World Military Leaders: A Collective and Comparative Analysis

Abstract

"World Military Leaders: A Collective and Comparative Analysis," by Mostafa Rejai and Kay Phillips, is reviewed.

Mostafa Rejai and Kay Phillips, World Military Leaders: A Collective and Comparative Analysis. Westport, Ct: Praeger (Greenwood), 1996. Pp.161. $55.00. hardcover.

This short, pithy book is characteristic of Dr. Rejai's other publications on political-military leadership: clean, clear, and well written. Rejai and, here, co-author Phillips, get to the point quickly; run out a relevant theory, test it, and succinctly summarize the findings. As usual, the work constitutes a nice model for future research.

Leaders and leadership often are subjects that attract an exotic mystique. The authors point out, correctly I believe, that leadership per se has not attracted much systematic research over the centuries in spite of the tremendous amount of ink spilled. There is an old saying: Ink follows blood, not science. The object of study in this book is military leaders, not military leadership.

Often even scholars seem to have a hard time facing up to the fact that leadership implies a social relationship, not merely a set of individual abilities, an example of the reductive fallacy. There are no leaders without followers and no followers without leaders. The kinds of traits that make a good leader with one set of followers may not amount to much of anything with another set of followers, e.g., a genius with idiot followers or an idiot with genius followers. The authors say nothing directly about this consideration. However, in their defense, they do say, "While we take for granted the centrality . leadership-followership, still we have no direct way of examining or demonstrating this relationship retroactively in the historical contexts with which we deal." Fair enough.

Yet, the modern theory of leadership is situational, which can best be illustrated by the following story. During the French revolution the leader of a revolutionary mob was caught and interrogated by the gendarmes. He said, "Let me go, I am their leader and I must follow them! Which way did they go? How fast were they going? Where were they going?" Or, if you prefer a more classic version, see the Greek play by Aeschylus, Antigone.

So, what is the authors' theory? Rejai and Phillips say that their theory is best labeled as an interactionist one because it involves the following three factors: 1) sociodemographic traits (e.g., urban, nonethnic origins); 2) psychological attributes (e.g., nationalism, love-deprivation); and 3) situational conditions (e.g., national crises such as war or revolution). It is quite clear that they place the heaviest emphasis on situational factors. They are not among those who buy the "hero in history" thesis, i.e., the position that the cause of history lies in the actions of single heroes. However, they still leave some room for the individual personality; hence, the interactionist label. They also sometimes combine both the first and third factors as a situational factor. A deeper explanation of the general theory is to be found in Rejai's past work, which is very much worth reading for any student of the game.

The sample consists of 45 military leaders from 13 countries spread across four centuries, and the authors give us a collective, comparative portrait of high-ranking military leaders, all generals, ranging from George Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte to George Patton and Joz Broz Tito. To have been included in the sampling frame, a military leader must have lived between 1600 and 1980 and been "famous." Excluded were all living military leaders, military leaders studied in Rejai's previous work, monarch-soldiers such as Prussia's Frederich the Great, and 70 famous leaders for whom there was insufficient data. To sum up the general findings, six variables best predict and explain whether a person will become a military leader: these generals were native-born males, born to military families in a military town or garrison, experienced relative deprivation or love-depression, were vain and egotistical, and were nationalists and imperialists.

Every venture has its defects. This fine piece of research had to ignore a lot of profound and sticky questions, but doing a good piece of research implies knowing what to exclude as well as what to include. I highly recommend it.