This chapter sets out the debates that have grown up around CEOs, highlighting three major reasons why they warrant serious study: their importance to the companies they lead, their wider economic and political power, and what their careers tell us about social mobility. To address these debates the book explores three questions: Who were the CEOs and how did they get into the role? What did they do? Did they matter for their companies and Britain’s economy and society? To answer these questions, a unique database of the CEOs of the top 100 most valuable UK public companies between 1900 and 2009 has been assembled. This consists of 475 companies and 1,397 CEOs. For each CEO a career biography is created. To analyse the data, we draw on Upper Echelons Theory and Agency Theory, alongside historical scholarship to understand the environments in which they operated. The chapter then sets out the five analytical threads that are developed throughout the book. The chapter closes by discussing how the nomenclature around top corporate officers evolved from ‘chairman’ to ‘managing director’ to ‘chief executive officer’.

The 1960s were marked by wide-ranging debates about British decline, so much so that historians have identified a culture of ‘declinism’ affecting all asspects of contemporary life, from the prescriptions of economists to the activism of the (short-lived) ‘I’m Backing Britain’ movement in 1968. Though declimism principally affected the political and literary culture of England, this chapter explores how it was also reproduced in strikingly similar ways elsewhere - in Australia, New Zealand and Canada in particular - where a proclivity for diagnosing the deficiencies of nationhood became a recurring feature of the broader political culture. Yet such was the focus on national maladies that these wider commonalities and their shared sources of discontent were almost never remarked upon — even as the practitioners borrowed freely from each other’s rhetorical templates. This chapter, then, takes stock of the wider anxieties about the ‘state of the nation’ that converged around the diminished certainties of Greater Britain.

In her assessment of US democracy, Chebel d’Appollonia emphasizes three main points. First, Americans perceived the meaning of democracy in a multidimensional way. This explains why political leaders’ estimates of the state of democracy have never been just context-dependent; they have also been ideologically contingent, framed by beliefs in US exceptionalism that are often disconnected from reality. Second, US democracy has been and still is more fragile and more resilient than commonly perceived – which suggests we need to put into perspective both an overconfidence in robustness and pessimistic accounts of fragility. Chebel d’Appollonia therefore examines the relationship between “the weakness of robustness” and “the strength of fragility” in order to demonstrate how robustness and fragility are organically related, for better or worse, in terms of perceptions and practices. Third, assessments of US democracy oscillate between overconfidence and declinism, with no stable equilibrium between these two poles. While it is premature to evaluate what the state of US democracy will be in the coming years, Chebel d’Appollonia identifies major threats that can seriously damage US democracy – such as the denial of actual problems by leaders, or conversely, the use of declinist arguments to legitimize undemocratic practices allegedly designed to protect democracy.