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King of the Mountain: The Nature of Political Leadership
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It is not accidental that political leaders oc-casionally remind us of chimpanzees, gorillas and baboons, and vice versa, argues Arnold Ludwig in his King of the Mountain. This is because both humans and non-human primates are motivated by the same evolutionarily-shaped desire to achieve a dominant status within their social entities: "the drive to be the alpha male provides the basic impetus for the dominance hierarchy, which [...] seems to gov-ern most social interactions among higher pri-mates" (p. 8). Thus, the key to understanding political leadership is to be found within the evolutionary theory. By establishing a number of similarities between "the primate model of ruling" and characteristics of human political leaders on the basis of a detailed survey of the 20th century political leaders, Ludwig argues that "in essentially all of their major relation-ships with others – their relationship with their family, their relationship with society, and their relationship with God – most humans have been socially, psychologically, and biologically programmed with the need for a single domi-nant male figure to govern their communal lives. And this programming corresponds closely to how almost all anthropoid primate societies are run." (p. 9).
Arnold M. Ludwig. - Personal Name
0813122333
NONE
King of the Mountain: The Nature of Political Leadership
Leadership
English
University Press of Kentucky,
2002
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