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.

Total loss of consciousness is nowadays mostly framed as a global alteration of brain activity. In antiquity, doctors often alluded to this symptom with compound terms of psuchê or anima, and they understood the body and the soul to be involved - to different extents - in the phenomenon. Consequently, by exploring how they conceived this condition, it is possible not only to better understand their idea of consciousness, but also to get a hint of how the envisaged the relation between body and soul.

Unlike the other presentations, Galen associates both forms of total loss of consciousness, lepipsuchiê and sunkopê, with an affection (whether direct by sympathy) of the heart. Namely he localises the problem in the seat of the spirited part of his tripartite soul. Nevertheless, the loss of pneuma provides a link with the affection of the rational soul, whereby both conditions cause total loss of movement and perceptions. The idea of the soul as a life principle is also present in this author, because although total loss of consciousness is associated with the temporary depletion of pneuma (and finishes when it is replenished), the separation of the soul does cause death.

Post-Hellenistic authors took some Hippocratic ideas and terminology to build their own theories about the different forms of losing consciousness, and about the relationship between body and soul. Also, they presented a clearer distinction between the two forms of total loss of consciousness (to the extent that they described a new disease, where the body was primarily affected but not the soul). Celsus’ description of fainting suggests that his idea of soul was influenced by Epicurean corpuscular theories with a rational and an irrational component. Aretaeus, in his turn, was majorly concerned with the mechanisms that produced fainting, where he included a tangle of ideas that included loss of heat, loss of tension, affection in the blood or in the heart, and sometimes, the separation of the soul. However, his idea of psuchê was rather erratic, and his way of organizing mental capacities was not consistent throughout the treatise.

Galen conceived sleep and wakefulness as a continuum that depended on the mixture of qualities within the ruling part of the puschê (the hêgemonikon) located in the brain. Naturally, in his system whenever pathological sleep occurred the doctor needed to determine if the brain was affected directly or by sympathy (from another organ), and the precise imbalance of qualities that needed to be counteracted by their opposites. His idea of mind was very accurately and hierarchically structured: it resided in the logical part of the soul, located in the brain, and several diseases with impaired consciousness compromised its normal functioning.