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Psychological Insights for
Understanding COVID-19
and Society

In the Psychological Insights for Understanding COVID-19 series, international

experts introduce important themes in psychological science that engage with
people’s unprecedented experience of the pandemic, drawing together chapters as
they originally appeared before COVID-19 descended on the world.
This book explores how COVID-19 has impacted society, and chapters examine
a range of societal issues including leadership and politics, community, social
status, welfare, social exclusion and accountability. Addressing the social and
psychological processes that structure, and are structured by, our social contexts,
it shows not only how groups and individuals can come together to manage global
crises, but also how these crises can expose weaknesses in our society. The volume
also reflects on how we can work together to rebuild society in the aftermath of
the pandemic, by cultivating a shared sense of responsibility through social
integration and responsible leadership.
Showcasing theory and research on key topics germane to the global pandemic,
the Psychological Insights for Understanding COVID-19 series offers thought-
provoking reading for professionals, students, academics and policy makers
concerned with the psychological consequences of COVID-19 for individuals,
families and societies.

S. Alexander Haslam is Professor of Psychology and Australian Laureate Fellow

at the University of Queensland. Alex’s research focuses on the study of group and
identity processes in social, organisational and health contexts. Together with over
250 co-authors around the world, he has written and edited 15 books and published
over 250 peer-reviewed articles on these topics. He is a former editor of the
European Journal of Social Psychology and currently Associate Editor of The
Leadership Quarterly.
Psychological Insights for Understanding COVID-19

The Psychological Insights for Understanding COVID-19 series aims to highlight

important themes in psychological science that engage with people’s unprecedented
experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. These short, accessible volumes draw
together chapters as they originally appeared before COVID-19 descended on the
world but demonstrate how researchers and professionals in psychological science
had developed theory and research on key topics germane to the global pandemic.
Each volume includes a specially commissioned, expert introduction that contex-
tualises the chapters in relation to the crisis, reflects on the relevance of psychologi-
cal research during this significant global event, and proposes future research and
vital interventions that elucidate understanding and coping with COVID-19. With
individual volumes exploring society, health, family, work and media, the Psycho-
logical Insights for Understanding COVID-19 series offers thought-provoking
reading for professionals, students, academics and policy makers concerned with
psychological consequences of the pandemic for individuals, families and society.
Titles in the series:

Psychological Insights for Understanding COVID-19 and Families, Parents,

and Children
Marc H. Bornstein

Psychological Insights for Understanding COVID-19 and Media and Technology

Ciarán Mc Mahon

Psychological Insights for Understanding COVID-19 and Society

S. Alexander Haslam

Psychological Insights for Understanding COVID-19 and Work

Cary L. Cooper

Psychological Insights for Understanding COVID-19 and Health

Dominika Kwasnicka and Robbert Sanderman

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/

Psychological-Insights-for-Understanding-COVID-19/book-series/COVID
Psychological Insights for
Understanding COVID-19
and Society

Edited by S. Alexander Haslam

First published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 selection and editorial matter, S. Alexander Haslam; individual
chapters, the contributors
The right of S. Alexander Haslam to be identified as the author of the
editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-64760-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-64759-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-12612-6 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Selected chapters are taken
from the following original
Routledge publications

Selma Rudert, Rainer Greifeneder, Kipling Williams, Current Directions in Ostra-

cism, Social Exclusion and Rejection Research, ISBN: 978-0-8153-6813-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-351-25591-2 (ebk)
Ken J. Rotenberg, The Psychology of Trust, ISBN: 978-1-138-67848-4 (hbk)
978-1-315-55891-2 (ebk)
Barry Richards, The Psychology of Politics, 978-1-138-55167-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-14769-7 (ebk)
Wendy Stainton Rogers, Perspectives on Social Psychology: A Psychology of Human
Being, ISBN: 978-1-138-50132-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-14427-6 (ebk)
Catherine Haslam, Jolanda Jetten, Tegan Cruwys, Genevieve Dingle, S. Alexander
Haslam, The New Psychology of Health: Unlocking the Social Cure, ISBN:
978-1-138-12387-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-64856-9 (ebk)
Carolyn Kagan, Mark Burton, Paul Duckett, Rebecca Lawthom, Asiya Siddiquee,
Critical Community Psychology: Critical Action and Social Change,
ISBN: 978-1-138-36405-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-43150-0 (ebk)
Polli Hagenaars, Marlena Plavšić, Nora Sveaass, Ulrich Wagner, Tony Wain-
wright, Human Rights Education for Psychologists, ISBN: 978-0-367-22287-1
(hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-27431-2 (ebk)
Contents

List of contributors ix

Introduction: COVID-19 and society 1

S . A L E X A N D E R HAS L AM

1 Leaders 13
B A R RY R I C H A R DS

From The Psychology of Politics

2 Trust and politics: The Emperor’s not very new clothes 37

K E N J . R O T E N B E RG

From The Psychology of Trust

3 Community as social ties 45

C A R O LY N K A GAN, MARK BURTON, PAUL DUCKETT,
R E B E C C A L AWT HOM AND AS I YA S I DDI QUE E

From Critical Community Psychology: Critical Action

and Social Change

4 Social status and disadvantage 109

C AT H E R I N E H AS L AM, JOL ANDA JE T T E N, T E GAN CR U WY S,
G E N E V I E V E D I NGL E AND S . AL E XANDE R HAS L A M

From The New Psychology of Health: Unlocking the Social Cure

5 Human welfare 143

WE N D Y S TA I N TON ROGE RS

From Perspectives on Social Psychology: A Psychology of

Human Being
viii Contents
6 Dealing with social exclusion: An analysis of psychological
strategies 188
S U S A N N A T I ME O, PAOL O RI VA, AND MARI A PA O LA PA LA D IN O

From Current Directions in Ostracism, Social Exclusion

and Rejection Research

7 Social accountability and action orientation: Strengthening

the policy-making capacity of psychologists 205
E L I Z A B E T H L I RA KORNF E L D

From Human Rights Education for Psychologists

Contributors

Mark Burton, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK (visiting position)

Tegan Cruwys, Research School of Psychology, The Australian National Univer-
sity, Australia
Genevieve Dingle, The University of Queensland, Australia
Paul Duckett, Victoria University, Australia
S. Alexander Haslam, The University of Queensland, Australia
Catherine Haslam, The University of Queensland, Australia c.haslam@uq.edu.au
Jolanda Jetten, The University of Queensland, Australia
Carolyn Kagan, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK C.Kagan@mmu.ac.uk
Rebecca Lawthom, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
Elizabeth Lira, Alberto Hurtado University, Chile elira@uahurtado.cl
Maria Paola Paladino, University of Trento, Italy
Barry Richards, Department of Humanities and Law, Bournemouth University,
UK BRichards@bournemouth.ac.uk
Paolo Riva, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy
Ken J. Rottenberg, University of Keele, UK k.j.rotenberg@keele.ac.uk
Asiya Siddiquee, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
Wendy Stainton Rogers, Faculty of Health and Social Care, The Open University,
UK w.stainton.rogers@icloud.com
Susanna Timeo, University of Trento, Italy susanna.timeo@unipd.it
Introduction
COVID-19 and society
S. Alexander Haslam

An obvious point about the COVID-19 pandemic is that it has created a huge
amount of uncertainty that we are unable to resolve on our own. Much of that
uncertainty centres on the nature of the virus itself and questions of biology and
epidemiology. How does it spread? What are its effects? How can we find a vac-
cine? But many others relate to the social and psychological dimensions of the
pandemic. Indeed, all of these questions have answers that are social as much as
medical. This is particularly true when we reflect on the impact of the virus as it
is clear that, after the pandemic, society as a whole will be profoundly altered
(Solnit, 2020). For example, previously unquestioned assumptions about work,
travel, social interaction and health will have to be substantially revised – in ways
that we would have struggled to envisage just a year ago (Jetten et al., 2020a; Pfef-
ferbaum, & North, 2020; Wind et al., 2020).
And, yet, for all this uncertainty, there are two important sets of constants. The
first relates to the social and psychological processes that will play out in the context
of this change. Certainly, these processes will be operating under a different set of
conditions and in a different set of circumstances; nevertheless the processes them-
selves will be the same. For example, prior to COVID-19 we knew that social inter-
action and social integration were key determinants of health (Haslam et al., 2018;
Holt-Lunstad et al., 2010) and this is no less true today. What has changed, though,
is that many forms of interaction (e.g., with colleagues, with those in care; Bentley,
2020; Haslam, 2020) are now a lot more problematic and harder to take for granted
than they were a year ago. Likewise, prior to the pandemic it was the case that social
inequality created a health gradient which compromised the health and well-being
not just of the disadvantaged but also of the advantaged (Marmot, 2014; Wilkinson &
Pickett, 2012). This will still be true tomorrow, but what will have changed is that
the pandemic will have exposed and accentuated pre-existing inequalities in ways
that seem likely to place even greater strain on societies, their citizens and their
institutions (Jetten, 2020; Smith & Gibson, 2020; Weible et al., 2020).
Related to this, the second set of constants relates to the knowledge that we have
acquired about these various social and psychological processes. Faced with the
unprecedented scale and nature of the pandemic, it is easy to imagine that social
psychological science would be poorly prepared for the task of understanding the
dynamics that would play out in its wake. Indeed, along these lines, several
2 S. Alexander Haslam
commentators argued that psychology (and social psychology in particular) was
not ‘crisis ready’ – especially in comparison to medical and biological sciences
whose understanding of the realities of epidemics and their impact was believed
to be in a much more advanced state (Dupuis, 2020; Ijzerman et al., 2020; Ritchie,
2020; Yates, 2020).
There are a range of problems with this argument, but two stand out. The first
is that, as events have shown, the novelty of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has meant that
medical and biological scientists have themselves often struggled to make sense
of, and respond to, the unfolding realities of virus transmission (Krause et al.,
2020; Sahu et al., 2020). As a result, their models are imperfect and are constantly
being updated and revised (Kuznia & Griffin, 2020; O’Brian, 2020). Nevertheless,
alongside the new knowledge that is acquired as the pandemic advances, the main
source of guidance has been the body of scientific knowledge that scientists pains-
takingly built up in the decades leading up to the current crisis. The same is true
of social psychological science, and indeed in this respect the scientific fields are
no different. Moreover, in this context, a second problem with the idea that psy-
chological scientists are poorly positioned to inform responses to COVID-19 is
that since start of the pandemic not only has there been more demand for social
psychological knowledge than ever before, but so too that knowledge has proved
far more useful than ever before.
As testament to this, a major review article by Van Bavel and colleagues (2020)
that was published early on in the pandemic was accessed over 130,000 times in
the first three months after appearing in Nature Human Behaviour. More impor-
tantly, over that time, most of its observations (e.g., about such things as threat
perception, leadership, science communication, stress and coping) appeared to
have been borne out by developments. For example, the observation that the pan-
demic would unleash a wave of prejudice and racism – particularly against Asians –
proved correct (Huo, 2020) as did the claim that countries’ ability to secure
compliance with health directives would be linked to leadership that communi-
cated a sense that ‘we are all in this together’ (rather than that ‘we are divided’;
e.g., along party political lines; Haslam et al., in press; Steffens, 2020).
It is in this context, then, demands have increased for social psychologists to
harvest knowledge from their discipline in ways that would support responses to
the pandemic. Prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, very few social psychologists
had been explicitly interested in pandemics (although a body of research on public
health emergencies and disaster management certainly anticipated some of its key
features; e.g., Carter et al., 2015; Drury, 2012, Drury et al., 2020; Williams &
Drury, 2009). Accordingly, as the pandemic took hold, researchers scurried to
assemble and curate relevant theoretical, empirical and practical insights in ways
they thought would be helpful to policy makers, practitioners and other research-
ers. Here, then, as Abrams (2020) has observed, researchers worked together

not to find the one truth or “the science”, but to deploy [their] different aca-
demic insights to best effect under the circumstances . . . [thereby getting]
multiple experts to work together to identify how we can get things less wrong.
 Introduction 3
The review by Van Bavel et al. (2020) was one such effort, but the pandemic has
inspired many other reviews (e.g., Holmes et al., 2020; O’Connor et al., 2020), journal
special issues (e.g., Jonas & Cesario, 2020; Smith & Gibson, 2020) and books (includ-
ing our own: Together Apart: The Psychology of COVID-19; Jetten et al., 2020a).
The present volume is part of this same orchestrated response and is an attempt
to bring together contributions from key researchers and practitioners that speak
to issues of leadership, trust, community, human welfare, human rights, social
exclusion and disadvantage which are proving to have profound relevance in the
context of COVID-19. What follows provides a short introduction to these contri-
butions and goes on to abstract some of the key themes whose importance they
explore and underline.

