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Article
Carlyle, Freud, and the
Great Man Theory more
fully considered
Bert Alan Spector
DAmore-McKim School of Business, Northeastern University, USA
Abstract
Contemporary surveys of leadership scholarship will occasionally mention the Great Man theory
before moving on to more rigorous academic categories. Less a theory than a statement of faith,
the Great Man theory does not fit into the rigorous scholarly theory and research that makes up
the contemporary canon of leadership discourse. My goal in this article is to treat the Great Man
theory seriously and to present a fuller notion of the theory. My intent is not to offer a defense of
the theory or to redeem Thomas Carlyle as a leadership theorist. Rather, I will add a hitherto
unacknowledged dimension: the element of Freudian psychology. In Freuds case, the Great Man
was articulated not a moral proscription for how to act, but rather an analytic description of the
elemental forces that lead people to seek heroes. The article suggests that the Great Man theory
is worth considering because of its contemporary relevance. To consider the theory in full,
however, Freuds work on leadership needs to be examined alongside that of Carlyle. It is
Freuds description of the impulses that drive us toward authority figures, more than Carlyles
proselytizing for hero worship that can, and should offer valuable insights into how wescholars,
observers, and participants in the business worldreact to corporate saviors.
Keywords
Great Man theory, Thomas Carlyle, Sigmund Freud, CEOs, intellectual history
In leadership discourse, the Great Man theoryan assertion that certain individuals, certain
men, are gifts from God placed on earth to provide the lightening needed to uplift human
existenceis associated mainly with Thomas Carlyle. For good reason. In the spring of 1840,
Carlyle delivered a series of six public lectures on the role played by heroes in shaping the arc of
history. The following year, those lectures were brought together in a single volume entitled
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, and the Great Man theory was born.
Carlyles voice in those lectures is off-putting to the contemporary ear. There is the obvious
gender bias of his formulation, a rendering of his reading of history as unfolding through the
Corresponding author:
Bert Alan Spector, DAmore-McKim School of Business, Northeastern University, 350 Huntington Ave., Boston, MA
02115, USA.
Email: [emailprotected]
Leadership
2016, Vol. 12(2) 250260
! The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1742715015571392
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effects of dominant males combined with the prevalent Victorian conviction that leadership was
irredeemably masculine (Grint, 2011: 8). There is the deep religiosity of his language, a reflec-
tion of the strict Calvinist upbringing provided by his parents who expected him to become a
preacher (Bossche, 1991). And perhaps most distinctly, there is his admonition that our job,
those of us not divinely designated, is to recognize the Great Man, lift him to a position of
prominence, and then obey. A sick world would be thus healed (Carlyle, 1841/2013).
1
Contemporary surveys of leadership scholarship will occasionally mention Carlyles
Great Man theory before moving on to more rigorous academic categories: traits, behaviors,
charisma, contingencies, and so forth (see, for example, Malos, 2012). More often, Carlyle
and his lectures are simply ignored (for example, Yukl, 2013), presumably because the Great
Man formulation is less a theory than a statement of faith. As such, it apparently does not fit
into the rigorous scholarly theory and research that makes up the contemporary canon of
leadership discourse (Day et al., 2014: 64). A trait approach that emphasizes the extra-
ordinary attributes that set effective leaders apart from less effective ones may be seen as a
more recent echo of the Great Man (Northouse, 2013), although that approach too is dis-
missed as unsatisfying, misleading, or both (Yukl, 1989). A notable exception to the scant
attention paid to the Great Man theory can be found in Keith Grints survey of leadership
discourse, which acknowledges Carlyle as a foundational writer of modern leadership dis-
course (Grint, 2011).
The theme of the Great Man and its pull on the manner in which leadership is conceived
and leaders are considered resonates in todays discourse on corporate behavior. Nancy F.
Koehn, for instance, suggested in a recent Op-Ed piece that the continuing upward spiral of
CEO pay even in the midst of the well-publicized executive misdeeds in the first decade of the
21st century can be attributed directly to this ongoing belief in the Great Man (Koehn,
2014). This is a theory that warrants reexamination.
This essay is part of my larger, ongoing project to assess discourse on the topic of lead-
ership, primarily in business organizations, as it unfolded in the 20th century. Under the title
The Discourse of Leadership, I am analyzing not the practice of leadership but rather the
manner in which the topic is defined, discussed, analyzed, and considered.
