ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a theoretical investigation of moral leadership in the age of the technocrat. It proposes the conception of the natural leader as found in two major schools of ancient Chinese thought, Confucianism and Taoism. This leader seeks to embody the social and political machine in intimacy, thus averting the possibility of technology becoming autonomous and dehumanizing. Modern technocratic democracies are not immune to a similar mechanism in which, as Ellul says, the leader "is being stripped of any real power and reduced to the role of a figurehead." Theories supporting the idea of a puppet leader, merely supplying a face to the political and economic machinery that works in the background are popular still. At a first reading, Confucius seems to provide all the necessary support for a technocratic view of the state. His emphasis on the importance of rituals may appear to be another attempt to reduce all aspects of human life to a mechanism.
