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PART 1
INTRODUCTION
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CHAPTER 1
LEADERSHIP AND
THE QUESTION OF HONOR
Leaders on assuming office will say they are humbled by their elevation. They will thank their supporters, vowing to lead for all, while affirming that it is an honor to hold the office whose responsibilities they will discharge with care and diligence. They will declare their pride in their nation and pledge to protect and enrich it. These declarations are often dismissed as mere rhetoric, empty words ritually recited by all leaders. Yet even when not heartfelt, the expectation to display humility in victory, while acknowledging the dignity of office and pride in one’s country, suggests that honor and shame are an important part of political life. Once in office, all leaders are naturally solicitous of the dignity of their followers and ever vigilant not to offend them. In democracies especially they will praise the goodness and wisdom of the people and in all places defend the noble achievements, proud history, and great name of their country. All the while they will have an eye to the future and their own legacy, being especially concerned with “making a difference,” standing out, or being remembered for their “signature” achievements. And once out of office they will fiercely defend their name and reputation, cooperating with historians and academics who wish to memorialize their achievements. In some cases, they will write an autobiography to “set the record straight,” correcting unflattering interpretations of crucial events and major initiatives. Honor and shame thus suffuse all aspects of the lives of leaders, determining their original decision to seek office, the actions they pursue while they have authority, and their subsequent attempts at preserving their good name and reputation on leaving political life.
Of course, few of us are immune from the charms of honor and the power of praise and blame. In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke (1979, Ch. XXVIII, 12, p. 357), one of the theoretical founders of liberalism, explains the potent and inescapable reach of what he calls “The Law of Fashion or Private Censure”:
As Locke observes, few if any of us are indifferent to the opinion of others, especially those we respect or admire. On the contrary, it seems almost impossible not to think of others in all aspects of our lives, being especially concerned with avoiding censure. While most of us want to avoid the shame of not doing the right thing, a smaller number desire not just the avoidance of shame, but the active recognition of virtue, an acknowledgment of excellence. Some will therefore seek respect for their accomplishments in the fields of business, commerce, and industry, others as jurists, judges, or lawmakers. Still others will seek recognition as artists—poets, sculptors, painters, or musicians. But the most admirable, because it superintends and directs all of these and more, is the political. It is therefore not surprising that those most hungry for distinction will seek the highest political offices. Most if not all political leaders will therefore be distinguished by an abiding and powerful longing for honor.
This intimate connection between leadership and honor, each mutually constituting the other and thus defining the nature of politics more generally, was acknowledged at the very origins of Western tradition in Homer’s famous and compelling account of Achilles. At a crucial juncture in the Iliad, the Achaian delegation led by Odysseus visits Achilles to persuade him to return to the war against the Trojans. They find him with his close friend Patroclus, playing a lyre and “singing of men’s fame” (Iliad, Book 9, 189). Achilles, after hosting his guests and listening to their imprecations, rejects their offers, confiding to Odysseus a most intimate and profound choice his goddess mother, Thetis, has revealed to him:
Achilles is a healer, singer, and also the youngest, strongest, and most handsome warrior, aristos Achaion or “best of the Achaians,” and arguably the best human simply. Homer therefore suggests that all of us, but above all those who want to be outstanding, the exceptional and talented individuals who aspire to lead, will inevitably confront this profound dilemma and choice concerning honor. Glory or preeminence seems to far exceed, if not be incommensurate with, the benefits of gain and property. We see this when Achilles rejects Agamemnon’s exceptionally generous gift, which includes not only returning his slave girl Briseis, the initial cause of dishonor, but tripods, cauldrons, gold, horses, slaves, citadels, and his daughter’s hand in marriage. Yet despite Achilles’s initial indignation, we see glory is also unavoidably entangled with material gain, property seemingly a measure or symbol of his worth. Glory also appears dismissive or even disdainful of death, yet in longing for immortality, it seems moved by a pride in surmounting death’s sting. Finally, though glory is the shining goal, avoidance of shame seems to be the most powerful motivating force in practice. This complex of contradictory longings and desires therefore makes it difficult at any one time to discern what moves Achilles’s soul.
