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Lessons for leaders.

Article Excerpt
WHEN it comes to dispensing knowledge to leaders, it would be hard to find a better source than Carnes Lord. Few political theorists possess his experience as a practitioner of statecraft; fewer still who are currently slugging it out in Washington's halls of power can lay claim to Lord's credentials as a serious student of political philosophy. He has translated and written on Aristotle and has served both Presidents Reagan and Bush the elder in prominent national security roles. This makes him a rare commodity indeed, and his recent book on statesmanship deserves serious attention.

Lord, a professor of strategy at the Naval War College, has provided a distillation of his theoretical and practical knowledge in The Modern Prince. ([dagger]) The book is neither a plodding work of scholarship nor a jargon-filled policy paper. Its intended audience is neither academics nor bureaucratic laborers so much as sitting and aspiring leaders, as well as the citizens who elect them. Like the slender volume by Machiavelli on which this book is modeled, The Modern Prince is a didactic work designed, in Lord's words, to "catch the attention of busy men."

With his first two sentences, Lord catches everyone's attention: "The theory of democracy tells us that the people rule. In practice, we have leaders who rule the people in a manner not altogether different from the princes and potentates of times past." Lord thinks the separated and balanced system the Founders designed is too much an executive-dominated venture at present, with the legislature in "manifest decline." Lord suggests that this development "may vindicate Machiavelli's fundamental argument concerning the indispensability of princely rule in a republic." If true, Lord adds, it could undermine "the liberal constitutionalist solution to Machiavelli's challenge--and perhaps of the very idea of republican government."

It is therefore never in question that Lord intends...

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