In contemporary discourse hubris is usually adduced as a dangerous state of mind, a form of pride or over-confidence which leads to downfall. This has its origins in the view once conventional among classicists that for ancient Greeks hybris was an arrogant disposition, offending the gods by exceeding mortal limits. This did not accommodate the fact that in many Greek states hybris was the term for a serious criminal offence, usually involving violence or sexual abuse. My Hybris (1992) successfully located the concept within the category of ‘honour’, and it is now widely agreed that hybris involved both arrogance and dishonouring behaviour towards others. Disagreement, however, persists over the balance to be struck between the two. This chapter reviews the debate, partially revises my earlier account (which underplayed the dispositional element) and insists that other-directed behaviour is equally essential to the concept. Using case studies from Sophocles and Herodotus, it concludes by restating the crucial distinction between hybris and related, but not necessarily pejorative, expressions such as pride or ‘thinking big/unmortal’ thoughts.

CEO hubris is a vital construct in research on the psychology of organisational decision-makers. Hubristic CEOs influence strategic decisions, from acquisitions to product and geographic market entry. To date, research has mainly focused on how and when CEO hubris impacts CEOs and their organisations. I offer a framework in which CEOs predisposed to inflated self-evaluation engage in behavioural processes that yield overconfident strategic decisions associated with hubris. The framework reviews and summarises how such evaluations stem from CEOs’ psychological and social circumstances. It then links inflated self-evaluation to the three drivers of over-confidence that are associated with hubris: over-estimation, or the tendency to exaggerate prospective outcomes; over-placement, or the tendency to rank one’s capabilities and situation ahead of others; and over-precision, or the tendency to issue unduly bounded or narrow forecasts which tend to be inaccurate. The framework is illustrated by the case study of Elizabeth Holmes, formerly founder and CEO of Theranos, who was lauded as a celebrity entrepreneur before being convicted of crimes associated with her hubris.

In this chapter, we are concerned with ordinary hubris – what social and personality psychologists empirically study under the heading of self-enhancement. This umbrella term refers to both (a) the motive to augment or protect the positivity of the self, and (b) probable manifestations of that motive at a cognitive or behavioural level. We review five such manifestations: the better-than-average effect (regarding oneself as superior to others); the self-serving bias (taking credit for success but disavowing blame for failure); selective memory (forgetting one’s weaknesses but not one’s strengths); overclaiming (endorsing flattering falsehoods about oneself); and socially desirable responding (strategically acting to gain social approval). We also discuss the case of excessive self-enhancement: narcissism. This personality trait combines self-serving grandiosity with manipulative propensity. Narcissists irrationally over-exhibit all five key manifestations of self-enhancement but are likely to be over-represented among movers and shakers. We conclude with a nuanced consideration of self-enhancement’s costs and benefits.

This chapter seeks to introduce recent research on leadership hubris, particularly relating to political and business leaders. It offers an overview of key insights, concepts and theories suggesting three possible dimensions of the specific problem of leadership hubris and its consequences for leadership effectiveness. It also aims to highlight relationships and divergences between approaches and findings of classical scholars and of psychologists, neurologists and leadership researchers concerned with the experience and impact of modern, hubristic leadership. It aims to show how current understanding of hubris has developed from the ancient. While criminal charges may no longer be brought against those accused of hubris in their leadership roles, they may well be considered to be suffering from an acquired personality disorder. Alternatively, their dysfunctional leadership may be attributed to the negative consequences of a wider social process involving, in addition to the leaders themselves, a conducive context and followers rendered susceptible to such leadership by such processes of which both they and their leaders are victims.

During the period of Sasanian dominion (224–651 ce) the inhabitants of the Empire of Ērānšahr (“Realm of the Iranians”) were subject to a well-developed and efficient legal system, which was in force in all the provinces of the vast empire during the five centuries of this dynasty’s rule and remained relevant far into the Muslim era after the Arab conquest of Iran in the seventh century. In the age that the chapter deals with, Iranian law had already developed across many centuries from its simple beginnings in a pastoral society in the first millennium bce, during which the first Zoroastrian precepts were formulated and customs established, to its most sophisticated known form in the legal system of the Sasanian state. Within this timespan, jurisprudence evolved into an advanced and complex discipline, which remained firmly based on Zoroastrian tenets, but became largely detached from theology particularly in the legal practice of the state courts in the Sasanian era.

