By R. F. Foster.
Penguin.382 pp. $27.50
Ed. by Robin Hansbury-Tenison.
Oxford Univ. 530pp. $30
By Paul Gross and Norman Levitt.
Johns Hopkins. 328 pp.$25.95
The race is on to build the information superhighway.
The Greelcs referred to those who lived
outside the realm of public life and politics as
idiots-~6i(O~ai. In our unthinking acceptance
of the idea of race, whose birth and development
Ivan Hannaford here chronicles, we in the
modern aye inay be guilty of a kind of collective idiocy. Genuine public life-not to mention a genuine solution to racial problems-becomes
impossible when a society allozus race or ethnicity to displace citizenship as one's badge of identify.
510 B.c.)shows the...
George Caleb Biizgham.
'Close to 3,000 books and articles have been published on the subject of leadership, mostly within the past three decades," notes business writer Richard Luecke-in a new book that adds to his statistic. Perhaps no coincidence, these same three decades 1mve given rise to a consensus that great leaders no longer move among us. Our authors here propose that the usual ways of addressing the leadership question might themselves be a problem.
46 WQ SPRING 1994
What's Wron...
visible occasionally among tlie numbing political advertisements of tlie 1993 election season was a commercial promoting tlie New York City ballot initiative proposing term lim-its for elected officials. The spoken text was reasonably predictable, but the visual image was striking: several enormously fat men sit- ting together, chomping on large cigars, and chortling-as if expressing tlieir contempt for tlie law, or the people, or both. Wlietlier tlie commercial had anything to do with tlie over-...
Political argument is so obsessed with leadership that it might seem per- verse to claim that it is a local pas- sion, not a universal one, and that even in the United States it has been intermit- tent and not constant. It is certainly a claim that would be hard to make in a gathering of orthodox social scientists. It would be equally hard to persuade the public. American politi- cians and voters are much concerned with as- sorted "crises of leadership" as described in the contemporary...
In 1879 the brilliant young New England conservative Henry Cabot Lodge accepted for publication in the International Review a rousing essay calling for revived presidential leadership.