I view the writing of history as an exercise in narrative construction. Historical narratives
depend not on the simple compilation of a timetable containing a sequence of events, but
rather on an act of imaginative intervention that constructs an order of meaning, with the
goal of revealing themes and interactions (Durepos and Mills, 2011). I recognize that numer-
ous narrative lines can be drawn that connect Carlyle with contemporary discourse. One
such line could be suggested that connects Carlyle and German sociologist Max Weber,
whose configuration of charismatic authority can be represented as a transition from
Carlyles emphasis on the hero as a gift from God to more contemporary constructions of
charisma as an attributional characteristic applied by followers (Conger and Kanungo,
1987). Another line could start with Carlyles gendered view of heroic leadership and
reach forward to the work of Virginia Schein and others focusing on the prevalence of
masculine stereotypes in contemporary literature (Schein, 1973). Both approaches, and
likely others, warrant full consideration. My interest in this essay, however, is specifically,
on the narrative line that connects Carlyle to Sigmund Freud and then to contemporary
discourse concerning the moralor immoral or even amoralnature of leadership. I suggest
that Freuds description of the impulses that drive us toward authority figures, more than
Carlyles proselytizing for hero worship can, and should offer valuable insights into how
wescholars, observers, and participants in the business worldreact to corporate saviors.
Spector 251
A note on methodology
My methodology for this essay is intellectual history. Intellectual historians look at ideas as
expressed by intellectuals. I take Maciags inclusive definition of intellectuals as people who
have produced writing, speeches, sermons, and other textual material intended for public
consumption (Maciag, 2011: 744). In the belief that ideas are powerful agents that either
change or support the status quo, I will take measure of the ideas expressed by these two
seminal thinkersCarlyle and Freudconcerning leadership, and the influence those ideas
continue to exert in contemporary leadership discourse.
I make no argument that Freud read Carlyle or was otherwise directly influenced by his
work. Rather, I am proposing a narrative in which Carlyle and Freud wrestle with similar
questions of authority and the impact of leaders on followers, albeit from strikingly different
perspectives. My contribution is to construct an historical narrative that encompasses these
two sets of ideas.
The role of historical narratives is to engage in a simultaneous dual discourse, one with
the past and the other with the present. It is that second exchange that offers the opportunity
for critical perspective. By constructing a narrative representation of the evolution of an
understanding of the Great Man theory of leadership and drawing special attention to
Freuds contribution, my intent is to offer a critical perspective on current discourse.
Carlyles Great Man
In a period of crisis and upheavalthe Napoleonic wars and the accelerating pace of
industrializationScottish-born Thomas Carlyle (17951881) looked for a source of
strength, direction, wisdom, and uplift. That source was no longer the Church, which in
Carlyles experience had become a discredited shepherd (Bossche, 1991). Moving away from
Calvinism involved a commensurate break with his father, so parental authority seemed as
unreliable as Church hierarchy. Carlyles search led him to the Great Man: an individual of
this earth but unmistakably sent by God.
Already a well-known author on his way to becoming the most widely read and most
greatly admired social philosopher of his time (Schapiro, 1945: 99), Carlyle fought his
discomfort over public speaking in order to earn the significant fees associated with lectur-
ing. Carlyle opened his series of London talks on heroes by explaining his intent. We have
undertaken to discourse here for a little on the Great Men, he explained to his audience,
their manner of appearance in our worlds business, how they have shaped themselves in
the worlds history, what ideas men found of them, what work they did on Heroes (16).
Carlyle intended to demonstrate how the great man, with his free force direct out of Gods
own hand provided the lightening that shaped the world (29).
Given his loss of faith in the Church and his dismay over the revolutions that had spread
across Europe, Carlyle wondered about authority. Who had it? Under what claims was it to
be held? Who would hold it in the future? From Carlyles vantage, wrote Chris Vanden
Bossche, it appeared not only that authority had shifted, but that the transcendental
grounds for it had been undermined (Bossche, 1991). But if old platforms for authority
were passing, what would replace them? In On Heroes, Carlyle provided his own answer: the
Able-man, an individual who has been sent by God to have a divine right over me.
Looking back at the French Revolution, Carlyle laid the responsibility for the collapse
of the Ancien Regime squarely on the shoulders of its royal leader, Louis XVI.
2
Louis was a
far-from-able man, and revolutions occur, insisted Carlyle, when you have put too Unable
252 Leadership 12(2)
Man at the head of affairs! (162all emphasis will be from the original text). Societies
bedeviled by the lack of an Able-man at their helm had one core responsibility: find him:
Find in any country the Ablest Man that exists there; raise him to the supreme place, and loyally
reverence him; you have a perfect government for that country; no ballot box, Parliamentary
eloquence, voting, constitution-building, or other machinery whatsoever can improve it a whit.
