This collection of papers from the 2005 Netherlands American Studies Association conference has the strengths and weaknesses common to many such volumes. Spanning a wide range of disparate topics in American studies, contributors discuss leadership in American culture – in business, politics, the military, academia, media and the arts, international affairs and the civil rights movement – with the stated aim of problematizing and historicizing a concept which, the editors rightly note, defies straightforward conceptualization. Leaders are easy to spot, but their exceptional status makes the reproduction of their leadership assets elusive. Indeed, despite presenting a vision of interchange between leaders and followers that is notionally participatory, and despite implying that leadership can be learned, the act of defining leadership as an attribute sui generis can often occlude the external conditions which place one individual in a position to lead and deny access to others. Character, not context, gets the credit.

Thus one might identify a tension between “leadership studies,” adducing general characteristics of leadership from specific examples with the aim of re-creating them elsewhere, and the study of the idea of leadership. Of these, the latter is surely the more intellectually exciting. Indeed, a cynic might be tempted to see in the explosive growth of leadership studies programmes over the past twenty years many more signs of following than of leading.

But it is unclear in which realm this book should be situated. Does the collection provide clues as to the historical evolution of the idea of leadership which point to its general function within a democratic culture, as the title of the volume implies it might? Not especially. The essays are too variegated in their interests to be brought together in such a way, despite the valiant efforts of Krabbendam, Harrington and Miroff in their theoretical contributions, and promising glimpses in Delany's work on the narratives of leadership in presidential museums and libraries, Gilroy's discussion of The West Wing, and Scott-Smith's account of the US Foreign Leader Programme (each of which suffers, like several other pieces, from the volume's restrictive length constraints). Does it provide new theoretical insights into the nature and typology of leadership itself, then? Arguably more so, but most contributors prefer to remain in their respective silos rather than venture out and draw more general conclusions – presumably because the concept is so precarious – and so broader lessons about the nature of leadership are relatively rare.

The result is a disparate volume, not without merit but certainly lacking focus. Some of the contributions are stimulating, whilst some are good but essentially extracts from work published in greater depth by the same contributors elsewhere. Some essays are promising but rushed in execution, editing or copy-editing (“Baraka Obama,” anyone?), and a few are frankly best forgotten. There is enough here to consider the book of merit for researchers interested in leadership very broadly defined. However, in the end it is not clear that taken together these essays add up to more than the sum of their parts.