The present volume

The contributions
Our coverage starts in Chapter 1 with a discussion by Barry Richards of the nature
of leadership taken from his 2018 book The Psychology of Politics. As we noted at
the start of this chapter, the COVID-19 pandemic has created demand for effective
leadership both to resolve uncertainly about the nature of the threat that the virus
poses and to motivate people to work together to minimise that threat. In this context,
effective leadership helps people understand what they should be thinking and doing,
and inspires them to contribute to a concerted societal response. Effective leadership
thus serves the dual function of (a) holding groups together through a crisis and (b)
constructively channelling the energies of group members. In this context too, lead-
ers themselves should ideally serve as a model of “the best of us” and in a crisis their
first responsibility should be to set aside – and to be seen to set aside – divisive
personal or partisan interests (Haslam et al., in press). And yet, as Richards observes,
around the world in recent years we have witnessed the ascendancy of populist lead-
ers (generally men) with turbocharged superegos who come to power with a narcis-
sistic interest in pursuing polarising agendas – often underpinned by a narrative in
which they cast themselves as representatives of the downtrodden who are fighting
back against an all-too-cosy political elite. Think Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro,
Rodrigo Duterte. Richards explores many of the deficiencies of this model of leader-
ship – not least its authoritarian requirement that followers are excluded from the
democratic process of defining and shaping the group that the leader leads. As he
observes, this skews agency in the leader–follower relationship in ways that ulti-
mately make groups themselves weak and ineffective (see also Haslam et al., 2011).
Along these lines, prior to the pandemic, a range of scholars and commentators
had identified and decried the deficiencies of this model of leadership (e.g., Fitz-
duff, 2016). Yet Richards makes the point that it takes a crisis to fully expose their
shortcomings. He does so with reference to terrorist attacks and international con-
flicts, but clearly COVID-19 was just such a crisis and here an ego-focused
approach to leadership has indeed exposed groups to the full force of the existential
threat that the SARS-CoV-2 poses. Going forward, a key question is therefore how
4 S. Alexander Haslam
to loosen the grip of such models and develop alternatives which are more demo-
cratic and inclusive – and safer. Unfortunately, as Richards notes, this goal has
been made more challenging because populist leaders have themselves sought –
with some success – to erode trust in the political process and in the people and
institutions that embody it.
These questions of trust are even more central to Chapter 2. Taken from Ken J.
Rotenberg’s 2018 volume on The Psychology of Trust, this underlines the point that
in recent years the rise of populism has transformed healthy political scepticism into
rampant cynicism. In the process, he notes that a key form of social capital has itself
been eroded – capital which binds citizens to each other and to their communities
and institutions. Importantly, this capital is a key resource in efforts both to mitigate
against the effects of various forms of disaster and to manage post-disaster recovery
(Helliwell et al, 2014; Jovita et al., 2015; Masud-All-Kamal & Monirul Hassan, 2018;
Nakagawa, & Shaw, 2004). Accordingly, it should come as no surprise that the
countries in which this capital is highest (e.g., in Australasia and Scandinavia) have
generally fared better in responding to COVID-19 than those in which it is lower.
Not least, this is because social capital is associated with a sense of ties to, and
obligation towards, one’s fellow citizens in ways that encourage co-operation and
compliance with health directives (Borgonovi, & Andrieu, 2020).
At the same time, precisely because the pandemic has underscored the need for
sound governance and good leadership, where this has been forthcoming, it has
tended to increase trust in government and thereby (re)build social capital. This is
true in Australia, for example, where, as Rotenberg notes, prior to the pandemic only
43% of the public agreed that government could ‘usually’ or ‘sometimes’ be trusted
to do the right thing, but by April 2020 this had risen to 53% and only 13% of Aus-
tralians said that they had ‘no trust’ in government (Lewis, 2020). One reason for
this is that the pandemic has created a sense of common fate and shared identity, such
that rather than snipe at their political opponents, many leaders have been motivated
to collaborate with them (Ntontis & Rocha, 2020). Again, though, for some political
leaders the pill of solidarity has proved too bitter to swallow. Accordingly, while this
upswell in solidarity has been found to have a range of benefits (of a form that
Rotenberg’s analysis anticipates) it has not been a universal phenomenon.
Issues of community are explored in Chapter 3 in a contribution from Carolyn
Kagan, Mark Burton, Paul Duckett, Rebecca Lawthom and Asiya Siddiquee that is
taken from their 2011 text on Critical Community Psychology. The focus here is on
the ways that different types of social ties – those based on affection, interdepen-
dence and coercion – contribute to a sense of community and in turn have a role in
defining behaviour within that community. A key theme here is that ties are multi-
faceted and nuanced and create a complex network of forces. For example, the
social ties that bind people into a social group and that support positive relations
within it can also engender antagonism toward those outside the group who appear
to threaten it (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). Similarly, social boundaries can have impacts
that are both benign and malign: helping to define a community of ‘us’ but some-
times also creating a pariah of ‘them’. Again, these are dynamics that have played
out forcefully in the context of COVID-19 – where international tensions have been
 Introduction 5
inflamed by leaders seeking to build ties with and within their ingroup by tuning its
members into various sources of outgroup threat (e.g., as seen in Donald Trump’s
insistence on referring to SARS-CoV-2 as “the Chinese virus”; Huo, 2020).
As in Rotenberg’s chapter, these considerations again feed into reflections on
the way that different types of social ties serve to build social capital of a form that
not only sustains civic life and polity, but also forms an important resource for
communities to sustain themselves in the face of various challenges (Puttnam,
2000). Importantly, though, the authors observe that communities’ capacity to do
this is conditioned by the degree of inequality within them – so that social capital
is harder to build (and hence its benefits harder to access) in communities that have
high levels of inequality (Wilkinson & Picket, 2009). As they note, this is a point
that is often overlooked by theorists and commentators – in part because they have
been insensitive to the political and ideological forces that erode social capital
(e.g., those informed by neoliberalism and individualism; Sennett, 1998). Yet the
importance of this point has also been forcefully brought home by the COVID-19
pandemic. Here, then, it has become clear that inequality is a major determinant
of SARS-CoV-2’s impact – so that not only is the virus disproportionately harmful
to the poor and disadvantaged, but so too general levels of harm are higher in com-
munities with higher inequality (Farmer et al., 2020).
The mechanisms of such health disparities are the focus of Chapter 4. Taken
from their 2018 text, The New Psychology of Health: Unlocking the Social Cure,
here Catherine Haslam, Jolanda Jetten, Tegan Cruwys, Genevieve Dingle and S.
Alexander Haslam provide an analysis of the impact of social status and disadvan-
tage on health. Importantly, this provides a social psychological framework that
explains how the health impacts of inequality flow in large part from levels of
shared social identity within a given community or society. A key point here is that,
on their own, sociological and economic factors do not fully account for the impact
of social disadvantage on health. Instead, the authors argue that social psychologi-
cal processes moderate this relationship such that health (particularly of those who
are disadvantaged) will vary as a function of the degree to which members of
particular groups perceive themselves, and act, as a group (in terms of shared
social identity) rather than as individuals. The authors argue that where people act
in terms of social identity, this provides them with access to a range of social psy-
chological resources – notably a sense of control, purpose and support – that then
help them cope better with various forms of adversity, especially those that are
associated with life (and identity) change.
A large body of empirical evidence supports these claims, much of it gleaned
from studies of people’s capacity to adjust successfully to such things as serious
illness, retirement and trauma (Haslam et al., 2020). The latter work is particularly
relevant in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic as it provides evidence of the
capacity for social identity not only to increase resilience but also to open up
pathways to post-traumatic growth (Muldoon et al., 2019). In line with a range of
points that we have already made, it thus seems likely that social identity will
prove to be an equally critical resource in efforts to tackle, and recover from, the
pandemic. Indeed, consistent with this claim, there is already evidence that in the
6 S. Alexander Haslam
face of COVID-19 people’s social identification with a given community – and
leadership which helps to build and support this identification (Steffens et al.,
2014; Van Dick et al., 2019) – is a key predictor not only of compliance and citi-
zenship but also of solidarity, health and well-being (Haslam et al., in press; Jetten
et al., 2020a; Templeton et al., 2020).
These considerations of health provide a segue into broader questions of human
welfare upon which Wendy Stainton Rogers reflects in Chapter 5. Taken from her
2019 book Perspectives on Social Psychology, this chapter offers a wide-ranging
critical perspective on matters of health and well-being, and begins by noting how
these constructs have become increasingly personalised, commercialised and medi-
calised over time (trends which lead her to prefer to talk of ‘welfare’ rather than of
‘health’). In particular, she draws attention to the way in which health – and the task
of being healthy – has come to be construed as a matter of personal responsibility.
Relatedly, another important contribution of this chapter is to observe how prevailing
models of health focus attention on the individual – rather than on the social context
in which they are embedded – in ways that lead us to see any illness that a person
suffers as ‘their problem’. Not only does this draw attention away from structural
factors (such as inequality) that drive health outcomes, but so too it stigmatises those
who suffer from particular conditions and skews attention away from the role and
responsibility of collectives (not least governments) in this process and also overlooks
the capacity for collectives (not least thriving communities) to promote resilience.
Again, there is abundant evidence of the problematic implications of such
skewing in the trajectory of COVID-19. To start with, the defunding of public
health agencies (e.g., the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in the US)
meant that they were poorly prepared to deal with the pandemic and that the
burden of care then fell on victims whose capacity to cope was understandably
limited (Haeder, 2020; Scott, 2020). As the pandemic has spread, it is apparent
too that those who have contracted the virus are often targets of opprobrium and
discrimination rather than of empathy and support. As the World Health Organiza-
tion (2020) notes, “the current COVID-19 outbreak has provoked social stigma
and discriminatory behaviours against people of certain ethnic backgrounds as
well as anyone perceived to have been in contact with the virus”. Not only, then,
are those who are disadvantaged more likely to fall prey to the virus, but they are
also more likely to be blamed and victimised if they do. At the same time, though,
in line with Stainton Rogers’ emphasis on the importance of social connection for
welfare (which was also a focus of the previous chapter), we see that strong com-
munities have played a vital role in pushing back against the virus – in particular,
helping people to resolve local problems (e.g., surrounding access to resources
and services) and protecting the vulnerable (Jetten et al., 2020b; Walker, 2020).
As Herron (2020) observed on the ground in New Zealand, it takes a village to
beat a virus.
Yet if it is true that a sense of shared social identity and community can support
adjustment and recovery, then, as a corollary, it should equally be true that social
division and social exclusion will tend to work against these things. This is a point
that is explored in Chapter 6 by Susanna Timeo, Paolo Riva and Maria Paola Paladino
in an analysis of the dynamics of social exclusion taken from Selma Rudert, R ‎ ainer
 Introduction 7
Greifeneder and Kipling Williams’s (2019 edited volume, Current Directions in
Ostracism. As they point out, social exclusion has a range of negative consequences
for people’s emotional and cognitive states and for their mental and physical health.
A primary way it does this is by threatening basic needs – for belonging, self-esteem,
control and purpose (Williams, 2009; precisely those needs which group-based inclu-
sion satisfies; Greenaway et al., 2017; Haslam et al., 2018). The authors discuss a
range of cognitive strategies for coping with this threat (e.g., re-appraisal, self-dis-
tancing, distraction), as well as reaffirmation strategies for restoring threatened needs.
In line with observations in the preceding two chapters, many of the latter centre on
efforts to reconnect (psychologically and/or physically) with valued groups in ways
that (re)create the social bonds that are damaged by exclusion.
The significance of these issues in a world torn asunder by COVID-19 is all too
clear. Indeed, even where people have not contracted the virus and been excluded
on that basis (e.g., by having to self-isolate or being placed in quarantine), the
process of protecting oneself against it (e.g., by practicing physical distancing) can
itself be exclusionary (Bentley, 2020; Van Bavel et al., 2020). Thus at a time when,
as we have noted, there is a particular need for people to come together to support
each other and work on challenges collectively, there are forces driving them apart.
This puts health policy makers on the horns of a serious dilemma, and presents as
a particular challenge for members of vulnerable populations (e.g., older adults,
or those in care; Haslam, 2020; Seifert et al., 2020). Going forward, it is clear too
that developing workable solutions to this dilemma will be critical to ensuring that
a viral disaster does not pave the way to a mental health catastrophe.
Panning out to reflect on broader challenges of policy making, the volume is
brought to a close in Chapter 7 with an analysis of social accountability and action
orientation by Elizabeth Lira Kornfield that appeared in a volume edited by Polli
Hagenaars, Marlena Plavšić, Nora Sveaass, Ulrich Wagner, and Tony Wainwright
(2020) on Human Rights Education for Psychologists. This chapter takes as its
focus the challenges researchers faced when trying to support victims of the human
rights violations that were committed by the military regime in Chile between 1973
and 1990. Under the dictatorship of Pinochet-led government, these violations were
rife and centred on the abuse, torture, ‘disappearance’ and murder of many thou-
sands of the regime’s opponents. However, alongside this oppression, there also
developed a network of agencies that emerged to provide social, psychological and
medical support to those who had been brutalised by the regime. As documented
by Kornfield, the problems that these agencies had to deal with were profound and
traumatic, and she describes a range of processes designed to help victims work
through their experiences and the psychological scarring these had created, and to
recover something of their dignity and sense of self-worth. As she describes it, this
journey starts with the creation of a therapeutic bond that then creates a platform
for victims to regain confidence in their ability to trust and have meaningful rela-
tionships with others. Necessarily too, intervention also needs to be social not just
personal, as in order for the journey to progress, victims “need[] to know that their
society, as a whole, acknowledge[s] what had happened to them”.
While many of the harrowing features of Kornfield’s analysis are specific to the
atrocities that victims of the Pinochet regime had to deal with, there are important
8 S. Alexander Haslam
lessons here for recovery from all trauma. Moreover, these will undoubtedly be
important to take on board in efforts to recover from the trauma caused by COVID-
19 (Muldoon et al., in press). Principal among these is the importance of interven-
tion being built around a therapeutic alliance between those who give and receive
support (Haslam et al., 2018). Support from the wider society (material as well as
psychological) will also be important not only as manifestation of solidarity but
also to help repair the enormous damage that COVID has done to social, economic
and community infrastructure. Whether or not this will be forthcoming remains to
be seen, but if it is not then the traumatic scarring of COVID-19 is likely to be
much profound and much prolonged.

