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WITH A NEW FOREWORD BY THE AUTHOR

An authoritative survey of political leadership over the last hundred years - from Churchill and Roosevelt to Stalin and Hitler, from Willy Brandt and Mikhail Gorbachev to Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair - and a debunking of the myth that it is only the strong, single-minded leader who makes a difference.

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WITH A NEW FOREWORD BY THE AUTHOR

CHOSEN BY BILL GATES AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR 2016

Archie Brown challenges the widespread belief that ´strong leaders´, dominant individual wielders of power, are the most successful and admirable.

Within authoritarian regimes, a collective leadership is a lesser evil compared with a personal dictatorship. Within democracies, although ´strong leaders´ are seldom as strong or independent as they purport to be, the idea that just one person is entitled to take the big decisions is harmful and should be resisted.

Examining Franklin D. Roosevelt and Mikhail Gorbachev, Deng Xiaoping and Nelson Mandela, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair amongst many others, this landmark study pinpoints different types and qualities of leadership. Overturning the popular notion of the strong leader, it makes us rethink preconceptions about what it means to lead.

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"An important and unusual read... Brown does a wonderful job of showing how the same qualities that can seem so appealing in strong leaders can lead, in the mildest cases, to bad decisions - and, in the most extreme cases, to death and suffering on a massive scale.... Though The Myth of the Strong Leader is about political leadership, you come away from Brown´s book with a deeper understanding of leadership in general"

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Archie Brown is a British political scientist and historian. He is Emeritus Professor of Politics at Oxford University and Emeritus Fellow of St Antony´s College, Oxford. A Fellow of the British Academy since 1991, Professor Brown was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003. He has written widely on Soviet and Communist politics, the Cold War, and political leadership.

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