Tony blair biography pdf download

Sign up Log in. Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. Metropolitan Museum Cleveland Museum of Art. Internet Arcade Console Living Room. Open Library American Libraries. Search the Wayback Machine Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. Sign up for free Log in. A journey : my political life Bookreader Item Preview. Sign up Log in.

Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. Metropolitan Museum Cleveland Museum of Art. Internet Arcade Console Living Room. Open Library American Libraries. Search the Wayback Machine Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. A Journey: My Political Life A life in words: my writing journey Pages ; The journey home: my life in pinstripes My Journey 9 Pages In real life: my journey to a pixelated world Pages My American Journey ; My Southern Journey Pages My Journey to Lhasa Pages My Spiritual Journey ; Sometimes leadership serves good purposes, sometimes bad; but whether the end is benign or evil, great leaders are those men and women who leave their personal stamp on history.

Now, the very concept of leadership implies the proposition that individuals can make a difference. This proposition has never been universally accepted. From classical times to the present day, eminent thinkers have regarded individuals as no more than the agents and pawns of larger forces, whether the gods and goddesses of the ancient world or, in the modern era, race, class, nation, the dialectic, the will of the people, the spirit of the times, history itself.

Against such forces, the individual dwindles into insignificance. So contends the thesis of historical determinism. Why, Tolstoy asked, did millions of men in the Napoleonic Wars, denying their human feelings and their common sense, move back and forth across Europe slaughtering their fellows? Marxism is the determinism of class. Nazism the determinism of race.

But the idea of men and women as the slaves of history runs athwart the deepest human instincts. Rigid determinism abolishes the idea of human freedom—the assumption of free choice that underlies every move we make, every word we speak, every thought we think. It abolishes the idea of human responsibility, since it is manifestly unfair to reward or punish people for actions that are by definition beyond their control.

No one can live consistently by any deterministic creed. The Marxist states prove this themselves by their extreme susceptibility to the cult of leadership. More than that, history refutes the idea that individuals make no difference. Suppose, in addition, that Lenin had died of typhus in Siberia in and that Hitler had been killed on the western front in What would the twentieth century have looked like now?

For better or for worse, individuals do make a difference. Individuals of genius show the way, and set the patterns, which common people then adopt and follow. In the long run, leaders in thought may well make the greater difference to the world. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

The power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. It is at their hands that new thought gets its translation into the crude language of deeds. Leaders in action—the leaders portrayed in this series—have to be effective in their own time. And they cannot be effective by themselves. They must act in response to the rhythms of their age.

I must follow them. They seize on the opportunities of their time, the hopes, fears, frustrations, crises, potentialities.

Tony blair biography pdf download

They succeed when events have prepared the way for them, when the community is awaiting to be aroused, when they can provide the clarifying and organizing ideas. Leadership completes the circuit between the individual and the mass and thereby alters history. It may alter history for better or for worse. They have also been vital in such gains as humanity has made in individual freedom, religious and racial tolerance, social justice, and respect for human rights.

There is no sure way to tell in advance who is going to lead for good and who for evil. But a glance at the gallery of men and women in Modern World Leaders suggests some useful tests. One test is this: Do leaders lead by force or by persuasion? By command or by consent? Through most of history leadership was exercised by the divine right of authority.

The duty of followers was to defer and to obey. More often, absolutism nourished the passion for domination, land, gold, and conquest and resulted in tyranny. The great revolution of modern times has been the revolution of equality. The revolution of equality has had two contrary effects on the nature of leadership. For equality, as Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out in his great study Democracy in America, might mean equality in servitude as well as equality in freedom.

It is easy to issue commands and enforce them by the rope and the stake, the concentration camp and the gulag. It is much harder to use argument and achievement to overcome opposition and win consent. The Founding Fathers of the United States understood the difficulty. It required leaders to be responsive to popular concerns, and it required followers to be active and informed participants in the process.

Democracy does not eliminate emotion from politics; sometimes it fosters demagoguery; but it is confident that, as the greatest of democratic leaders put it, you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. It measures leadership by results and retires those who overreach or falter or fail. It is true that in the long run despots are measured by results too.

But they can postpone the day of judgment, sometimes indefinitely, and in the meantime they can do infinite harm. It is also true that democracy is no guarantee of virtue and intelligence in government, for the voice of the people is not necessarily the voice of God. But democracy, by assuring the right of opposition, offers built-in resistance to the evils inherent in absolutism.

When their goal is the abolition of slavery, the liberation of women, the enlargement of opportunity for the poor and powerless, the extension of equal rights to racial minorities, the defense of the freedoms of expression and opposition, it is likely that their leadership will increase the sum of human liberty and welfare. Leaders have done great harm to the world.

They have also conferred great benefits. You will find both sorts in this series. Leaders are not demigods; they put on their trousers one leg after another just like ordinary mortals. No leader is infallible, and every leader needs to be reminded of this at regular intervals. Irreverence irritates leaders but is their salvation. Unquestioning submission corrupts leaders and demeans followers.

Making a cult of a leader is always a mistake. Fortunately hero worship generates its own antidote. For great leaders attest to the reality of human freedom against the supposed inevitabilities of history. And they attest to the wisdom and power that may lie within the most unlikely of us, which is why Abraham Lincoln remains the supreme example of great leadership.

A great leader, said Emerson, exhibits new possibilities to all humanity. Great men exist that there may be greater men. The annual G8 summit meeting among the eight leading industrialized nations was starting in Gleneagles, Scotland. Blair hoped to find some common ground with other nations about global climate change and African poverty.

He was meeting with the Chinese prime minister when disturbing reports from London began to arrive. There had been some kind of explosion in the subway, or tube as it is called in London. Early information indicated that there may have been one or more power surges in the grid that supplied the underground trains. Confusion over the cause of the explosion continued for several hours before it became clear that there had been four explosions and that they were likely terrorist acts.

During this time, Blair continued with his scheduled meetings and was updated regularly. Shortly after noon, a grim-faced Blair gave an initial statement from Gleneagles. There are, obviously, casualties, both people that have died and people seriously injured. And our thoughts and prayers, of course, are with the victims and their families.

There had been three explosions in the tube, and one destroyed a double-decker bus. The three tube explosions had occurred within less than a minute of each other, and the bus was blown up about an hour later. Rescue efforts by the police and firefighters proceeded at top speed as many victims were trapped far underground in the tube tunnels.

Meanwhile, Blair informed Bush and the other leaders and asked them to proceed with the summit while he returned to London to meet with his emergency team. They agreed and issued a joint statement about the bombings.