Conclusion: key messages for a COVID-stricken society

These, then, are the specific analyses that this volume brings together. No doubt too,
as you read the chapters yourself you will discover a wealth of points that are germane
to contemporary debates about how we should respond to the COVID-19 pandemic,
and how we should work to rebuild our societies in its wake. Indeed, the diversity of
these chapters is testimony to the breadth and richness of a wealth of theoretical and
empirical research that has investigated the social and psychological foundations of
society over the course of many decades (and in some case centuries).
Yet while the chapters that follow are a source of variegated insights, for a reader
who is coming to this literature for the first time, the wood here may be hard to see
for the trees. So what are the core messages that these contributions (and the
broader corpus of work of which they are representative) carry for researchers,
practitioners, policy makers and the general public in a time of COVID-19? There
are many of these. But in bringing these introductory reflections to a conclusion,
there are three inter-related messages that the chapters bring home that seem to be
particularly worthy of emphasis.

1. We are political beings who look to others to help us formulate collective

responses to uncertainty and complexity. As we have already noted, a defin-
ing feature of COVID-19 has been the complexity of the pandemic and of
its impact on societies around the world. Scarcely a day goes by without
some new revelation, some new twist or some new complication. Most of
these centre on the implications of the virus for our health, our economies
and our communities. In this context our quest for definitive answers to a
catalogue of high-stakes questions is insatiable. More particularly, as several
chapters in this volume anticipate (notably Chapters 1 and 2), the pandemic
has fuelled demand for leadership – not just in politics but in multiple
spheres including those that centre on matters of health, education, business
and community. Importantly too, there is evidence that despite numerous
examples of leadership failure, a great many leaders and a great many
institutions have risen to this challenge. Importantly, though, they have not
done this alone or through the assertion of ‘I-ness’ or ego. On the contrary,
where they have been most successful, this is because they have mobilised
 Introduction 9
the latent power of communities through efforts to unite them around a
shared sense of ‘we-ness’ and the common cause of fighting the virus.
2. We are communal beings and our health and welfare is compromised by the
erosion of communal ties. This is a message that is shot through most of the
chapters but which is underscored in different ways by Chapters 3, 4, 5 and
6. Each of these contributions points to the importance of community-based
social connections for health, but each also identifies ways in which this sense
of community can be eroded – by social division, by inequality, by social
exclusion. The truth and relevance of this observation in the time of COVID-
19 is plain to see and aligns with the general observation that, to date, countries
and communities have generally been better placed to weather the viral storm
where they have presented a united front against it. At the same time, it needs
to be recognised that the virus itself exploits division and disunity, and so its
capacity to do this needs always to be actively countered – not least through
leadership that focuses on social integration rather than division.
3. The processes that shape and sustain society are social, participatory and fluid.
In many different ways, one of the big lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic is
that nothing in society is set in stone. Indeed, stark testimony to this is provided
by the fact that the pandemic has required a radical rethinking of the functional-
ity of the skyscrapers that adorn our city skylines, of the stadia in which sporting
and cultural festivals are enacted, and even of our large lecture halls. In the
process, much of the social psychological infrastructure that sustains society –
and that hitherto we had taken largely for granted – has also been thrown into
sharp relief too (Solnit, 2020). For example, the importance of mundane social
interaction, of social integration and of compassionate leadership has been
brought home in ways that could scarcely have been more dramatic.

As we work together on the challenging tasks of rebuilding society in the pan-

demic’s aftermath, now, then, is the time to take stock of the core lessons of social
psychological science and to reflect on their implications for action. The chapters
that follow are broadly representative of that science, and, for all their manifold
differences, they actually speak with a remarkably clear voice. Never has it been
more important for that voice to be heard.

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 1
LEADERS
Barry Richards

RAGE AND RETRIBUTION

You bleed for those sons of a bitch. How many? Three thousand? I will
kill more if only to get rid of drugs.1
When I say, ‘I will kill you if you destroy my country’, and ‘I will kill
you if you destroy the young of my country’, I am asking everybody to
fnd me a fault in those two statements.2
If I make it to the presidential palace I will do just what I did as mayor.
You drug pushers, holdup men, and do-nothings, you better get out
because I’ll kill you.3

These are statements made during a successful campaign in 2016 by

a candidate for election to the presidency of a country of more than
100 million people. Rodrigo Duterte is a middle-class, university-
educated career politician, currently president of the Philippines, who
was explaining his strategy for tackling the country’s major drugs
problem. He is an extreme example of a politician, well-known for
the violence and misogyny of his language, but is head of state in one
of the world’s largest democracies. Later in this chapter we will dis-
cuss what responsibility leaders have for the climate of feeling in their
countries – in this example, why is the rage about drug traffcking so
focussed on savage retribution? But frst we must walk through some
more general ideas about, and analyses of, the dynamics of leadership.
14 Leaders

AUTHORITY AND THE SUPEREGO

Leadership is a central issue in most aspects of human society, perhaps
most obviously so in areas such as organisational life and politics.
Yet it is one aspect of a wider and perhaps even deeper topic, that
of authority. Authority is at the centre of all human relationships,
including personal and intimate ones, because it is intrinsic to the
questions of how we conduct ourselves, and how we make deci-
sions; what rules we choose to follow, or to break; what standards we
seek to achieve, or to subvert; what we expect of people, including
ourselves. All such moral questions are at one level about authority,
because they are about which or whose rules and standards we relate
to, and about how we experience ourselves as moral agents able to
act on our own authority.
These are not only questions about which people we respect and
which codes we try to adhere to. They are also about a more subter-
ranean area of human life, in which forms of pre-verbal relating to
the world hold sway. These are laid down early in our psychological
development, when we learn who or what to trust, and what we have
to do to keep safe and to ft in with the world. In the technical lan-
guage of psychoanalysis, it is the area of early superego development.
The superego is that part of the mind in which the restraints and
rules of the culture are embedded, transferred from one generation of
superegos to the next (though with modifcations along the way), and
which is therefore core to our development as civilised beings. Out of
the ‘parental matrix’, which was described in Chapter 1, there emerges
a constellation of feelings and capacities in the developing person
which we can call their ‘superego’, and which defne that per-
son’s relationships with authority. This includes their own sense of
personal authority, the capacity to make judgments and to act inde-
pendently. So the superego is deeply linked to the individual’s experi-
ence of both safety and dignity.
In the over-simplifed versions of psychoanalysis sometimes found
in general psychology textbooks, the term ‘superego’ can mean much
the same as ‘conscience’. It is usually painted in severe terms, as a
 Leaders 15

punitive enforcer causing much painful guilt. Undoubtedly, guilt is

a major source of pain, and the superego can in some persons be
capable of great cruelty. However it is important to see it as a much
broader and more complex region of the self, including not only fear-
ful images of a forbidding censor, but also impressions of authority as
caring and supportive. Indeed the capacity to feel guilt and remorse
will not develop authentically if driven by fear alone, and needs a
trusting and loving connection with whoever is doing the prohibit-
ing or commanding.
What does all this early psychology have to do with the psychol-
ogy of politics? The superego is a core part of the self which is not
only an internal regulator but is also a set of powerful templates,
deeply embedded in the adult mind and able to shape our experience
throughout life of people and organisations we encounter which in
one way or another represent authority to us. Our experiences of
these authorities will carry the stamp of that early parental matrix,
and any social institution or person carrying some meaning as a
source of authority will occupy a quasi-parental place in the life of
the adult citizen. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean it will be
trusted or followed. As we saw in Chapter 1, there is much ambiva-
lence to be overcome in relationships with parents.

