Leadership After Charisma

Why these essays

Although the immediate context of these essays is the approach of new elections in Israel, the inquiry they pursue is not electoral. It emerges from a broader concern about leadership in contemporary democracies and the growing tension between political responsibility and political imagination.

In many democratic societies, charismatic leadership has come to generate exhaustion rather than direction. Permanent mobilization, moral dramatization, and personalized authority have weakened institutions and deepened polarization. In response, political systems increasingly reward restraint, competence, and managerial discipline. Leaders are valued less for vision than for their ability to stabilize fractured systems.

Israel offers a particularly instructive case. Subject to constant security pressure and repeated electoral cycles, it reveals with unusual clarity the dilemmas facing post-charismatic democracies. Yet the interest of the Israeli case lies precisely in its broader relevance. The questions raised here are not uniquely Israeli.

The guiding question of this series is simple but demanding:

What happens when democracies succeed in restraining excessive leadership, yet struggle to produce new political horizons?

Each essay examines a different political figure or political formation as a response to this challenge. The aim is not to assess intentions or forecast outcomes, but to understand forms of leadership: what they stabilize, what they contain, and where their limits appear.

Taken together, these essays seek to clarify a problem increasingly visible across democratic societies: the risk that politics becomes competent but directionless, governed but uninspired. The concern animating this inquiry is not the fate of any single leader, but the future of political imagination under conditions of democratic constraint.

Series:

What Happens When Democracies Produce Managers but No Visionaries?