Leadership and Thinking

One of the things that I enjoy about Orrin Woodward is the depth of his thinking. He reads and writes in so many diverse areas like Faith, Economics, Leadership, Personal Development, Political Theory, Biographies, History, and others.  His depth of understanding is displayed in his new book RESOLVED: 13 Resolutions For LIFE. The book makes a person think about life. It simply cannot be read at one sitting.

Orrin writes many articles on these subjects. I have read this particular article several times. I wonder how many other top leaders are willing to read hundreds of books per year to make a difference? Here are a couple of paragraphs from the article. Thank you Orrin Woodward for making your life count so we can all have LIFE!

William Lecky, an English historian, wrote a book called Democracy and Liberty just before the turn of the twentieth century. In it, he describes the malevolent effects against personal liberty of a full-blown democracy. Although Lecky was criticized for his stand, today, he looks like a prophet. America is displaying all the signs of decay and decline predicted in Lecky's great work. He shared his thoughts on the close alignment of democracy and despotism:

The American Constitution, indeed, was framed by men who had for the most part the strongest sense of the dangers of democracy. The school of American thought which was represented in a great degree by Washington and John Adams, and still more emphatically by Gouvemeur Morris and Alexander Hamilton ; which inspired the Federalist and was embodied in the Federalist party, was utterly opposed to the schools of Rousseau, of Paine, and even of Jefferson, and it has largely guided American policy to the present hour. It did not prevent America from becoming a democracy, but it framed a form of government under which the power of the democracy was broken and divided, restricted to a much smaller sphere, and attended with far less disastrous results than in most European countries. Hamilton, who was probably the greatest political thinker America has produced, was, in the essentials of his political thought, quite as conservative as Burke, and he never concealed his preference for monarchical institutions. Democratic government, he believed, must end in despotism, and be in the meantime destructive to public morality and to the security of private property. . .