THE EXTERNALISED SUPEREGO

One of the earliest psychological theories of leadership is still a rich
source of understanding its dynamics. It was set out by Sigmund
Freud in his 1921 essay on group psychology. He noted that when
individuals inhabit a collective identity, they merge a part of them-
selves into that identity. The part in question is what Freud a little
later came to call the ‘superego’. His crucial observation was that
group members were often prepared to hand over their superego
functions, at least in part, to the leader of the group, and so were
prepared to act in ways that as individuals they would probably not
allow themselves. Group membership is therefore a reversal of the
process of emotional maturation. Having spent the years of growing
16 Leaders

up in efforts to internalise restraint, and to build our own internal

capacity for self-regulation, we project that back out there, to some-
one (or something) in the external world, when we commit to a
group which is emotionally signifcant to us. In return for this loss
of full selfhood, of psychic autonomy, the individual can gain the
safety and the dignity of belonging to a group, under the protection
and blessing of its leader. This experience may however be illusory,
and so be a long-term threat to the well-being of the individual.
Moreover, there is another more obviously dangerous consequence
of this dynamic of group membership, in that group members may
fnd themselves acting on feelings or impulses which are destructive
or self-damaging.
There are many ways in which this dynamic can play out, with very
different consequences, depending on what feelings the group leader
is giving permission to group members to release, or what actions
the leader is demanding of the group. In criminal gang cultures, the
permission or demand may often be for violent behaviour. In bohe-
mian communes, it may be for promiscuity and other hedonistic
activities. In political parties or movements, it is a demand for belief
in what the organisation stands for, and for action to promote its
aims.The content of that demand will vary according to the ideology
involved. The demands may conceal permissions as well – to engage
in antagonistic behaviour, for example, perhaps even violence, or to
take yourself away from your relationships with family or friends.
As was noted in Chapter 1, we are more familiar with the nega-
tive versions of this phenomenon. Freud’s model of group dynam-
ics has infuenced many attempts to explain the rise of Nazism and
the Holocaust. Indeed, a general implication of the model is that
group membership is intrinsically a form of diminished selfhood, a
condition into which people with less integrated superegos (i.e. less
psychic maturity) are more likely to fall. Freud was infuenced by
the rise of totalitarianism, in response to which he and many other
intellectuals held a suspicion of the collective and an idealisation of
the autonomous, fully self-possessed individual who would be less
vulnerable to the seductions of leaders.
 Leaders 17

However, developments in psychoanalytic thinking since Freud

about the superego and about groups enable us to expand his model
such that we can see leader-follower or leader-public relationships in
terms of a wide range of possibilities. Our perceptions of and feelings
about leaders may be the result of various aspects of the self being pro-
jected onto them, with different elements in leaders’ personalities acting
as the hook or target for those projections. So to an important degree,
we create our leaders through projection. But a leader must be willing
and able to inhabit and to own the projected feelings and identities.
What about the leaders themselves? The choice to become a politi-
cal leader may, in the person’s internal unconscious, be an attempt
to inhabit a superego role in the external world. At its worst, this
might mean gaining the power to infict on others whatever punish-
ments the person feels they have been threatened with by their own
superego. (Our discussion of terrorism in Chapter 4 will explore that
scenario.) At its best, it might mean the leader becoming a benign
and protective authority, thereby either reproducing their own good
developmental experiences of superego fgures, or flling a gap in
their personal development. Justin Frank’s (2012) psychoanalytic
study of Barack Obama links both merits and faws in his leadership
style to – amongst other factors – his early loss of a father. His parents
separated when he was one, and his father moved away. In later life,
including in his role as president, Obama sought to be the father he
had missed while also being very ambivalent in his relationship with
his internal image of father.
There are a number of ‘psychobiographies’ of leaders which
try to trace their emotional development and its shaping of their
adult characters, and to examine the ft (or sometimes the lack of
ft) between the person and the offce occupied, with its political
demands and opportunities to respond to the emotional profle of
the public. Some recent American presidents have been the subject
of interesting psychobiographies; as well as Frank’s study of Obama,
and an earlier one by him of George W. Bush, there is also one by
Vamik Volkan on Richard Nixon’s very diffcult childhood and his
subsequent narcissism and self-destructiveness (Volkan et al., 1997).
18 Leaders

In the rest of this chapter we will however focus more on the ‘fol-
lowership’ side of leadership.We will consider how broad changes in
society have affected leadership styles, by modifying what we want
and need to see in leaders. These changes bring the psychological
dimensions of leader-follower relations more into focus.We will dis-
cuss the question of whether leaders are made in the image of their
followers, or vice versa. Then we will look at some examples of how
leaders respond to their public’s needs for safety and dignity, and of
what containment they can offer of the anxieties around those needs.

AMBIVALENCE TOWARDS AUTHORITY

Perhaps the most obvious form of authority in everyday life is that
of the law. The law is easily pictured both as an external superego in
both a patriarchal, punitive mode, as something designed to oppress
rather than protect us, and also as a fundamentally benign source of
collective strength and rectitude. There may be many specifc situa-
tions in external reality which ft one or the other of these dichot-
omised images of a ‘good’ law and a ‘bad’ one. We may consume, in
rapid succession, media reports about the heroism of some police
offcers and the corruption of others. An ‘offcial’ and widely shared
rhetoric about the goodness of the law and those employed to enforce
it exists alongside many narratives that assume the opposite.This cul-
tural ambivalence towards the law refects the mixed nature of reality,
but also echoes the ambivalence towards parental authority which
is especially noticeable in adolescence and its oscillations between
needy dependence and resentful hostility.
The psychological basis of ambivalence towards authority, in the
process of development from infancy through adolescence, is pres-
ent in us all, though as individuals we are able to resolve it to varying
degrees, and express either or both sides of it in endlessly varying
ways. These will be strongly infuenced by our social environments.
It seems that social media have hugely expanded the scope for public
expression of negative feelings about politicians, sometimes testing the
 Leaders 19

legal proscription of hate speech. However there is reason to think

that expression of the negative side of the ambivalence was gaining
strength some decades before social media, due to a number of factors
but in particular the broad cultural trend over at least the last half cen-
tury of falling levels of trust in traditional institutions and professions,
and growing scepticism about some types of expertise. Politicians have
been especially affected by the weakening of deferential trust in their
integrity and competence. They are the least trusted profession in the
UK, according to IpsosMORI’s annual Veracity Index of 2017,4 which
reports that only 17% of the public trust them to tell the truth.
Globally, the overall picture of trust in politics is complex. Trust
in politicians is not quite the same as trust in government, and both
differ from trust in political institutions, so recorded levels of trust in
politics will depend on the questions asked.And as the 2018 Edelman
Trust Barometer shows,5 there are international year-by-year varia-
tions, with some countries such as Argentina, France and Germany
showing surprising increases in trust in government since 2012, with
fuctuations in between. So some positive attitudes towards authori-
ties remain, but negative ones towards politicians are probably on
a long-term rising trend, with some people becoming relentlessly
disparaging of them. To be cynical about politics (‘I don’t trust any
of them’) seems to have become for many people a criterion of basic
worldliness. Amongst other people, positive attitudes may be infated
to the point of idealisation, in denial of a disappointing reality. If
we try to understand all this psychologically, we can see it as regres-
sive splitting, a diffculty in holding on to a complex, mixed view
of vital social institutions, instead retreating to the simplicities of a
black-and-white world. This may suggest that some erosion of our
general capacity to trust has occurred, a diminution of emotional
capital in society as a whole. In representative democracies, there
is obviously risk to the democratic process when attitudes towards
elected politicians are dominated by splitting and the negative side
of the ambivalence is becoming stronger, a situation facilitating the
rise of ‘populist’ leaders.
20 Leaders

THE CHANGING STYLES OF LEADERSHIP:

INFORMAL, EMOTIONAL, PERSONAL
Another cultural trend of relevance to understanding the changing
dynamics of leader-follower relations has been called the informalisation
of everyday life (the sociologist Cas Wouters [2007] has led the way
in defning this trend). This refers to the fact that social formalities
and conventions, including those related to differences in status and
authority, no longer regulate social exchanges to the extent that they
used to. For example, dress codes are much more relaxed than they
were, and less indicative of rank. First name address is common even
across wide gaps in age and status.This trend may sometimes mislead
by obscuring the hierarchies that continue to exist, but overall must
surely be a positive development: it signals that respect should fow
‘down’ as well as ‘up’, it may reduce the timidity of younger or
more junior people, and it facilitates inclusiveness. It can reduce the
distance between politicians and the people, though politicians must
be careful in this area, since as they know, affecting an informality
which does not come naturally can make for bad publicity.
Informalisation is linked to two other broad cultural changes
which are impacting on political leadership: personalisation and
emotionalisation. Emotionalisation is a complex cultural phenomenon
which is linked to the rise of psychology we noted earlier. At its core
is an increase in emotional expressivity in everyday life, but amongst
many other things it also involves an increased popular interest in
emotional experience, and in the intimate lives of celebrities and
public fgures. Leaders are now permitted a much wider range of
emotional expression than previously – in fact, this is now desired of
them. The changing leadership styles in a more emotionalised cul-
ture have been explored in Candida Yates’ study of British political
culture from the late 1990s to 2015. The public’s interest is partly
served by, and partly generates, media content in which politicians
are presented as emotional persons as well as, or even rather than,
the bearers of policies.
The trend to personalisation is therefore closely linked to emotionalisa-
tion.There has been a tendency amongst politicians and commentators
 Leaders 21

in the more stable democracies to underplay the importance of lead-

ers. What matters, we have often been told, is policies not personali-
ties. It is as if an attraction to individual leaders sets us on a dangerous
path which could lead again to the horrors of twentieth-century fas-
cism. Yet this fear sits in a cultural environment in which there are
endless invitations in our media to experience and consider politicians
as persons, and to focus on the personalities of our leaders.Two devel-
opments have facilitated this personalisation of politics.
One is the process of ‘dealignment’ – the dissolution of the links
between socio-economic position and political affliation. While in
the past the industrial working class could have been expected to vote
en masse for parties of the left, the dissolution of clear and stable class
structures has led to much more complex and unpredictable patters
of voting. Ideologies grounded in class identity have much weaker
infuence, and the ‘Left-Right’ distinction can no longer organise the
diversity of political opinion. In this context, more space is avail-
able for the personal qualities of candidates to become important in
electoral choice.
The second is to be found in socio-technical developments in
media. The arrival of television in the 1950s and 1960s brought the
personal presence of politicians into everyday experience. The frst
televised debate between presidential candidates in the US, between
John Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960, was seen as a turning
point in the campaign. Kennedy subsequently won the election by a
narrow margin, with many commentators and polls suggesting this
was due at least in part to his much more telegenic presence and
performance in the debate. The later rise of the web and of social
media, and of the global 24-hour news environment, have afforded
deeper audience involvement in many aspects of politics, with the
domain of emotional responses to politicians expanding and being
of focal interest for many people. There some negative sides to this.
The intensive visual presentation of leaders on television and online
can have distracting or trivialising effects on political debate, and it
may negatively affect the leadership prospects of very capable people
who do not have distinctive screen appeal.
22 Leaders

However, while this is clearly a mixed development, we might wel-

come it as being more positive than sinister. It can help to sustain public
interest in politics, in times when the sterile ritualism of party competi-
tion and the remoteness of political elites has turned large numbers of
people away from it.What interests many people most is other people,
and what matters most are our relationships with other people. Pas-
sionately focussed though some people are on issues like the environ-
ment or human rights, productive emotional engagement with politics
is for many most likely to develop when it is somehow personalised.
This may come about through an issue being dramatised by the case
of an individual (say, stories of an individual migrant, CEO or terrorist
coming to represent the broad issues of migration, business governance
or terror), or through the media presence of an appealing leader (or
perhaps through an aversive response to an unappealing one).
Many members of the public have perhaps always ignored the
advice to stick to policies, and have instead been heavily infuenced
by how they relate to leaders and aspiring leaders as people, even
though they mostly have only ‘para-social’ contact with them (i.e.
via the media) so that relating is based on impressions gained from
media content alone. Certainly, before the age of television some lead-
ers were acutely aware of their emotional impact on their followers,
and of how their personal character and its presentation was crucial
to their political support. Refecting this, in the classic sociological
theory of charisma, academics have also registered the power of the
emotional tie between leader and follower. For the sociologist Max
Weber in 1919,6 the appeal of the charismatic leader rested on per-
sonal qualities, distinguishing that style of leadership from ‘tradi-
tional’ and ‘bureaucratic’ types, which were based on respect for roles
defned by custom and by law respectively (say, tribal elder or high
court judge) not on the emotional appeal of a person. Perhaps aca-
demic theory, which across the social sciences this century has been
undergoing a ‘turn to affect’, is only now just returning to Weber and
catching up with reality.Yet reality is also moving, and political lead-
ership is becoming more explicitly personalised and emotionalised,
as is culture as a whole.
 Leaders 23

THE LEADERS WE DESERVE?