It is the perfect state; an ideal country. The Ablest Man; he means also the truest-hearted, justest,
the Noblest Man: what he tells us to do must be precisely the wisest, fittest, that we could
anywhere or anyhow learn; the thing which it will in all ways behoove us, with right loyal
thankfulness, and nothing doubting, to do! (162).
Of course, locating an Able-man and having the multitudes agree that this was the Able-man
was no easy matter:
That we knew in some tolerable measure how to find him, and that all men were ready to
acknowledge his divine right when found: that is precisely the healing which a sick world is
everywhere, in the ages, seeking after! (163164)
Carlyle was offering as much an argument for how the world works as a theory of lead-
ership. Great men were sent by God to be heroes and these heroes became leaders through the
righteous process of hero worship. Perhaps no statement found in the lectures is more fre-
quently quoted than what follows from the opening of On Heroes:
For, as I take it, Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at
bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men,
these great ones, the modelers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatever the general
mass of men contrived to do or attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world
are properly the outer material result, the practical realization and embodiment, of Thoughts
that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole worlds history, it may
justly be considered, were the history of these (21).
The goal of the lectures, then, was explicitly pedantic: to convince listeners to bow down
submissive before great men, an act which would allow the worshiper to feel himself to be
more noble and blessed (31).
Carlyles great men were an eclectic group; they were, in the order of his lectures, pro-
phets, poets, priests, men of letters, and kings. Including Shakespeare along with Oliver
Cromwell and Martin Luther demonstrates that Carlyles great men were heroic figures
but not necessarily leaders in any institutional sense. To Carlyle, all the greatness of
man came out decisively in Shakespeare.
That Shakespeare is the chief of all Poets hitherto; the greatest intellect who, in our recorded
world, has left record of himself in the way of Literature. I know now such a power of vision,
faculty of thought, if we take all the characters of it, in any other man (95).
Nature had offered Shakespeare to the world and Nature was pleased with the result.
Still, it was the final lecture, The Hero as King, that carried the greatest weight for
Carlyle and cemented the connection between heroes and leaders, or commanders over men.
It was the last form of Heroism, he wrote, that which we call Kingship:
The Commander over Men he to whose will our wills are to be subordinated, and loyally
surrender themselves, and find their welfare in doing so, may be reckoned the most important
Spector 253
of the Great Men. He is practically the summary for us of all the various figures of Heroism;
Priest, Teacher, whatsoever of earthly or of spiritual dignity we can fancy to reside in a man,
embodies itself here, to command over us, furnish us with constraint practical teaching, tell us for
the day and hour what we are to do (162).
It was this amalgam Great Man who should be raised to the supreme place. Carlyle
professed indifference to the process of such elevation: no ballot box, Parliamentary elo-
quence, voting, constitution-building, or other machinery whatsoever can improve it a
whit. It was the fact of elevation and the resultant worshipful voluntary subjugation that
would lead to the perfect state; an ideal country (162).
Carlyles view of history as working through the deeds of great men, or conversely
through the absence of such a hero, did not go uncontested at the time. Ideas, at least
important ones, seldom do. Within Victorian England there was Herbert Spencer. In his
1873 Study of Sociology, a founding text in the evolution of sociological study, Spencer took
direct aim at the Great Man theory. Reflecting a sociological world view, Spencer argued
that social context played a far more significant role in shaping events than did any indi-
vidual leader, great man or otherwise.
The great man must always be considered and understood in terms of the times in which
he lived. Even if we were to grant the absurd supposition that the genesis of the great man
does not depend on the antecedents furnished by the society he is born in, Spencer wrote,
there would still be the quite sufficient facts that he is powerless in the absence of the material
and mental accumulations which his society inherits from the past, and that he is powerless in the
absence of the co-existing population, character, intelligence, and social arrangements. (Spencer,
1873/1961, 3132).
Great men, if and when they did appear, were products of social and historical forces rather
than gifts bestowed on human civilization by God.
