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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...