This focus on the emotional dynamics of leadership points to a way
of answering the old and fundamental question of whether – for bet-
ter or worse – we get the leaders we deserve. In societies with some
degree of functioning democracy it is hard to avoid the conclusion
that yes, we do – though in a limited sense, as we will see. While
the capacity of wealthy and infuential elites to manipulate elections
through propaganda and other forms of infuence, if not outright
corruption, should not be underestimated, voters usually have some
choice, and exercise it. On this view, leaders may articulate public
opinion, but do not radically shape it.
Insofar as we do exercise choice, it is not in the simple way that
rationalist models of democracy would have it. Rational and evidence-
based comparative analysis of policy alternatives on offer may play a
part amongst some voters, but ‘voter competence’ levels (how much
electorates know about the issues and can make rational, informed
judgments about them) are not high even in the most educated
societies. So recourse to an intuitive summary judgment of candidates
is common, and is likely to be heavily infuenced by a voter’s emotional
responses to the candidates. As we’ve observed, their judgments
may be based on what voters project of themselves onto the public
personae of candidates, and therefore on how much they can identify
or feel a bond with one candidate more than others, or on how much
they are repulsed by a candidate onto whom they have projected some
very negative qualities. Or voters may be searching out the candidate
who they feel can best meet their needs to feel, say, more safe or more
respected. In these circumstances, the successful candidate may likely
be the one who, irrespective of competence and even of ideology,
has a public persona which best fts the emotional needs of a crucial
segment of the public.7 So we the public are choosing, albeit for what
may be largely unconscious reasons, the candidate whom we have
ourselves largely constructed. Some would see the role of the media
as crucial in that process of construction, although again there is a
debate to be had about whether we get the media we deserve. Do the
media simply articulate public emotion, or shape it?
24 Leaders

LEADING BY EXAMPLE
Let’s continue to test the view that neither the media nor leaders
actually create their publics, but simply refect them. Is this true at
moments of crisis, when there may be clear choices available to lead-
ers about how to lead? There are always different structures of feel-
ing8 present in the pool of public emotion, and at times of acute
disturbance and uncertainty when leaders are looked to for guidance
they may be able to choose which of these to express and support.
After a major terrorist attack, for example, there is grief, fear, rage and
resolve, and leaders’ choice of language in the aftermath shapes and
modulates some of these feelings more than others, with differing
consequences on a number of fronts, especially in relation to social
cohesion and to support for counter-terrorism policies.Two days after
77 terrorist murders in Oslo and on the island of Utoya in Norway
in July 2011, the then Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg in
a national memorial address spoke powerfully about the victims, and
then struck a remarkably positive note of optimistic resolve.

Amidst all this tragedy, I am proud to live in a country that has

managed to hold its head up high at a critical time. I have been
impressed by the dignity, compassion and resolve I have met. We
are a small country, but a proud people. We are still shocked by
what has happened, but we will never give up our values. Our
response is more democracy, more openness, and more human-
ity. But never naïvety. No one has said it better than the Labour
Youth League girl who was interviewed by CNN:‘If one man can
create that much hate, you can only imagine how much love we
as a togetherness can create’.9

We can compare this with the quotations at the start of this chapter,
a few of the many statements made by the Rodrigo Duterte about
the ongoing crisis of massive drug use in his country, the Philip-
pines. The contrast between these two leaders demonstrates the fun-
damental role of public emotion in shaping leadership. Neither set
 Leaders 25

of statements could conceivably have been made by a national leader

in the other country. So something about Norwegian culture and its
shaping of the psychology of the Norwegian public produced the
Stoltenberg statement, while making it impossible for the Duterte
statements to have been uttered in Norway. Nor could Duterte’s vio-
lence have been released amongst the Philippino public without
their substantial collusion. In fact, with his reputation and style as a
political leader already established from years as a mayor, he received
16.6 million votes, 39% of the votes cast, in his victory in the presi-
dential election of 2016.
However these examples also indicate the role of individual lead-
ers in giving voice to reserves of particular feeling at particular times.
There are politicians in Norway who after Utoya would have spoken
in a different tone from that adopted by Stoltenberg. While subscrib-
ing to the general horror at this atrocity, the anti-immigration Nor-
wegian Progress Party had a different version of the resolution not to
be led into losing its values: it affrmed the importance of retaining its
policy priorities.And of course there are many in the Philippines who
speak differently from Duterte on how to deal with the drug problem,
including Benigno Aquino III, who lost the presidency to Duterte.
Stoltenberg’s speech had a strong effect on the Norwegian public,
who rallied around his words, and his approval ratings improved
considerably.This was not a long-term effect, but the speech seemed
to play a major role in containing public feeling during a critical
period. However, the diffculty for national leaders is that national
publics are emotionally diverse, and fnding an appropriate response
for all the feelings that may be present in the public at the time is an
impossible task. Still, good emotional governance requires as wide a
containing response as possible.The speech did not address the fear
and the rage which many Norwegians must have been feeling, even
if they did so against their better judgment. The Oslo/Utoya attack
was a major assault on the sense of safety, and on the dignity of Nor-
way as peaceable and cohesive country.The prime minister’s speech
tended to idealise the Norwegian public as extraordinarily resolute,
leaving little space for anything more complicated or ambivalent
26 Leaders

to be expressed. It followed a claim that this was not naïve with a

statement that could be seen as naïve. All this may explain why its
unifying effect was short-lived. Most people urgently wanted to
regain the experience of safety and dignity, and Stoltenberg’s words
offered a noble way towards that. As such they offered some con-
tainment of the shock and anxiety, in modelling a composed and
resilient response. To speak at all at such a time must be extremely
hard, and this was a deeply felt and eloquent speech. It would be
unrealistic to expect one speech to give voice to all reactions to the
killings. In the longer run, however, a more variegated picture of
the Norwegian public would need to be presented if the polarising
forces which had given rise to the attacks were to be more compre-
hensively managed and contained.
Duterte also must have ‘struck a chord’, though in the opposite
of a containing way. How can a national presidential candidate brag
of murdering people, and then be elected? The Philippines does not
only have a drug problem; it also has a major terrorism problem. In
the year before Duterte’s election as president, several groups with
allegiance to or similar aims as ISIS were involved in bombings, burn-
ing of villages, extortion, kidnappings and beheadings. The police
have been unable to deal with the problem, so the army was continu-
ously deployed against the terrorist paramilitaries, who were espe-
cially strong in the region Duterte came from. Later, in 2017, Islamist
fghters actually took control of a city in the south of the country, and
a military battle involving nearly a thousand deaths was necessary
to reclaim it. The country’s politics for most of its history have been
turbulent and bloody, and the thousands of extra-judicial killings in
Duterte’s war on drugs are integral to its violent history. This is the
kind of situation where one would expect emotional capital to be
at very low levels, with the sense of safety seriously depleted, and
dignity minimal except in privileged strata of the population. In that
context, it is plausible that a population habituated to violence, yet
also desperate to escape it, might turn to a violent leader promising
to demolish one key part of the ruin that is their society. Potentials for
(often sexualised) violence therefore awaited the arrival of a Duterte,
 Leaders 27

though his particular character was perhaps also necessary to break

the taboo on a president openly glorifying and promising violence.
At the moments of potential fux occasioned by an election, it is
very possible for an incumbent to be replaced by a very different
leader, perhaps quite suddenly. This reminds us that a public is never
monolithic – there are bodies of feeling present in it other than that
expressed in the current regime, such that given the availability of a
potential leader with a different emotional appeal and an effective
way of communicating it, one of these other structures of feeling
may take hold of government. So while leaders must work within
the psychological limits of their publics, they can play crucial roles
in the complex processes which bring about switches of government
from one emotional base to another, by mobilising a particular con-
stituency of feeling, a particular segment of the emotional public. As
was suggested in the previous chapter, the ‘leave’ campaigners in the
UK’s 2016 ‘Brexit’ referendum were able to do this, by an articulation
of anxieties about the loss of British identity or its dignity, and thus
overturning a long-standing (if narrow) majority of public sentiment
in favour of remaining in Europe.
So we should not overlook the active role of the leader in making
history. Leaders are not only chosen by the public to act out the col-
lective will, and it would be misleading for us to rest with a simple
assertion that therefore we get the leaders we deserve. A national
public is a hugely complex phenomenon, psychologically, so much
so that to speak of a ‘national psyche’ is bound to be a major simpli-
fcation. Many different structures of feeling within it are available
for mobilisation, and through their words, images and deeds some
political leaders will, deliberately or not, be working to identify and
bring some of those structures to the surface and to foreground or
amplify some feelings rather than others. So we have come to the
overall conclusion that publics and leaders make each other; there
are endless complex interactions involving expressed feelings and
unconscious phantasies amongst the public, their representations in
mainstream and social media, the internal worlds (the motives and
perceptions) of political leaders at all levels, and the external world
28 Leaders

demands of economic life, diplomacy, and so on. While the default

position in psychoanalysis is more towards seeing people as respon-
sible for managing their own feelings, perhaps in the political context
we should give a little more emphasis to the opportunities that lead-
ers have to infuence how their publics do this, and to help build up
emotional capital.

LEADING INTO BATTLE

This infuence of leadership may be most clear, and most consequential,
in some confict situations, especially those of potential violence,
military or other. Alongside the classical non-psychological causes of
inter- and intranational conficts (such as who governs a territory and
its people, or has access to its resources), there are the psychosocial
processes by which our internal needs and anxieties fasten themselves
onto some aspects of the confict and rigidify the minds of those
involved.The Israeli psychologist Daniel Bar-Tal (2013) has developed
the concept of ‘confictive ethos’ to describe a situation in which,
whatever is objectively at stake in the confict, the parties involved
have come to experience it in certain ways. For example, they see
it as fundamental to their identity, and as a zero-sum affair, such that
any beneft to their enemy must be a loss to themselves. Those and
other related perceptions lock them into pursuit of the confict,
and paradoxically enable them to bear it carrying on, so that it then
becomes intractable. In a different theoretical language,Vamik Volkan,
through many studies of conficts around the world, and the roles
of leaders within them, has written about how a process of ‘large
group regression’ can take place, involving the majority of people in
a society and resulting in the intractability which Bar-Tal describes.
This is most likely to happen when a leader emerges whose own
personality is dominated by a malignant narcissism, and who encour-
ages large sections of the public into regressed states of mind in which
the world is grossly simplifed. The large group’s identity (typically
that of a ‘nation’) is idealised, and the process of splitting, on which
that idealisation depends, also produces demonised enemies, and a
 Leaders 29

number of other adverse effects. A large group is vulnerable to this

process, says Volkan, when it is unable to process and tolerate the level
of anxiety to which its members are subject. In terms of the ideas
which are outlined in this book, this would mean that an insuffcient
experience of safety and/or dignity has raised levels of anxiety to
a point at which the group will seek a defensive response. This is
offered by a leader who promises safety and dignity, linked in more
toxic cases to an image of a purifed national community, of which
more below.