Other contemporary thinkersnotably Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace, 1869) and Ralph
Waldo Emerson (Representative Men, 1903)joined in this argument that leaders were
products of their times. In On Heroes, Carlyle rejected the position totally:
He [the Great Man] was the creature of the Time, they say; the Time called him forth, the
Time did everything, he did nothing but what we the little critic could have done too! This
seems to me but melancholy work. The Times call forth? Alas, we have known Times call loudly
enough for their great man; but not find him when they called! He was not there; Providence had
not sent him; the Time, calling its loudest, had to go down to confusion and wreck because he
would not come when called. . . The great man, with his free force direct out of Gods own hand,
is the lightening. His word is the wise healing word which we all can believe in. All blazes round
him now, when he has once struck on it, into fire like his own (29).
Critics of the Great Man theory, Carlyle maintained, belittle themselves through their egre-
gious misreading of how the world works.
It is impossible to miss the stern proselytizing, the righteous indignation, and the
reproachful tone of these words. No surprise that Carlyles work found particular favor
among the rising acolytes of 20th-century Italian fascism and German Nazism (Schapiro,
1945; Steinweis, 1995). Carlyle with his Great Man theory was called upon to add a veneer
of respectability to the fascists, who were delighted to find their ideas proclaimed in
eloquent words by the great Victorian (Schapiro, 1945: 114). More recently, the notion
254 Leadership 12(2)
of hero worship has been criticized as a pathway to passivity and dependence (Frieze and
Wheatley, 2011; McPherson, 2008). Moderns generally and rationalists in particular typic-
ally express a deep unease with hero worship. Carlyles preachingthat is the best word
for itis easy to resist or ignore on scientific, moral, and political grounds. However, my
narrative has an additional iteration to explore before arriving at a present-day consider-
ation of the lingering impact of the Great Man theory.
Lets bring Freud into this
By the time of the 1937 publication of Moses and Monotheism, a revisionist study of the great
Hebrew hero and savior, Sigmund Freud (18561939) had established a worldwide psycho-
analytic movement. In search of analytic rigor to aid his and others clinical assessment of
patients, Freud delved into the unconscious working of the mind. Over time, intellectual
curiosity led him to a broader perspective, seeking to illuminate a linkage between individual
psychology and group dynamics, religious belief, and the structure of history. Although the
study of Moses represents his most articulate view of the hero role in history, his notion of
the great man (I am using small letters rather than capitals because it is meant to be descrip-
tive in Freuds case) can be seen in earlier works, most specifically his 1921 Group Psychology
and the Analysis of the Ego.
For Carlyle, heroes were gifts from God and the task for the rest of us was to recognize
that gift and to follow. Heroism certainly resided outside of the traditional boundaries of
patriarchy. For Freud, on the other hand, the need for a single, special leader was primal,
arising from the drive for dependency and even love. He opened that reasoning by situating
the individual within a larger collective: a tribe, clan, or family. Group membership conveys
many obvious benefits to individual members, including safety and security. On the other
hand, by following a single leader, group members tend to bend their thinking in the
direction of the approximation to the other individuals in the group (Freud, 1921/1967:
20). Group members would opt for conformity while sacrificing individuality.
Freud selected two institutions to offer illustrative examples of this attraction: the Church,
particularly the Catholic Church, and the military. Christ for the church and the comman-
der-in-chief for the military were both father figures who were loved by group members and
were thought to love all followers within the group equally. Those assumptions were based
on the basic process of identification. This was, for Freud, the earliest expression of an
emotional tie with another person: particularly the son identifying with the father.
A little boy will exhibit a special interest in his father; he would like to grow up like him
and be like him, and take his place everywhere (Freud, 1921/1967: 37). Identification with a
father figure was a natural, even inevitable form of emotional attachment.
For Freud, the leader is always male; a father figure. Strozier and Offer explain that
Freud always examines the unfolding of the Oedipus complexthis being the primary
source of conflict within the familyfrom the boys point of view, adding only parenthet-
ically that the analogue of the boys conflicts occurs in girls (Strozier and Offer, 2011: 28).
For Carlyle and Freud both, the great man is, well, a man. Carlyles gendered view derives
from his reading of world history as unfolding through the actions of men; for Freud, it
derived from the assumed role of the father as head of the family.
In Freuds treatment of Moses, we can see his most complete statement of the role of the
male hero leader in human society. Throughout history, Freud noted, the great majority of
people have a strong need for authority which they can admire (Freud, 1937/1967: 111).
Spector 255
Freud replaced Carlyles belief in divine intervention with individual psychology, family
dynamics, and psychosexual drives. He nonetheless located what he felt was a recurring
human desire for a single, always male, individual. This father figure satisfied a primal
need for protection and love.
