King of the Mountain: The Nature of Political Leadership (review)

Arnold M. Ludwig is not the first analyst to apply principles of psychological behavior to the study of politics. Political scientists know well the works of those within the discipline, from Alexander George to James David Barber to Stanley Renshon, who have dragged the psychotherapist's couch into political analysis. Ludwig is a distinguished psychiatrist who comes to political science with great ambition in this new book: to propose a new theory to explain the drive to seek and maintain power. Sweeping aside conventional, "epiphenomenal" explanations, Ludwig asserts that people seek power because it is natural for them to do so, noting startling similarities between human rulers and alpha males found in the primate world. In Ludwig's words, "human politics can be explained readily on the basis of a primate model of ruling that was patterned after that of our simian ancestors and perpetuated throughout the process of evolution" (19). Tip O'Neill once noted that all politics is local. In Ludwig's analysis, all politics is glandular.

One benefit of Ludwig's analysis is that he views politics with a fresh and, one hopes, unjaundiced eye. Why, he asks, do all nations have rulers? Why is there an inexhaustible supply of them, regardless of the risks or circumstances of ruling? Why do rulers seem not to learn from the past? Why is there no obvious, consistent set of qualities that form a uniform prerequisite for those who rule, even including sanity? To address these questions, Ludwig brings more than anecdote. In a research effort spanning 18 years, Ludwig examined 1,941 rulers found in 199 countries from 1900 to 2000. Culling this list for those whose impact was greater, and for whom adequate biographical and historical information could be obtained, Ludwig identified 377 rulers from around the world as his data set. In his study, he uncovers a variety of inconsistencies that he labels five "caveats" arising from the political world that "often do not conform to what students learn in Political Science 101" (42), such as the fact that the labels and concepts typically applied to political systems often do not mean what the dictionary says they mean. So, for example, the presence of elections does not equal democracy. The high-sounding principles found in written constitutions are often worth no more than the paper they are printed on. Democratic systems often function badly, and authoritarian systems often function well, even beneficially for their societies. Rulers in name aren't always rulers in fact. And any rule or principle can be contradicted by a given case. Ludwig's caveats are correct, but he is incorrect in noting that these lessons cannot be found in basic classes in political science.

Using the simian world as his guide, Ludwig asserts at the outset (tautologically) that people want to rule because it is natural for them (they are "hard wired," so to speak) to do so. While understanding the important differences in how power is obtained in democratic versus authoritarian systems, his principles are applied with equal vigor. Politics is male-dominated, he finds, just as dominance behavior is found among alpha male primates in nature. Those few females who manage to attain political power, leaving aside widows and daughters, have distinctly male traits and behaviors (Margaret Thatcher, the "Iron Lady," came to mind even before I got to this chapter). The prerogatives of power, Ludwig asserts, closely follow those that accrue to (other) alpha male primates, including greater sexual opportunities, more offspring, greater access to food and shelter, and deference by others. To take the case of sex, American presidents seem uniquely indicative, yet hardly exceptional for rulers, from Wilson to Clinton (the author never cites Henry Kissinger's aphorism that "power is the ultimate aphrodisiac," yet he affirms its truth). Yet when Ludwig examines the instances of non-monogamous sexual activity...