Ronald Reagan a Prominent Leader

Leadership style is a complex approach or attitude that provides strategic direction, reasonable implementation and is used as the motivating power for numerous individuals. The world faced a lot of leaders in its history, each supporting his personal views. Thanks to Kurt Lewin, many researchers have identified different styles of leadership (Lewin 1939, p. 12). Basically, there are three major leadership styles: authoritarian, participative and delegative. In most cases we can observe the fact that practically all leaders tend to use the combination of all three style with the certain dominance of one style over the other. Ronald Reagan was the 40th President of the United Stated who started his career as a film and television actor and became one of the most well-known and celebrated people who took this post. Among his achievements the researchers usually name the reaganomics, or the model of economy management that brought considerably good results during the time of his presidency. Despite the fact that not everyone took him seriously at first. Reagan proved to be a charismatic and influential leader. His second time in office was hailed by a multitude of difficulties in the sphere of foreign policy. The Cold War began, the invasion of Grenada took place, as well as the conflict in Libya. This, and a number of other contradictory events, could have been enough for several presidents to deal with, but Reagan’s historical role was to rule in the times of really huge changes and dramatic turnings, as the USSR lived its last years. People still say that he tore down and wall and won the Cold War. According to Bates (2002), “And the wall was torn down and millions of slaves freed from the subhuman misery of Communism. Ronald Reagan was a president of character and conviction, an individual with an infectious optimism, a leader with an unambiguous vision of the future. He restored to America a sense of patriotism, of hope, of renewed purpose”. I would like to focus not on the universally known aspirations and achievements that Reagan held but on more abstract things such as the dilemma over free will versus determination. Calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire”, he probably meant that free will is more desirable as a principle of government building and management, and practices what he preached during his time in power. The dilemma whether free will prevails over determinism has not yet been solved, hence the problem: does responsibility require free will. It is imperative that we try to answer that question because this directly concerns ethical issues of responsibility a person has to take upon for his actions (Jackson, 2010). The understanding of free will and responsibility affects, for instance, the penitentiary matters, i.e. is it lawful to punish a person for committing a crime if we agree to believe that certain actions are predetermined by our nature.The problem is that some people may use the aforementioned determinism theory to justify their own fallacies and indecent behavior. However, …