These reflections on honor, and how they will determine the choices Achilles will make, are clearly crucial for Achilles himself, but as we subsequently see in the drama of the Iliad, his decisions have profound implications not only for his close friends and fellow Achaians but also for the outcome of the war itself, the larger canvas on which Homer depicts the political consequences of Achilles’s longing for glory. The overall and dominant impression is of the dangerousness of glory. We see this at the very beginning of the Iliad where Achilles declares that, being shamed by Agamemnon, he will leave the war and return home. His desire to recover honor is so powerful that he even perversely prays for Trojan success. Achilles’s withdrawal deprives the Achaians of their best fighter, leading to their near defeat, prompting Achilles’s beloved Patroclus to enter the war in Achilles’s armor only to die in combat. Enraged, Achilles returns to the war, creating carnage among the Trojans, killing Hector and desecrating his body by dragging it behind his chariot. As foretold but not shown in the Iliad, Achilles dies from Paris’s poisoned arrow to his heel. Yet if the Iliad reveals the dangerous aspect of the passion for glory, it also shows it as sustaining nobility and sacrifice. We see this in Achilles’s decision to join the expedition to Troy, his valor in war, and above all his decision to return to the conflict, knowing that he will never return to his family and homeland. But Homer’s final thoughts on the passion that moves the most promising human beings is found elsewhere, in the epic that celebrates his other great hero, Odysseus. In the Odyssey, Odysseus meets Achilles in the underworld, where Achilles laments his choice, preferring slavery to death:
In Homer’s epics we find one of the earliest and most profound reflections on the importance of honor for leaders. Through his poetry, Homer makes Achilles the preeminent and influential model not only for Greek playwrights such as Euripides and Sophocles, but also for subsequent Roman, Medieval, and Renaissance measures of leadership excellence. It is fitting that it is generally in the works of poetry, paintings, and sculptures that celebrate and commemorate exceptional leaders that we find these seminal and influential meditations on the dangers and promise of honor for leadership ambition. The power of the Muses lies in animating the complex drama, revealing the hidden truth of how leaders respond to honor, how it drives single-minded and dangerous ambition as well as engenders noble sacrifice. In attempting to understand why honor fascinates and enthralls us, we are thus inevitably drawn to the works of great artists. Thus we cannot help but reflect on the dangers and promise of glory when confronting great architecture like the Pyramids of Giza or Versailles Palace or celebrated works such as Michelangelo’s David, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Beethoven’s Eroica, and Picasso’s Guernica.
Yet the Homeric approach would, even in classical times, confront a new way of understanding leadership that questioned its premises and challenged its strictures. Socrates’s discovery of political philosophy initiated a radically new inquiry concerning human and political things. Socrates, especially in the Platonic dialogues, pursued the most comprehensive dialectical examination of the importance of honor for leaders, how it shapes their actions, and how leaders in turn educate their followers and in doing so shape political institutions and regimes. Socrates, in short, presented himself as the new model of human excellence to replace Achilles. The Socratic insights into the dangers of glory and also its potential for noble ambition, good leadership, and philosophic liberation became influential themes for subsequent philosophers. For Aristotle, the megalópsychos or “great-souled” person longed for honor because it is the greatest of the external goods, one usually bestowed on the gods (Nicomachean Ethics, 1123b, 13–27; 1123a 35–125b 25). Cicero took up these ideas in the Roman context of the cursus honorum, the leadership career path that culminated in the consulship. In his De Officiis (2.31), Cicero distinguished honestas—honor derived from wisdom, justice, temperance, and magnanimity—from utile or the useful. These themes would later be taken up by Plutarch, whose famous Lives of Noble Greeks and Romans compares the preeminent Greeks and Romans to understand the character of each and instruct future generations on how to be a good leader. It was an education that would be endorsed by subsequent Medieval, Renaissance, and Scholastic traditions and continues to profoundly shape and define the way we understand the crucial link between leadership and honor.
