to stable democracies.Pelinka's unique use of rich empirical evidence from twentieth-century history is this volume's hallmark. He is critical of mainstream political theory and its neglect of deviant examples of democracies - such as Switzerland, Italy, and Japan, where there is traditionally much less emphasis placed on leadership. Pelinka's noteworthy study will be essential reading for political scientists and theorists, political philosophers and political sociologists with special interest in political ethics, and contemporary historians. Read less

Foreword, 1. On Leadership, 2. Jaruzelski I: On the Gravity of one — of any — Political Decision, 3. On the Illusion of Democratic Leadership, 4. An Impossible Encounter — The First, 5. On the Tendency to Ban Machiavelli to Hell, 6. On the Limits of Idealism, 7. Charisma, 8. On the Attempts to Tame a Myth, 9. On the Skepticism Toward Too Much Democracy, 10. On the Unavoidability of Lying, 11. On the Misery of Collaboration, 12. On the Presumption of Objectivity, 13. On the Ambiguity of Difference, 14. On the Amorality of Foreign Policy, 15. On the Logic of Leninism, 16. On the True Nature of Personal Leadership, 17. On the Necessity of Limiting Evil, 18. On the Longing for William Tells and Robin Hoods, 19. On the Necessity of Becoming a Parvenu, 20. An Impossible Encounter — The Second, 21. On the Democratic Dissolution of Politics in General, 22. On the Transformation of the People into the Marketplace, 23. The Cockpit, 24. On the Possibility of Intellectual and Moral Leadership, 25. Jaruzelski II: On the Arbitrary Nature of Historical Perception, 26. Bibliography, Index of Persons

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Anton Pelinka

Politics of the Lesser Evil

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Author(s)

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