Leadership Models, Social Selection, and the Evolution of Western Civilization

Why have some societies repeatedly developed institutions capable of generating scientific, technological, economic and political adaptation, while others have followed different trajectories? Conventional explanations emphasise geography, natural resources, military power, institutions, economic incentives or cultural traditions. This article proposes an additional explanatory variable: the socially legitimate model of leadership and the mechanism through which societies select, recognise and replace leaders. The central hypothesis is that societies do not merely select individual leaders; they reproduce particular models of legitimate leadership. These models influence institutional design, social incentives, access to status, competition among ideas and the capacity of institutions to correct errors. The article traces a possible historical sequence from the civic model described in Pericles' Funeral Oration, through the shift from dominator to partnership vocabularies of authority (Eisler, 1987) and Christian servant leadership, Renaissance humanism, the Reformation, the expansion of educational institutions, the Scientific Revolution, the settlements associated with 1648, Enlightenment political thought, modern markets, industrialisation and contemporary digital communication. A second hypothesis is proposed: long technological and economic waves may be connected to the cyclical ability of societies to renew their mechanisms of social selection. Technological revolutions change not only production but also communication, and thereby the environment in which leaders are socially selected. Printing, telegraphy, radio, television and digital networks successively altered the relationship between leaders, institutions and mass audiences. The contemporary phenomena described as postmodernity and post-truth may therefore be interpreted partly as symptoms of a transition in the mechanisms of social selection. The article does not claim that Western civilisation is intrinsically superior to other civilisations. It proposes a comparative and potentially testable model in which leadership legitimacy, openness of social selection, institutional adaptability and communication technology interact to influence long-term social evolution. It extends the author's earlier work on the social selection of leaders (Nosalsky, 2026e) and on closed social-selection loops (Nosalsky, 2026c) by adding a temporal question: what makes the mechanisms of selection themselves change, and why might that change be cyclical? Keywords: social selection; legitimate leadership; leadership models; partnership and dominator models; social evolution; institutional evolution; meritocracy; Western civilisation; Christianity; modernity; technological revolutions; Kondratieff waves; communication technologies; populism; postmodernity; post-truth. AI Usage Statement: Artificial intelligence tools (OpenAI ChatGPT-5.6 Luna, Anthropic Claude Sonnet 5) were used in the preparation of this manuscript. The AI assisted the authors in structuring the text, refining the literature presentation, and improving the linguistic quality based on the original research ideas, concepts, and methodology developed entirely by the human authors. The final text was thoroughly reviewed, verified, and approved by the authors, who take full responsibility for the integrity and accuracy of the content.