Yet this influential view was opposed by a radically different way of understanding the nexus between leadership and honor. The intrusion of Abrahamic piety into politics implied a complete transformation of the classical conception. Honor was now an even more pressing question for leaders, but only because it was now altogether questionable, a dangerous temptation rather than a potential spur to nobility and excellence. As all glory belonged to God, leaders moved by the desire for distinction were now committing the grave sin of pride. Because humanity was from humus or dust, humility rather than glory and pride marked the new answer to the question of honor. Christ, the Son of God, was born in a humble barn to poor parents. He was the Lamb of God, that most gentle, innocent, and vulnerable of God’s creatures. And as Jesus reveals in his Beatitudes, the great virtues were now meekness and humility: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” and “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth” (Matt 5: 3–10). To be sure, great undertakings were not only permitted but mandated; but such endeavors were never for personal distinction but always to glorify God: “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven” (Matt 5: 19). As the Pope upon his investiture was reminded three times, Pater Sancti, sic transit Gloria mundi—earthly glory is ephemeral. The proper disposition was to emulate J. S. Bach, who signed all his compositions S.D.G.—Soli Dio Gloria or to God Alone Glory.
It was in the context of this great divergence between classical and pious responses on the proper disposition of leaders toward honor that modern political thought, broadly understood, intervened and responded. Modernity too thought honor was a profound question for leadership, and indeed a variety of answers were proposed to this question. But, in general terms, the modern response took two divergent trajectories. The distinctive aspects of the first can be discerned most clearly in Machiavelli’s attempt to recover classical honor but on wholly new terms. Machiavelli thought it was necessary to reintroduce glory into politics to assure good leadership, but he was also acutely aware of the danger of tyranny. His proposal to contrive the dispositions or humors of those who want to command and those who want to be left alone within a republican architecture to secure liberty became the model for subsequent thinkers such as Montesquieu, who sought to marshal leadership ambition and desire for honor as the engine for a new, finely wrought constitutionalism that protected individual liberty. This general approach could be discerned in the American founding, the first modern republican constitution. According to its architects, the American Constitution was founded on the proper use of the passion for honor and distinction precisely because “the love of fame” for the authors of The Federalist Papers (No. 72) was “the ruling passion of the noblest minds, which would prompt a man to plan and undertake extensive and arduous enterprises for the public benefit.”
The other major modern trajectory was in some respects even more radical, questioning the goodness of honor altogether. It can be found in Cervantes’s Don Quixote, a coruscating attack on the madness of knights-errant and their chivalrous missions; in Shakespeare’s unforgettable Falstaff, nicely poised between Hotspur and Hal, declaiming that honor is “A word,” “Air” or “a mere scutcheon” (Henry IV, Part I: V.1); in Montaigne’s essay “Of Glory” and Bacon’s “Of Vain-Glory” and “Of Honour and Reputation.” Yet perhaps no one has been as successful and influential in debunking honor as Thomas Hobbes, who in his most famous book, Leviathan, ambitiously claims that the modern artifice of the Leviathan state will now fulfil Job’s (41, 1–40) hope of a leviathan that is “king over all the children of pride.” Hobbes diagnosed glorying as a form of madness and defined honor as a measure of the morally neutral concept of power. In doing so, he provided a new basis for understanding the relationship between leadership and honor and the new politics it would inaugurate. Hobbes’s influential approach is evident in Locke’s attack on “dominion,” and even in that great critic of the liberal tradition Rousseau, who nevertheless saw in amour propre the origin of all human domination and therefore corruption. Subsequent thinkers endorsed this view while attempting to moderate and thereby rectify Hobbes’s parsimonious conception of the power-seeking individual. Kant, for example, attempts to retrieve dignity as essential for republican rule, while Hegel argues for mutual recognition as the dialectical overcoming of relationships of dominance. The modern reliance on the concept of honor as “prestige” and the increasing references to dignity, esteem, and self-respect show the persistence of this modern trajectory in recasting the question of honor for leadership.
MODERN NEGLECT OF THE QUESTION OF HONOR
This necessarily brief synopsis and overview suggest that leadership and the question of honor have been a significant and enduring subject of poetic, philosophical, and pious reflection, deliberation, and debate. Honor is important for understanding and explaining what moves leaders as well as how they regard and engage with their followers. Equally, leaders inevitably are arbiters and defenders of all that is honored and, in special circumstances, innovators of what is honorable and shameful. There is therefore a dynamic relationship between leadership and honor where each can be said to constitute the other and, in so doing, define the contours and character of political life. That honor matters for le...