If we expect that the world culture with the first written laws should give us the earliest instances of legal “rights,” we would be looking at Mesopotamia. At the outset, this looks promising, because the senses of legal and moral right pertaining in the relevant Sumerian and Akkadian terms have the same semantic basis as the Indo-European root which builds the English word “right”: Sum. si sa2, “to make straight, fair”; Akk. ešēru, “to go/be straight,” causative šutēšuru, “to provide justice.” Like Latin rectus, “ruled,” and Germanic riht, “just, good,” these Mesopotamian verbs married senses of normativity and fairness (whether in terms of justice, ethical correctness, or moral principle) to concepts of straightness and linearity. Conversely, any deviation from si sa2/ešēru implied straying from a straight path or from justice. So, we begin with the semantics in good order.

A study of the notion of rights in classical Greek thought naturally focuses on Aristotle’s ethics and politics. Plato’s ethics shows a much greater concern with people’s interests than with their rights. In Plato, too, these interests are identified with reference to the community as a whole; that is, it is the good of the community that comes first in order of justification. As Julia Annas remarks in her Introduction to Plato’s Republic, in Plato’s ideal city “all classes are protected in freely having and doing what is necessary for them best to fill their social role.” At the same time, Plato believes that interests justified in this way (that is, identified and determined with reference to their contribution to the common good) are people’s true interests: his politics and ethics are therefore paternalistic and illiberal. As such, they do not allow for a theory of subjective rights as morally or legally sanctioned entitlements that are concerned with the individual qua individual, independently of the contribution that they might make to the common good. Plato’s predecessors, for their part, had mainly focused on the relation between morality and self-interest and the potential conflict between the two.

The notion of right(s) is ubiquitous in Roman Republican writings and its meaning often ambiguous and varied; it includes the idea of justice, normative rules, as well as a wider legal order. Following the work of Michel Villey, who argued that the Romans did not have a concept of subjective rights, as this would have required associating the ideas of right and power, historians of political thought and philosophers of law have all agreed that the Romans did not have much (or anything) to contribute to the idea of subjective rights and focused on identifying its first developments in subsequent periods, ranging from the twelfth century down to the late medieval period.

Stephen Angle and Marina Svensson assert that prior to the mid-nineteenth century, there was not a Chinese word that translates the concept of “rights.” They hold that even though the classical and postclassical Chinese talked about “privileges and powers,” they didn’t have ideas of rights that correspond to the modern Western senses: namely, those that correspond to duties, protect the individual person, or provide “antimajoritarian trumps on the general interest.” Even though rights talk was also relatively new to the West then, Angle and Svensson claim that rights were founded on the historical Western understanding of persons as autonomous individuals. In contrast, they hold that the Chinese view persons as always already bound up in roles and relationships which, instead of developing into rights that correlate with duties as in the West, remains as talk about “reciprocal responsibilities” in their theorizing about ethics and politics.

In its opening clause, the preamble to the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) asserts the strong affinity between the concepts of human dignity and human rights. “Recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family,” the declaration grandly begins, “is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” Preambles are repositories of lofty rhetoric, but they are also expressions of shared values and basic ideological assumptions. The expansive political claims of the UDHR find justification in the idea of human dignity. Moreover, the Declaration itself helped to cement the place of dignity in the modern discourse of rights, and the importance of dignity as a source of moral justification remains a lively theme in explorations of the origins and normative basis for human rights claims. In the words of Jeremy Waldron, for instance, “Dignity is intimately connected with the idea of rights – as the ground of rights, the content of certain rights, and perhaps even the form and structure of rights.”

In Latin ius (like droit in French, diritto in Italian, Recht in German) can mean a whole body of normative rules, a legal order, as well as “right,” in the many senses of the English word. Early in the last century, Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld proposed that English speakers resolve the ambiguity about the meaning of “right,” at least in precise legal language, by using the word “right” only where there was a correlative “duty” in another or others. If there was no correlative duty, but simply an absence of right in someone else (a “no-right”), Hohfeld preferred to say that the subject had a “privilege.” Hohfeld also proposed four other “fundamental legal categories”: “power” (another word that is sometimes encompassed in “right”), “immunity” (also sometimes encompassed in “right”), “liability,” and “disability,” categories that referred to the subject’s ability or lack thereof to change the first set of categories.

In August 1989, on the occasion of the bicentennial of the French Revolution, Le Monde published an interview with Margaret Thatcher, then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. In that interview Thatcher, in France at the time as an honored guest of French President François Mitterrand, asserted that claims that the notion of subjective rights originated with the French Revolution, and specifically with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of August 1789, are nonsense. The socialist French Prime Minister Michel Rocard criticized Thatcher vocally, and her arrival at the bicentennial celebrations was met with jeers, yet many historians today would agree with her, whatever their preferred origin point(s) for a concept of subjective rights. What is more controversial is Thatcher’s alternative account of the origins of the notion of subjective rights: to her, they had been invented by the Greeks, and were already foundational to Athenian democracy.