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Arnold M. Ludwig. King of the Mountain: The Nature of Political Leadership. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2002. 475 pp. ISBN 0-8131-2233-3, $32.00.
Political leadership is a mysterious and puzzling subject. Since ancient times, magicians, prophets, poets, playwrights, novelists, and scholars have failed to solve the mysteries and puzzles involved. Why do some people seek ultimate power and cling to it despite the enormous risks involved? Why does a scent of power lead to obsession with it? Why do leaders ignore signals about their coming assassination, execution, or deposition? Why have mainly men been rulers, and why are so many of them warmongers? These questions, lying at the core of human culture and history, have never been fully answered; even in the great writings by Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Marx, Tolstoy, or Freud, the nature of political leadership remains a secret.
The effort made in this book to unravel the secret is therefore quite ambitious. Arnold M. Ludwig, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of Kentucky, proposes an evolutionary theory according to which ruling is part of the natural order of things. just as a person needs a head, every society needs a ruler. Humans have always been reluctant to subject their behavior to biological factors, but Ludwig insists that as mammals who belong to the order of primates, humans share the characteristics of other higher primates. just as gorillas adhere to an alpha male whose idiosyncrasies account for differing group behaviors, humans also adhere to a single dominant male figure as...