Sigmund Freud maintained that “the great man influences his contemporaries in two ways: through his personality and through the idea for which he stands.” Yet, according to James MacGregor Burns, in Freud's viewing Moses through the lens of the Great Man, whose personality and strongly held beliefs not only underscored the view that “Moses was one of the first of the towering ‘charismatic’ leaders,” the essence of what Freud captured was “Moses’ greatness and an ambiguity in the concept of charisma that has clouded understanding of the ‘hero in history’ to this day.” While aspects of the heroic and the charismatic leader apply to Moses, there are indeed limitations to these concepts that do not fully reflect the power of Moses’ leadership.

Heroic Leadership and the Great Man Theory

Hal Lewis feels that “the Great Man Theory exaggerates the importance of the individual leader” because it minimizes other factors or completely ignores them altogether. According to the Great Man model, Lewis asserts, “the success and failure of an entire enterprise rest largely upon the shoulders of the leader.” It is a hierarchical view of leadership. Lewis argues that this view of leadership means that followers— whether, in the modern sense, “employees” or other functionally equivalent roles as “citizens” or even “congregants”— implies a “leader-follower relationship” where the leader occupying the top position has something to offer, and, in turn, those who follow thereby depend upon that leader to address their needs, whether it be a “paycheck, physical protection, expertise” or something less concrete or even measurable, like “cures, validation, an inspired sense of purpose.”

Lewis notes that such a “top-down” view of leadership is believed to work best when the leader possesses particular personality traits deemed desirable, such as “strength, magnetism, single-mindedness, and forcefulness,” almost making “heroic leaders” viewed in only superhuman terms. Lewis maintains, therefore, that “as Judaism has for centuries, today's most progressive leadership theories distance themselves from this archaic view,” making the Great Man Theory obsolete, regarding which he points to leadership theorists like Warren Bennis and Robert Thomas as also believing that the era of the Great Man is over.