King of the Mountain: The Nature of Political Leadership

Profiling every ruler of a recognized country in the twentieth century—over 1,900 people in all, Ludwig establishes how rulers came to power, how they lost power, the dangers they faced, and the odds of their being assassinated, committing suicide, or dying a natural death. Then, concentrating on a smaller sub-set of 377 rulers for whom more extensive personal information was available, he compares six different kinds of leaders, examining their characteristics, their childhoods, and their mental stability or instability to identify the main predictors of later political success.

Ludwig's penetrating observations, though presented in a lighthearted and entertaining way, offer important insight into why humans have engaged in war throughout recorded history as well as suggesting how they might live together in peace.

Of the many interesting points that he makes, one is that he can explain one of the universal traits of human politics--that the highest positions of political rule tend to be filled predominantly by men. Political scientists rarely acknowledge--much less explain--this remarkable pattern of male dominance. Ludwig explains it as a manifestation of male primate tendencies rooted in the neurophysiology of the male as shaped by natural selection in evolutionary history. (Surprisingly, Ludwig does not mention Steven Goldberg's book WHY MEN RULE, which makes a similar argument.)

There is one bright spot in Ludwig's otherwise dark vision of politics dominated by Machiavellian brutality--he shows that democratic leaders in established democracies act with more restraint than those in other kinds of regimes. He doesn't explain this. But he could have argued that even this has biological roots by appealing to Christopher Boehm's claim (in his book HIERARCHY IN THE FOREST) that there is a biological basis not only for the natural desire for dominance but also for the natural desire to resist dominance, and that modern democracy expresses that ambivalent political nature by allowing ambitious individuals to compete for high office within the constraints of constitutional structures that protect subordinates from being exploited.

I have developed some of these points in my book DARWINIAN NATURAL RIGHT: THE BIOLOGICAL ETHICS OF HUMAN NATURE.


A contemporary update of Machiavelli   June 11, 2002
 18 out of 21 found this review helpful

Despite its hard science dressings, this book is primarily a popular (versus academic) account of modern political leadership. Although Dr. Ludwig is obviously knowledgable about psychology, the scientific discourse in this book is kept to a minimum. Mostly, the book consists of a series of highly entertaining anecdotes about famous political figures, collected to support his thesis that political greatness equates possesing the characteristics of the "Alpha Male". The acceptability of this amoralistic conception of "greatness" - where Mao and FDR are co-ranked the greatest modern political leaders with Stalin a close second - is up to each reader to decide.