THE ‘POPULIST’ PHENOMENON

Much discussion of political leadership around the world in recent
years has focussed on the concept of ‘populism’.Typically this involves
a charismatic leader who seeks power on the basis of offering an end
to politics as we know it. This leader is presented as of a new type,
either because s/he is not a professional politician, or is one who
somehow claims exclusively to know and understand the ‘people’ and
promises to champion them against the political ‘establishment’, the
‘elite’ who have been in power for so long and achieved so little.There
is an overlap with the much older category of ‘strong man’ leader, the
protecting father who is not a populist in today’s sense but in whom
the ‘people’ have a confdence that transcends their broken trust in
political institutions and democratic process.
Not all forms of contemporary populism are of the ‘Right’: ‘Left’
populisms can and do occur, as the era of Chavez and Maduro in Ven-
ezuela can be seen to illustrate, and perhaps also the 2016 electoral
campaigns of Corbyn and Sanders in the UK and US respectively,
though neither of these posed a sharp ‘us the people vs. the elite’
dichotomy. Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain are seen by some
as examples of ‘Left’ populism, while the Five Star Movement (M5S)
in Italy defes placing on that axis (which as we have noted is of lim-
ited usefulness in describing politics today). Leftist populism can be
seen as at least partially adhering to the principles of safety and dig-
nity, though in different ways to Rightist versions: material security
Another random document with
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In his relations to Carleton, at any rate, he seems to have been open
to no reproach. But he tried too many things to be first-rate in
anything; he was not adequate to a great crisis and to heavy
responsibility: and because he was not of the first class, and also
because he had much dramatic instinct, he seems to have had more
eye for present effect than for the root of matters. He was educated
at Westminster School, and, when he died in 1792, he was buried in
the northern cloister of Westminster Abbey. He was a soldier, a
politician, a dramatist, and a man of society. He entered the army in
1740, again two years before Carleton’s military service began. He
became so involved in debt that he had to sell his commission. He
rejoined the army in 1756, and in 1762 he distinguished himself in
Portugal, where the English supported the Portuguese against Spain
and France. A few years later, however, in 1769, Junius referred to
him as ‘not very conspicuous in his profession’.[132] He went into the
House of Commons in 1761 as member for Midhurst. In 1768,
through the influence of his father-in-law, Lord Derby, he became
member for Preston, and, in connexion with his election, was
attacked by Junius for corruption and also for his gambling
propensities. As a politician he was, before he went to America,
more or less of a free-lance. He spoke on foreign and Indian
questions, and in 1773 made a speech in the House of Commons,
attacking Clive. After the catastrophe at Saratoga, and his return to
England, he threw in his lot with the Whigs, having been befriended
by Fox and his followers; he became Commander-in-Chief in Ireland
under Rockingham; and in 1787 he managed the impeachment of
Warren Hastings. Before the American war broke out, he produced
in 1774 a play called The Maid of the Oaks, of which Horace Walpole
wrote: ‘There is a new puppet show at Drury Lane as fine as scenes
can make it, called The Maid of the Oaks, and as dull as the author
could not help making it.’[133] At a later date, however, Walpole had
to confess that ‘General Burgoyne has written the best modern
comedy’.[134] This was The Heiress, which was brought out in the
beginning of 1786, and achieved a great success. Walpole had no
love for Burgoyne, at any rate at the time when the latter served in
America. ‘You ask the history of Burgoyne the pompous,’ he wrote in
October, 1777,[135] the month in which the surrender at Saratoga
took place; and after describing him as ‘a fortunate gamester’, he
continued, ‘I have heard him speak in Parliament, just as he writes:
for all his speeches were written and laboured, and yet neither in
them nor in his conversation did he ever impress me with an idea of
his having parts.’ Burgoyne’s affectation and mannerism may have
been due to the fact that he was essentially a man of society, as
society was then. He had eloped in early life with Lord Derby’s
daughter, and, like Charles Fox, was a confirmed gambler. The world
of London was his world, and the standard by which he measured
things was not the standard of all time. When he went out in 1777 to
command the expedition from Canada, he was on the flowing tide of
fortune, and the tone of his proclamations gave Walpole cause for
sarcastic comment. ‘Have you read General Burgoyne’s
rhodomontade, in which he almost promises to cross America in a
hop, step, and a jump?’[136] ‘Burgoyne has sent over a manifesto
that if he was to over-run ten provinces would appear too
pompous.’[136] ‘I heard to-day at Richmond that Julius Caesar
Burgonius’s Commentaries are to be published in an Extraordinary
Gazette of three-and-twenty pages in folio to-morrow—a counterpart
to the Iliad in a nutshell.’[136] All these three passages were written
in August, 1777, while Burgoyne’s expedition was proceeding. The
writer of them did not like Burgoyne, and did not like the war in which
Burgoyne was engaged; but, though Burgoyne lent himself to
criticism and lacked the qualities which the time and place
demanded, his story is by no means the story either of a bad soldier
or of a bad man; it is rather the story of a second-rate man set with
inadequate means to solve a problem of first-rate importance.
Having completed his preparations, Burgoyne Burgoyne’s
reached Crown Point on the 26th of June, preparatory advance against
Ticonderoga.
to attacking Ticonderoga. The full control of the
operations had passed into his own hands, for, by Germain’s
instructions, Carleton’s authority was limited by the boundary line of
Canada, and that line was drawn far north of Crown Point and
Ticonderoga, cutting the outlet of Lake Champlain near the point of
land named Point au Fer. The total force amounted to rather over
7,000 men, nearly half of whom were Germans under the command
of Baron Riedesel. The advance was made on both sides of the lake,
the Germans being on the eastern shore, the British on the western
—the side on which were Crown Point and Ticonderoga. The
Americans, too, held positions on both sides of the The American
lake, for, over against the peninsula on which position at
Ticonderoga.
Ticonderoga stood, there jutted out another point of
land, described in Burgoyne’s dispatch as ‘high and circular’, but in
reality rather oblong in form, rising well above the level of the lake
and skirted in part on the land side by a rivulet. It was called Mount
Independence, and was strongly held and fortified. The lake, here
narrowed to a river, is about a quarter of a mile across, and between
Ticonderoga and Mount Independence a bridge had been
constructed, consisting of sunken timber piers connected by floating
timber, the whole being guarded in front by a heavy boom of wood
strengthened by iron rivets and chains.
 MAP TO ILLUSTRATE BURGOYNE’S CAMPAIGN

Reduced from the Map published in ‘A State of the Expedition from Canada as laid before
the House of Commons by Lieutenant-General Burgoyne, London, 1780’

London, published as the Act directs, Feb. 1st 1780, by Wm. Faden, Charing Cross

To face p. 161

The Indian name Ticonderoga signified the confluence of three

waters. At this point the long narrow southern arm of Lake
Champlain, coming in from the south-east, meets the stream which
carries out the waters of Lake George into the third water, the main
lake Champlain. The outlet of Lake George describes a complete
semi-circle, and runs into Lake Champlain due west and east. The
direct route therefore from Lake Champlain to Lake George runs well
to the west of and inside the peninsula of Ticonderoga, cutting the
semi-circular stream without touching the peninsula. In this consisted
the weakness of the American position: unless the works were
extended further afield than they had men to hold them, part of the
attacking force could pass them by and invest Ticonderoga on the
southern as well as on the northern side, blocking retreat by the line
of Lake George. So it happened when Burgoyne’s army came on the
scene.
After three days’ stay at Crown Point to bring up all Burgoyne’s
his forces, the general on the 30th of June moved operations against
Ticonderoga.
forward his leading corps on either side of the lake,
and on the next day the whole army followed. On the 2nd of July the
Americans were reported to have abandoned the post which
guarded the bridge over the river from Lake George, to the west of
Ticonderoga, where saw-mills stood and which was the starting-point
of the ‘carrying place’ from Lake Champlain to Lake George. They
abandoned it, in order to concentrate their strength against the
English advance on the north-west. Burgoyne immediately moved
forward his troops and, driving the enemy back, on the night of the
2nd occupied the high ground on the west which commanded the
communications with Lake George, and thereby cut off the possibility
of retreat in that direction. On the 3rd and 4th the attacking forces
drew nearer to the two beleaguered forts, in spite of cannonade; and
on the night of the 4th, a party of light infantry occupied a height
called Sugar Hill, which stood on the southern bank of the outlet from
Lake George, in the angle between that stream and the southern
arm of Lake Champlain, overlooking and commanding both
Ticonderoga and Mount Independence at an estimated distance of
about 1,400 and 1,500 yards respectively. On the 5th guns were
being brought up to the hill, but, when the morning of The Americans
the 6th came, it was found that the American general, evacuate
position,
their