Freuds story of Moses departs in dramatic ways from that found in Exodus. Rather than
being a Jewish son sent floating down the Nile, he is in Freuds retelling an Egyptian born
into royalty. His later struggle with the Pharaoh is, in this telling, a struggleperhaps
symbolic but maybe notwith his real father. Moses emerged as a hero by rebelling
against this father, killing him in some guise or another (Freud, 1937/1967: 111).
Monotheism, which Moses institutionalized among the Hebrews, represented for Freud
the triumph of the father figure, the single male deity who could serve as the organizing
totem for his followers. Moses was, for Freud, the great man, with monotheism representing
the institutionalization of the single male authority figure.
A reconsideration (with Freud in the mix)
The Great Man theory, despite its lack of scientific rigor, remains fully relevant. In the world
of business, the search for a hero to save failing companies still exerts considerable appeal.
Driven by a quasi-religious belief in the power and influence of an individual hero, board
members and investors regularly search for saviors (Khurana, 2002). Occasionally, that
savior is a woman. Boards hire, and then frequently dismiss CEOs, both male and female,
always on the lookout for the latest savior.
A number of scholars have noted the utility and appeal of condensing a multitude of forces,
complex interactions, and uncertain causation into an individual (see, for example, Meindl
et al., 1985; Pfeffer, 1977). Leadership as a concept upholds human agency. Furthermore, it
offers a pathway to corrective action: when things go bad, fire the current leader and hire a new
one. That is, of course, a simple, certainly simplistic pathway, but a pathway nonetheless.
External observers of corporate life contribute to the exaltation of individual leader/
heroes. James Meindl and Stanford Ehrlich (1987) asked research subjects to evaluate the
performance of a fictitious firm based entirely on data provided them by the researcher.
The performance data were held constant. What changed in the two accounts provided the
subjects were an emphasis on the individual role of the leader in achieving that performance.
The result: Subjects evaluated performance of a fictitious firm more positively when the
information they received pointed to leadership as the main cause for performance. There
is little reason, apparently, to think that the notion of an individual hero/leader has lost its
power to influence our thought process.
Corporate executives explicitly reinforce the Great Man theory when they don the cloak
of heroic leadership. Eric Guthey and his colleagues noted a trend, dating back to the later
19th century, for business executives to construct a narrative in which they can remain
floating in mid-air by virtue of their own innate skills and exemplary characteristics
(Guthey et al., 2010: 12). Other recent studies have shown that CEOs take pains to claim
authorship of great successes for their companies, while blaming failures on outside forces:
unfair foreign competition, crippling state regulation, world economic trends, and even bad
weather (Bligh et al., 2011; Gray and Densten, 2007; Salancik and Meindl, 1984; Staw et al.,
1983). By romanticizing their own role in the companys success, CEOs seek to enhance their
self-esteem. With adulation comes prestige, power, and control (Goode, 1978). CEOs seek to
assure othersshareholders (both current and potential future investors), board members,
256 Leadership 12(2)
fellow executives, and employees at all levelsthat their leadership in worthy of follower-
ship; that they are indeed great men.
The narrative I have constructed explicitly offers Freud as a significant coauthor of the
Great Man theory. Freud addressed many of the same matters taken up in Carlyles lectures,
most particularly the source and role of authority in human existence (see Table 1).
For Carlyle, dependence on the Great Man offered nothing but uplift. For Freud, on the
other hand, dependency inevitably led to a marked reduction in intellectual engagement on
the part of group members. Part of this dynamic, what would later come to be known as
groupthink (Janis, 1972; Whyte, 1952), involved placing a higher value on group mem-
bership than on individual autonomy. But Freud added that the presence of a strong,
attractive individual leader exacerbated the tendency to submerge the individual into the
group. Group members provided the leader with love and expected that love to be recipro-
cated equally to the members.
3
This was Freud, so, yes, that attraction was in part sexual; a
libidinous attraction to the father-figure/leader.
In Freuds view, the great man is the father that lives in each of us from his childhood
days for the same father whom the hero of legend boosts of having overcome. The picture
of the father, then, includes the decisiveness of thought, the strength of will, the self-
reliance and independence of the great man [and] his divine conviction of doing the right
thing which may pass into ruthlessness. The great man will be admired, trusted, and fol-
lowed. However, one cannot help but being afraid of him (Freud, 1937/1967: 140).
That final noteone cannot help but being afraid of himoffers a markedly differ-
ent tone from the jubilation so prevalent in Carlyle. And Freud did not stop with
that warning. By admiring a leader unconditionally, followers were submitting to authority.
