Freud, Plato and Plutarch — who is the leader?

“Leadership is about inspiring others”
“Leader is not a boss”
“Leaders of 21st century”
What they all are talking about? I was not sure till the moment I put my hands into hundreds of researchers to find the “real” definition of leader and leadership, that is kind of close to what I am thinking it is or it should be.
To understand leadership itself, continuing with different models and theories, we have to primarily understand the definition of a leader and its historical development. Based on the Business Dictionary definition, a leader is
“a person or thing that holds a dominant or superior position within its field, and can exercise a high degree of control or influence over others” (Business Dictionary, 2016).
It is hard to believe, but the history of leader and leadership has its roots in ancient times, in the eras of Plato, Plutarch, and Freud. To understand the entire line of the development of leaders till nowadays, we should look at the past. Plato was one of the first who, without the knowledge of doing so, gave a clear psychological basis for leaders and leadership (Strozier, Abdyli, Offer, 2011). His famous work Republic brought the hidden meaning of leadership on stage. One thing among others that were discussed in Republic is the problem of tyranny and overcoming control from the aristocracy that moved government from democracy to despotism (Strozier, Abdyli, Offer, 2011). Plato, via revealing just laws’ power to control and influence everything, explained one of the most important aspects of leader’s: power to change via authority and public speaking; and using those skills to build a controlled group or system that is easy to lead.
Another contributor to the leader’s role development is Plutarch, who in his work The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans described, emphasized and gave a description of the political, personal and military achievements for each leading political figure, centralizing his attention on the way those characters motivated and used leadership techniques to control and influence their followers. Plato and Plutarch were both trying to give a definition of right and wrong, diving into a moralistic point of view on this subject and applying their perceptual definitions on different leaders / political leaders at an ancient period to analyse their style of leadership and categorize them as bad or good.
Plutarch’s great achievement was that he identified the connection between the psychology that leaders were using and the type of their followers. According to Strozier, Abdyli, Offer (2011) Plutarch even defined the personal characteristics that ancient leaders must have to be prospective among their followers:
“ambition, virtue, cruelty, revenge ….” (Strozier, Abdyli, Offer, 2011).
Both Plato and Plutarch brought plenty of contribution to the leader’s understanding and definition.
However, the man who not only brought clarity on stage but also described the whole process by being a leader himself with followers around him was Freud. He was concerned with the analysis of Ego and other psychological studies focused on an individual regarding society and family. Freud several times stated in his works that the role of a father in the family is the central and leading one — the father is the leader. What makes father a leader? He provides income; he cares about family and satisfies their needs and wants — so he is doing the major and primary leader’s functions.
According to Freud, the male is the only one who can afford to take political, military or any other influential position himself to control or influence any particular group (Strozier, Abdyli, Offer, 2011). I do not want to go deep with Freud’s discriminative position, on the other hand, I want strive to reveal the role of leader and leadership inside a particular organization without considering the leader’s age, race or gender.
It can be seen from different views of great philosophers from ancient times that the definition of “leader” has already existed for ages and was interpreted in several ways by various scientists and philosophers. It is also very clear that we do not have to enter the business environment to find those leaders; we can just depend on our families and friends. For instance, when some group of friends is going to have fun and walk around town, one of them is always generating crazy ideas, influencing others to do so and makes others laugh — this is a leader too, the leader of a small group of friends.
To conclude, the idea behind those definitions is very close to the single meaning that I will follow in my next posts:
a leader is a person who is selected by a particular group, because of his or her personal characteristics upon which the leader can impose his authority and influence its followers (Olesja Lacko).

