Dawei Chen Case Summary- Confucius, Machiavelli, and Rousseau According to the Case context, we can find out many ideas about leadership. First, from the great Chinese ancient philosopher-Confucius that we can learn that a phenomenal leader needs to love people and use virtue to rule a society. The ultimate goal for a leader is to fulfill everyone’s demand. In order to achieve this goal; a leader must be a sage or at least a very wise man to set up a very extraordinary example for others to learn. However, this opinion has a very obvious flaw that people cannot be as good as he think and most people are selfish that this kind of leadership is not going to be successful. Second, From the Machiavelli, we can acquire the idea which is almost opposite from Confucius, in his eyes, people has variable characters and most people are wicked. They are selfish and the only way to rule them is to treat them like objects. To achieve this goal, most leaders need to use the power of government and use many different strategies to control his followers such as military forces and spies. The core of his theory is to make fear in people’s mind and use this fear to set up the leadership and leaders can observe other leaders to make this happen. Third, case describes the great thinker in revolution era- Rousseau. He established the basic ideas of democracy. The core idea of his “The Social Contract “is to gather the “general will” and make the general will into a contract that is the law which everyone in the society need to obey. According to this great idea, people are born free, people can do whatever people inside the law; leaders are no longer born with power but People can select their leaders with their own wills. In a conclusion, from this case we can acquire a lot of ideas about the leadership and people can learn how the leadership developed in the human history.