In so doing, followers rendered themselves vulnerable. Submission enabled an authority
Table 1. Comparing the contributions of Carlyle and Freud.
Great Man Theory
Carlyle Freud
Great men were sent by God to
be heroes and these heroes
became leaders through the
righteous process of hero
worship
Core of theory Humans have a primal need for a
father figure to whom they
offer dependence and love in
return for protection and
reciprocated love
God Source of authority Position in family
Maleby virtue of history Gender Maleby virtue of patriarchal
family structure
Respect Exchange with followers Love
Loyal reverence Role of followers Submission
Not recognizing great man Inherent danger Mistreatment by great man
Uplift Outcome of obedience Reduced autonomy of group
members
Spector 257
figure who dominates and sometimes even ill-treats them (Freud, 1937/1967: 111). Writing
on the cusp of a World War II (Freud had fled Vienna for London just the year prior to the
publication of Moses and Monotheism), Freuds warning was tangible and immediate.
It is tempting to dismiss Carlyles unquestioned celebration of hero/leaders as passe and
naive. Before doing so, however, we should recognize a striking parallel in contemporary
leadership theories, especially transformational leadership. Political Scientist James
MacGregor Burns, for instance, defined leadership as a good thing. It is by his definition
virtuous and ethical, helping people and institutions achieve such lofty principles as order,
liberty, equality (including brotherhood and sisterhood), justice, and the pursuit of happi-
ness (Burns, 2003: 27).
Powerful individuals may provide ill treatment. In that case, however, they are not
leaders. The transforming leader in Burns view is both deeply moral and profoundly
uplifting. The result of transforming leadership is a relationship of mutual stimulation
and elevation that converts followers into leaders and may convert leaders into moral
agents (Burns, 1978: 4). It is the concept of moral leadership, Burns insisted, that
concerns me the most.
Burns focused on what he called transforming leadership and that became the dominant
paradigm in leadership scholarship thereafter (Antonakis, 2012; Northouse, 2013). The
leading advocates of applying such transforming leadership to business followed his lead
in asserting the inherent goodness of leadership. The well-known syllogism, introduced by
Bennis and Nanus in 1985 that Managers are people who do things right and leaders are
people who do the right thing explicitly marries leadership with righteousness (Bennis and
Nanus, 1985: 21). Bernard Bass explicitly departed from the moral uplift component that
Burns had inserted (Bass, 1985a, 1985b). Nonetheless, he remained committed to the prop-
osition leadership sat at the core of effective organizational performance (Bass, 1993).
Freud, as we have seen, was far less celebratory. Leaders are individuals who exercise
authority and exert power. They get other people to go along, to follow. Inspiration is part
of the appeal to others, but, as Freud insisted, so are fear, coercion, and conformity. To
pretend leaders are not power wieldersa pretense which Barbara Kellerman argued that
was embraced by a tacit alliance among theoreticians, practitioners, researchers and edu-
cators, consultants and trainerswas to whistle in the dark (Kellerman, 2000: 68). Freud,
not Carlyle, speaks to our contemporary awareness of what Tourish (2013) calls the dark
side of leadership.
The Great Man theory, more fully understood, helps our appreciation of what Meindl,
Ehrlich, and Dukerich referred to as the lofty elevation of a concept of leadership by imbuing
it with mystery and near mysticism (Meindl et al., 1985: 78). Academics do not escape the
allure of the romantic hero/leader. I have written about the appeal of Chrysler executive Lee
Iacocca to the foundational authors of transformational leadership (Spector, 2014).
All the rigorous scholarly research and theorizing we may undertake cannot diminish the
human striving to locate heroic leaders. People seek a narrative structure that brings legit-
imacy to abstractions, offers coherence in response to apparent chaos, and asserts human
agency in the face of seemingly unmanageable complexity. I am not suggesting that all of this
is rational. It may, in fact, be the opposite. Nor am I denying that the search may well be
delusional and self-defeating. Certainly, the terms of the search as suggested by Carlyle (for
the Great Man of history) and Freud (for the father figure) should be and have been con-
tested. What I am suggesting is that self-awareness can open the door for self-examination.
Alternative paths to group, organizational, and social health can then be considered.
258 Leadership 12(2)
Rather than ignoring the Great Man theory, we should appreciate that, in Freuds telling
especially, it is a description of our deepest impulses rather than a proscription for uplift.
Unlike Carlyle, Freud insisted that the impulses can lead to a loss of individuality and
mistreatment by the same figure to whom we offer our followership.
When leadership scholars marginalize the Great Man theory and fail to
