James MacGregor Burns

James MacGregor Burns (1918 to 2014) was an American historian and political scientist, presidential biographer and authority on leadership studies. He taught at Williams College for nearly forty years after a doctorate in political science at Harvard, served as president of the American Political Science Association, and later was a distinguished leadership scholar at the University of Maryland, where an academy of leadership bears his name. His book Leadership (1978) is credited with founding the field of leadership studies and distinguished transactional leadership, built on exchange between leader and follower, from transformational leadership, in which leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality. He shifted attention from the traits of great men to the interaction of leaders and their constituencies. He also criticised the American system of checks and balances in works such as The Deadlock of Democracy, and won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1971 for Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom.