Ed Larson, "Transnational Leadership in a Transformative Election" (Politics, Ethics and Change: The Legacy of James MacGregor Burns)

November 29, 2016 | By Kylie Larkin -- Professor Ed Larson has published a book chapter titled "Transnational Leadership in a Transformative Election" in Politics, Ethics and Change: The Legacy of James MacGregor Burns (George Goethals & David Bradburn, eds. Elgar, 2016).

Extract of "Transnational Leadership in a Transformative Election":

In his seminal book, Leadership, James MacGregor Burns identifies two types of leadership, the transactional and the transforming. Transactional leaders, he says, "approach followers with an eye to exchanging one thing for another: jobs for votes, or subsidies for campaign contributions." A transforming leader, in contrast, "looks for potential motives in followers, seeks to satisfy higher needs, and engages the full person of the follower." In doing so both leader and follower are transformed. Burns cites Thomas Jefferson as a transforming leader and his election as president in 1800 as a transformational event in American politics. Jefferson's running mate in that election, Aaron Burr, however, stands as the personification of transactional leadership. As Burns suggests in his depiction of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the lion and the fox, the two types of leadership often intertwine. Never was that more true than in the New York phase of the great election of 1800, which is the subject of this chapter. Over the 1790s, American politics had coalesced around two national political parties. The northern-based Federalist Party was ostensibly headed by the incumbent president, John Adams, but largely directed by his predecessor's Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton. The southern-centered Republican Party, which confusingly morphed into the modern Democratic Party, was led by the incumbent vice president, Thomas Jefferson, who under the Constitution as it then operated earned his post by coming in second in the 1796 election, and former Virginia congressman James Madison. Adams and Jefferson were destined for a rematch in 1800.

Politics, Ethics and Change: The Legacy of James MacGregor Burns may be purchased at www.e-elgar.com