Conclusions: Looking to the future of leadership

Most of the editors of this book grew up during an era when there was a deep suspicion of strong, heroic leadership. In post-war Europe, there was little need to be reminded of where powerful, charismatic, and inspirational but at the same time fanatical, evil, anti-moral leadership could lead, nor indeed of the complicit role that followers and other non-leaders play in paving the road to hell that it forged. The mindset was to view behaviour that in twenty-first-century settings has become associated with strong leadership as populism, zealotry, pedantry, ego-tripping – things to avoid. We collectively remember what the prior generation had perhaps forgotten, that we need a government conducted first and foremost through laws and institutions, not one dominated by the capricious dynamics of leadership and followership. In the post-war world, public trust in political institutions reached high levels.