St. Clair, had carried his troops across by the bridge

from Ticonderoga, and, having evacuated both that post and Mount
Independence, was retreating by land and water.
By land and water Burgoyne’s men followed on the and are followed up
same day, the bridge and boom being broken for the by the English.
gunboats to pass through. At Skenesborough, where the navigation
of Lake Champlain ends, the enemy’s vessels were taken or
destroyed by the British squadron, and the detachment of Americans
who held the fort set fire to it and retreated to Fort Anne. Meanwhile,
diverging to the east in the direction of Castleton on the road to
Connecticut, General Fraser, commanding the van of the troops who
pursued by land, followed hard throughout the 6th upon the
American rearguard; Riedesel came up behind him with supports;
but, by agreement between the two commanders, Fraser, when night
fell, bivouacked three miles in front of his colleague. Early on the 7th
he attacked the Americans, who outnumbered his own troops, near a
place named Huberton, and was on the point of being beaten back
when the arrival of Riedesel converted a repulse into a victory. The
colonists were broken, their leader, Colonel Francis, and some 200
of his men were killed, about the same number were taken
prisoners, and a large number of wounded were supposed to have
lost their lives in the woods. Having completed the rout, on the 8th
and 9th Riedesel and Fraser came into touch with the main army at
Skenesborough.
At Skenesborough there was a portage from Lake Fight near Fort
Champlain to Wood Creek,[137] a stream which flows Anne.
into the lake from the south. While boats were being dragged across
from the lake to the river with a view to further advance, the 9th
Regiment was sent on by land to Fort Anne, twelve miles distant in a
due southerly direction. By the evening of the 7th the English drew
near to the fort, and on the following day they were attacked and
hard pressed by a stronger body of Americans. They took up a
position on a hill, and held their ground resolutely, until the whoop of
Indians told that reinforcements were coming up: the Americans then
gave way, and, setting fire to Fort Anne, fell back to Fort Edward.
The English in their turn returned to Skenesborough, in the
neighbourhood of which, on the 9th and 10th of July, the whole army,
excluding the troops required to garrison Ticonderoga, was
concentrated, the line extending eastward from the head of Lake
Champlain towards Castleton.
‘General Burgoyne has taken Ticonderoga, and Result of the
given a new complexion to the aspect of affairs, which operations.
was very wan indeed,’ wrote Horace Walpole, when the news
reached England.[138] So far the operations had been triumphantly
successful. Hardly an attempt had been made by the Americans to
hold their ground at Ticonderoga and Mount Independence, although
months had been spent in strengthening the positions, and the
number of the defenders was variously estimated at from 3,000 to
5,000 men. Great quantities of stores, of boats, of guns had fallen
into British hands: the enemy’s loss on the retreat had been heavy,
and the rapidity with which the retreat had been followed up had
caused widespread alarm. For the moment there seemed nothing to
check the tide of British victory, but time, place, and insufficiency of
numbers gradually told against Burgoyne’s enterprise. He, too, had
suffered some losses, though small when compared with those of
the Americans; and his army, already inadequate in numbers for the
expedition, was further weakened by the necessity of garrisoning
Ticonderoga with some 900 men. He applied to Carleton to supply
the requisite number of soldiers for the garrison from the troops who,
in accordance with the instructions from home, were retained for the
defence of Canada, but Carleton felt himself bound to refuse the
request. It was Germain who had given the orders, and yet the same
man, writing from England in the following September, on receipt of
Burgoyne’s account of the capture of Ticonderoga, stated that he
presumed that the post would be garrisoned from Canada.[139]
Burgoyne’s objective was the Hudson river and The two routes to
Albany. Fort Edward stood on the left or eastern bank the Hudson.
of the Hudson, a little below the point where that river curves to the
south, to flow direct to the Atlantic. It was twenty-six miles distant
from Skenesborough, and due south of that place. The first twelve
miles of the route from Skenesborough lay along Wood Creek, until
Fort Anne was reached, and from Fort Anne to Fort Edward was an
interval of fourteen miles. Three miles short of Fort Edward the road
joined the road to Fort Edward from Fort George, previously known
as Fort William Henry, at the head of Lake George, which was at
much the same distance from Fort Edward as Fort Anne, viz.,
fourteen to sixteen miles. The more obvious route of advance
towards the Hudson from Ticonderoga, and the one originally
contemplated, was along Lake George, and Burgoyne Burgoyne’s line of
was criticized for not taking that line—without good advance.
reason, because the American retreat had already determined the
choice of routes. Having immediately followed the enemy up as far
as Skenesborough, Burgoyne, as he justly pointed out, would have
been unwise to make a retrograde movement in order to adopt the
alternative line of advance by Lake George. Moreover, while the
troops were moving forward from Skenesborough viâ Wood Creek
and Fort Anne, supplies were being forwarded along Lake George in
order to meet him when he reached Fort Edward. But there was a
further reason, which in Burgoyne’s mind made for the His object was to
more easterly of the two routes. His own scheme for threaten the New
England States.
the campaign had inclined to carrying war to the east
into Connecticut and the New England states, in preference to a
direct advance to the Hudson and Albany; and, though his
instructions prevented his carrying out the plan which he preferred,
he might yet, as he advanced, threaten New England, and at the
same time gather supplies from a more promising country than
would be found in the Adirondack region on the west of Lake
George. Thus in a private letter to Germain, which accompanied his
dispatch from Skenesborough, detailing the success of his recent
operations, he wrote: ‘I a little lament that my orders do not give me
the latitude I ventured to propose in my original project for the
campaign, to make a real effort instead of a feint upon New England.
As things have turned out, were I at liberty to march in force
immediately by my left, instead of by my right, I should have little
doubt of subduing before winter the provinces where the rebellion
originated.’ It must be remembered that at this time British troops
were in occupation of Rhode Island, and that Sir William Howe had
originally planned a campaign in New England in 1777, only giving
up the scheme when he found that sufficient reinforcements from
Europe would not be forthcoming.
It was with the object of keeping the New England States in fear of
invasion, or, as he himself phrased it, ‘of giving jealousy to
Connecticut, and keeping in check the whole country called the
Hampshire Grants,’[140] that Burgoyne, while encamped at
Skenesborough, detached Riedesel to occupy Castleton about
fourteen miles to the east. Castleton was an important Riedesel sent to
point, because through it ran a road which connected Castleton.
Skenesborough by land with the shore of Lake Champlain opposite
Ticonderoga and Crown Point. Riedesel was absent for about twelve
days, and in the meantime preparations were pressed forward for a
further advance of the main army, the road to Fort Anne and the
parallel waterway of Wood Creek being cleared of obstructions.
Simultaneous preparations were made at Ticonderoga for forwarding
supplies by Lake George. On the 23rd of July the advanced guard
moved forward to Fort Anne: on the 25th the whole army had
reached that point; on the 29th, the van arrived at Fort Edward,
which the Americans had already evacuated, and on the 30th
Burgoyne arrived at the same place. A large convoy of provisions
sent by Lake George reached the head of that lake by the 29th, Fort
George like Fort Edward having been abandoned by The army arrives at
the enemy, who had carried off their stores. Thus the Fort Edward on the
Hudson river.
end of July found Burgoyne on the Hudson, well on his
way to Albany; the main difficulties of the expedition seemed to be
past; but as a matter of fact the most trying time was yet to come.
His communications were insecure, for he could not spare men to
guard them. His transport was inadequate, and so were his supplies.
Delay in bringing up stores meant time to the Americans to recover
their spirits and gather in his front: he had no tidings from Howe, and
no sure knowledge of St. Leger’s progress. He only knew that at all
hazards he was expected to make his way to Albany.
While he halted at Fort Edward, two untoward The beginning of
incidents took place. The first was a brutal murder by misfortunes.
Murder of Jane
Indians of a young white woman named Jane McCrae, McCrae by the
who had remained behind at or near Fort Edward, Indians.
when the Congress troops fell back before Burgoyne’s advance. The
story went that she was engaged and about to be married to an
officer in Burgoyne’s army. Falling into the hands of the Indians, she
was murdered with purposeless, savage fury, and the tale of the
outrage, embellished with horrors, was spread far and wide through
the land. Colonists hitherto inclined to the loyal cause, felt that their
homes and womenkind would not be safe, if they awaited the coming
of the English and their savage allies: the opponents of England
found additional justification for the stand which they had taken up;
the sympathizers with the American cause in England were given a
new text for denouncing the war; and Burgoyne lost Indian support
by taking steps to prevent a recurrence of such enormities.
The second misfortune which happened—a most grave misfortune
—was an unsuccessful expedition in the direction of Bennington.
Bennington is in the state of Vermont, to the south- The expedition to
east of Fort Edward, lying about twenty-four miles due Bennington.
east of the stretch of the Hudson river, between Saratoga on the
north and the confluence of the Mohawk on the south, which was
known as Stillwater. It is in the forks of the two streams which
combine to form the Hoosick river, a tributary of the Hudson, flowing
into the main river from the east. Burgoyne’s Objects aimed at
information was to the effect, quoting his own words, by the expedition.
that it was ‘the great deposit of corn, flour, and store cattle’, intended
for the use of the Congress troops, which he designed to secure for
his own army in view of the difficulty and delay experienced in
bringing up supplies from Canada. The German general, Riedesel,
seems to have originally suggested such an expedition, from
knowledge gained while he was stationed at Castleton. He was
anxious to obtain horses to mount his men and to carry the baggage;
there was evidence of a considerable Loyalist element in the
population, and little reason to apprehend strong opposition from the
colonial militia. Above all Burgoyne had constantly in his mind the
object of threatening the New England states: and, having by this
time received intelligence that St. Leger was before Fort Stanwix, he
wished to make a diversion to the east, in order to prevent
reinforcements being sent up the Mohawk river to the relief of that
post. The instructions which he issued for the expedition show that
he contemplated that the detached force, if things went well, would
penetrate far beyond Bennington, up to the Connecticut river, and
possibly not rejoin the main army until the latter had reached Albany.
About 500 men, according to his dispatch, were Strength and
detailed for the enterprise, but the number appears to composition
force.
of the

have been larger.[141] It was a mixed body. There was

a strong contingent of Germans, chiefly dismounted dragoons, ill
suited for a cross-country march, and there were also picked
marksmen from the British regiments, Canadians, provincials, and
about 100 Indians. Out of compliment to Riedesel, the command
was given to Colonel Baum, one of his officers, and in Colonel Baum in
selecting German troops for the expedition, Burgoyne command.
marked his appreciation of the good service which those regiments
had rendered in following up the retreat of the Americans from
Ticonderoga. The starting-point was the Batten Kill stream, running
into the Hudson on its eastern side, ten miles lower down than Fort
Edward. From this point to Bennington, by the route which Baum
was finally instructed to take, was a distance of under thirty miles.
The advance guard of Burgoyne’s army had already been moved
down the Hudson to the Batten Kill, and, on the 14th of August, after
Baum had started, they were thrown across the main river a little
higher up under the command of General Fraser, and moved forward
on the western bank as far as Saratoga, with the object of a further
advance to Stillwater in the event of Baum’s expedition proving
successful. The temporary bridge of rafts, however, by which they
had crossed, being carried away, the troops were recalled and
passed back in boats to the eastern side.
Baum started from the Batten Kill early on the morning of the 13th
of August, reached a place called Cambridge in the afternoon of that
day, and on the following day arrived at Sancoick Mill near the
confluence of the two branches of the Hoosick river, about four miles
short of Bennington. There he found that the enemy in front of him
were more numerous than had been anticipated, and he sent back to
Burgoyne for reinforcements. Colonel Breyman, Reinforcements
another German officer, was dispatched to his support sent under Colonel
Breyman.
with nearly 700 men: he started early on the morning
of the 15th, but, owing to the difficulties of the route, and want of
horses and forage, he made slow way, and was far short of Baum
when evening came. On the 16th a number of men, as from the
country side, came to where Baum was encamped: Baum’s force
they were taken to be friends and Loyalists, and made surprised
up.
and cut

their way within his lines. On a sudden, while

beginning to move forward,[142] he found himself attacked on all
sides: the component parts of his little force were separated from
each other, and only the German soldiers held together, fighting
bravely, as long as they had powder left, and then vainly
endeavouring to cut their way out with their swords. The end was
inevitable. The Indians dispersed in the woods: some of the British
contingent with their commander, Captain Frazer, escaped, and so
did a good many of the Canadians and provincials: but Baum was
mortally wounded, and nearly all of his Brunswickers Baum mortally
were killed or captured. On the afternoon of the same wounded.
day, ignorant of what had happened, Breyman’s force was coming
up and was in turn suddenly attacked. Again the men Breyman attacked
fought hard until their ammunition gave out, and and forced to
retreat with heavy
eventually the main body made good their retreat, loss.
though they suffered heavy losses and had to leave
their guns behind. John Stark was the leader of the Americans in
these hard fought engagements.
The immediate result of the fighting was the loss to Consequences of
the English of over 500 men and four guns,[143] and the disaster.
the total failure of the expedition. The ultimate effect was much more
serious. Burgoyne’s small army was still further reduced: his hope of
securing supplies and horses from the surrounding country was
entirely gone; his expectation of Loyalist support, upon which the
English had counted, was shown to be groundless; the chance of
facilitating the main operations by a successful diversion was lost;
the enemy were put in good heart; and such fickle allies as the
Indians were further alienated. The enterprise was subsequently
made the subject of much hostile criticism, and blame was variously
assigned. Burgoyne considered that the failure was due to the fact
that Baum had not taken up a position in the open in accordance
with instructions, to the chance co-operation of bodies of the enemy
who happened to be near, and to undue slowness on Breyman’s
part. The truth seems to have been that the expedition was not badly
conceived, but imperfect knowledge of the country and faulty
intelligence as to the enemy’s strength and movements in this, as in
many similar cases, procured disaster.[144]
Burgoyne’s anxiety as to the future was expressed Burgoyne’s views
in a private letter which he wrote to Germain on the on the situation.
20th of August, accompanying the public dispatch of the same date
in which he reported the failure of the Bennington expedition. He
wrote that, in spite of St. Leger’s victory, Fort Stanwix was holding
out obstinately, that no operation had been taken in his favour, and
that the American forces under Gates in his front had been
strengthened and now outnumbered his own. Only one letter had
reached him from Sir William Howe. That letter was written from New
York on the 17th of July, and in it Howe stated that he had heard of
Burgoyne’s victory at Ticonderoga, adding ‘My intention is for
Pennsylvania, where I expect to meet Washington, but if he goes to
the northward contrary to my expectations and you can keep him at
bay, be assured I shall soon be after him to relieve you’. As has been
already stated, no instructions from Germain had reached Howe on
the subject of Burgoyne and his army, though he had received from
Carleton a copy of Germain’s dispatch of March 26th, 1777, in which
the programme of the expedition from Canada had been detailed.
Situated as Burgoyne was, knowing that further advance would
entail cutting of his communications with Ticonderoga, it is no
wonder that in his letter to Germain he wrote that, had he latitude in
his orders, he would have thought it his duty to remain where he was
encamped opposite Saratoga, or further back at Fort Edward where
his communications would be secure, until events in other quarters
facilitated a forward movement. But his instructions were ‘to force a
junction with Sir William Howe’, or at any rate to make his way to
Albany; and, as he sadly wrote, when the catastrophe was over and
he was a prisoner, ‘The expedition I commanded was evidently
meant at first to be hazarded. Circumstances might require it should
be devoted.’ A very strong man in his position would have taken the
responsibility of temporary retreat, but, good soldier as he was, he
was not a commanding character. He knew the power which
Germain possessed of making and unmaking men, he had before
his eyes the harsh treatment of Carleton, because Carleton had
exercised wise discretion in falling back from Crown Point in the
preceding autumn. His instructions freed him from responsibility if he
went forward, the blame would be his alone if he fell back. The evil
influence of Germain blighted loyal commanders and soldiers in
America. George the Third’s system was working itself out, and the
British Empire was being sacrificed to the ‘King’s Friends’.
The first necessity was to bring up supplies from Lake George for
the further advance, enough to last for twenty-five to thirty days,
inasmuch as crossing the Hudson and moving south meant the loss
of communication with Canada. This Burgoyne anticipated, and his
apprehensions proved true. Shortly after he crossed the Hudson and
began his southward march, a force of colonists, Burgoyne’s
assembling at Skenesborough, on the 18th of communications attacked by the
September attacked the British garrisons at colonists.
Ticonderoga and Mount Independence. They were
repulsed after four or five days’ fighting, but not until they had taken
outposts at the saw-mills, Mount Hope, and Sugar Hill, captured
three companies of British soldiers, and taken or destroyed a large
amount of stores and a number of boats. Retreating up Lake
George, they attacked a detachment on an island in the lake named
Diamond Island and, though they were again beaten off, their
operations served the purpose of making Burgoyne’s
communications utterly insecure.[145]
From the 16th of August to the 13th of September, the British army
remained on the eastern bank of the Hudson over against Saratoga.
The reinforcements which joined them apparently amounted to only
300 men. News seems to have reached the army, before they
moved onward, that St. Leger was retreating from Fort Stanwix, so
that hope of co-operation in the direction of the Mohawk river was at
an end; on the other hand there was a possibility that St. Leger’s
men, brought down the St. Lawrence and up Lake Champlain and
Lake George, might be able to join the main force. It is not clear what
was the exact number of men who crossed the Hudson under
Burgoyne’s command. According to the evidence given at the
subsequent Parliamentary inquiry, the regulars, British and German,
were rather short of 5,000 men, but, if the Canadians and provincials
were included, the total fighting force must have reached 6,000.
From Fort Edward to Albany is a distance of over forty miles and to
the confluence of the Mohawk river about thirty-four; but Burgoyne
was already encamped ten miles south of Fort Edward and the
Americans, who had previously fallen back to what was known as
the Half Moon at the mouth of the Mohawk river, after The Americans
the British defeat at Sancoick Mills and the relief of under Gates take
up a position at
Fort Stanwix, moved up the Hudson a little way above Bemus’ Heights.
Stillwater, and took up a strong position on high
ground called Bemus’ Heights, where they were within ten miles’
distance of the point where Burgoyne crossed the river.
General Philip Schuyler had been in command of the Congress
troops on the side of Canada. He was a man of the highest
character, and apparently a perfectly competent soldier, whose
Fabian tactics were beginning to achieve success when he was
superseded. After the abandonment of Ticonderoga and the rout
which followed, the tide of public opinion set against him—without
any adequate reason. The New Englanders were jealous of a
general from New York state; and, under a resolution of Congress,
Schuyler was in the middle of August replaced by Horatio Gates, a
godson of Horace Walpole, who, like Richard Montgomery, had been
born in the United Kingdom and had served in the British army,
having been badly wounded in Braddock’s disastrous expedition.
Gates, who in the previous year had commanded the garrison at
Ticonderoga, was a self-seeking, intriguing man. His subsequent
disloyalty to Washington, and his defeat at Camden, clouded what
reputation he gained through receiving Burgoyne’s surrender. When
he took over the command of the troops opposing Burgoyne, his task
was comparatively easy. He had good men with him, among others
Arnold, who had returned from the march to relieve Fort Stanwix and
between whom and Gates there was no love lost, he had also Daniel
Morgan and Lincoln; while the army under their command had
received an accession to its numbers in consequence of Howe
having moved off from New York to Philadelphia. The Americans
now largely outnumbered Burgoyne’s force, and behind them, lower
down the Hudson, the Highlands were held against a possible
movement on the part of Clinton, who commanded the troops left
behind at New York when Howe sailed for Chesapeake Bay.
About six miles below Fort Edward, between that Burgoyne crosses
fort and the Batten Kill stream, at a place named Fort the Hudson and
advances South.
Miller, there were rapids in the Hudson, where a
portage was necessary for the boats descending the river; below it
navigation was unimpeded, and the stores and baggage of the army
could be carried by water. A bridge of boats was thrown over the
river about half a mile above the Batten Kill, and by this bridge the
whole army crossed the Hudson on the 13th and 14th of September
from the eastern to the western shore. Burgoyne was subsequently
criticized for crossing, but the criticism had no sound foundation. If
he was to reach Albany at all, he must cross the river at some point
or other, and the further he went down stream the more difficult the
crossing was likely to be. Moreover the high road ran along the
western bank, while on the opposite shore swamp and mountain
would have made it impossible at certain points to march close to the
river bank, and the army would therefore have been separated from
the boats. On the western side of the Hudson the country, through
which the troops advanced, was wooded and broken, the road and
bridges over the intervening creeks had been cut up by the enemy,
and progress was slow; but by the 17th less than four miles
intervened between the two armies. On the 18th there was
skirmishing, while the British force were repairing bridges and cutting
a way through the bush: and on the 19th a general action took place.
The British army advanced in three divisions. On the Action of
right under General Fraser were the 24th Regiment, September 19.
the light infantry and the grenadiers, accompanied by Indian and
Canadian scouts and supported by some German troops under
Colonel Breyman. The centre column, entirely composed of British
regiments, was under Burgoyne’s immediate command. The left
wing was in charge of Riedesel, and included the main body of the
German soldiers with most of the artillery. The left marched along the
high road on the lowland following the course of the river, and one
British regiment, the 47th, on the bank of the river, guarded the boats
which carried the stores. There was a deep ravine between the
armies, and Fraser’s division made a wide circuit to the right in order
to keep on the high ground. The movement was successfully carried
out, and Fraser established himself in a strong position while the
centre column moved forward, crossed the ravine, formed on the
other side, and bearing to the right became engaged with the enemy.
The centre of the battle was a clearing in the woods, where there
was a homestead known as Freeman’s farm; from this farm the
Americans had molested Burgoyne’s advance, and being dislodged
by artillery fell back into the cover behind. Their intention had been to
turn the British right, but, finding that Fraser was too strongly posted,
they counter-marched and placed their full force in front of the centre
column. Here the battle was fought, and for four hours, from three
o’clock in the afternoon till seven, the brunt of the fighting fell upon
three British regiments, the 20th, the 21st and the 62nd, a fourth
regiment, the 9th, being held in reserve. Some help came from
Fraser’s men, but the safety of the army depended upon his holding
his ground on the right, so that he could not bring up his whole
division in support of the centre. Constantly reinforced and covered
by the woods, the Americans, led by Arnold, who commanded the
left wing of their army, pressed hard upon the fighting regiments,
until, late in the day, Riedesel, having pushed forward his troops
along the line of the river, wheeled them sharp to the right and struck
in on the flank. This decided the battle, and, as darkness fell, the
forces of the Congress drew off, leaving Burgoyne’s army in
possession of the field.
The fight was won, but, as Burgoyne wrote in his Result of the fight—
subsequent dispatch, ‘it was soon found that no fruits, Burgoyne’s losses.
honour excepted, were attained by the preceding victory.’ He had
lost about 500 men, the 62nd Regiment having especially suffered,
and though the losses of the Americans had possibly been heavier,
reinforcements were available for them and their position grew
stronger and stronger. On the day after the battle the English moved
forward slightly until they were almost within cannon shot of their
enemies, at a distance of about half a mile, and in turn threw up
entrenchments. On the 21st Burgoyne received a message from
Clinton, dated the 12th, to the effect that in about ten Message from
days’ time he intended to move up the Hudson and Clinton.
attack the American forts in the Highlands. Burgoyne sent back
word, urging the necessity of some such operation in his favour in
order to divert part of the American force which was barring his way,
and he stated that he would hold his ground if possible, till the 12th
of October. The days went on: provisions began to run Scarcity of
short: on the 3rd of October it was found necessary to provisions.
reduce the soldiers’ rations: and, some movement having become
inevitable, Burgoyne determined on the 7th to make a Further movement
reconnaissance on the enemy’s left—the side furthest necessary.
removed from the Hudson, in order definitely to ascertain whether
there was a possibility of either forcing a passage or at any rate so
far dislodging the enemy as to enable the British army to retreat
unmolested. At the same time it was hoped that under cover of the
reconnaissance, forage, badly needed, might be collected for the
horses.
Only about 1,500 regular soldiers were available for Action of October
the movement, with ten pieces of artillery: and, small 7.
as the number was, hardly enough men were left behind to guard the
lines. The detachment advanced, and was formed within about
three-quarters of a mile of the enemy’s left, waiting for some of the
marksmen with Canadians and Indians to make a detour through the
woods still further to the right and take the enemy in the rear. On a
sudden the Americans in superior numbers made a determined
attack on the left wing of the little force, where were the grenadiers
and a German regiment. At the same time the flank of the right wing
was in imminent danger of being turned: and, while the troops on this
side were being drawn back and reformed in order to secure the
retreat, the Americans redoubled the attack on the grenadiers and
the Germans. The German regiment gave way, the grenadiers were
overpowered, and complete disaster was averted only by the stanch
fighting of the gunners and by bringing up supports The English heavily
from the right under General Fraser who, in carrying defeated and their
corps partly taken.
out the movement, was mortally wounded. Hard
pressed and heavily defeated, leaving six guns behind them, the
force regained their lines, but the Americans, who fought with
conspicuous boldness and resolution, followed on, broke through the
entrenchments, and eventually stormed the post in the rear of the
right which was held by Colonel Breyman and the scanty German
reserve. The position was taken, but night came on, Arnold who had
led the fight was wounded, and the Congress troops drew off,
content with the success which they had already gained. Under
cover of the same night Burgoyne fell back, and took up a new
position on high ground in the rear of his former camp.[146]
Up to this point in the campaign General Burgoyne may have
made mistakes, but at any rate he had not shown himself to be
either irresolute or incompetent. He had been sent to achieve the
impossible: he had loyally attempted to carry out his instructions,
even when opposed to his own views; and, bearing in mind the small
number of his troops and the difficulty of securing provisions and
supplies, it is not easy to find ground for criticism Burgoyne’s fatal
either in his delays or in his fighting. But now his duty delay.
was clear, to retreat at once on Fort Edward and save the remnant of
the expedition. Every hour was of importance, for every hour
numbers greater than his own, emboldened by success, were
gathering round him and threatening his retreat. The position in
which he was placed after the battle of the 7th of October was no
doubt one of great difficulty, but at any rate there was only one
practical course to be taken, and a firm resolute man, intent only on
the public good, would have taken it at once. Burgoyne acted
otherwise, his movements were leisurely and almost invited the final
catastrophe. Reading the account of what took place, and his own
defence, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that the personal
element was strong in him, that there was a theatrical strain in his
character, and that he was concerned with public opinion and effect,
instead of simply gripping the nettle in manful fashion, neglecting no
chance, and fighting out hard to the last.[147]
All day on the 8th the army remained in their new position offering
battle, and burying General Fraser with the honour due to a brave
and much loved man, while parties of the enemy crossed the
Hudson, and fired on the British camp from the opposite side. A day
was lost, the Americans were beginning to turn the Beginning of the
right or inland flank, and on the night of the 8th the retreat.
retreat began, the wounded being left behind in hospital. The
weather was bad, the baggage encumbered the army, it was
necessary to guard the boats on the river, yet the distance to be
traversed to Fort Edward was less than twenty miles and a hurried
retreat would have saved the army. When the morning of the 9th
came, however, Burgoyne called a halt for his wearied men, and
through the greater part of that day no further movement was made.
Late in the afternoon the march was resumed, when darkness came,
the troops passed through Saratoga and crossed the Fish Kill
stream, and on the morning of the 10th the artillery was brought
over. Meanwhile the Americans had pressed forward up the eastern
bank of the Hudson, and, when the British troops neared Saratoga,
they found a party of the enemy already in front of them on the
western side, who were beginning to throw up entrenchments, but
withdrew as the British came up, leaving the road still open for
retreat. On the 10th some troops were sent forward by Burgoyne to
hold the ford opposite Fort Edward and to cover the work of repairing
the bridges, but were recalled when the main American force
attacked the rear of the British army on the line of the Fish Kill. The
boats could now no longer be adequately defended Loss of the boats.
against the American guns, the provisions were taken
out of them, and they drifted into the enemy’s hands. Burgoyne’s
irresolution.