What national leader in all of history did the greatest good for his people?

Answer 1

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
He achieved Independence for India through Non-violence.Yet relinquished any post in independent India.
He did not even participate in the celebrations on the day of Independence.Leaving others to celebrate, he rushed to West Bengal to pacify communal disturbance.

Answer 2

What leader did the greatest good for his or her OWN people? Well the answer could be someone like Atilla the Hun or Ghengis Khan. They certainly unified their peoples and took them from being loose affiliations of nomadic tribes to being great nations that other superpowers of the time had to reckon with. The Emperor Chen united the five warring states and brought peace and stability of China, but he was paranoid and caused the death of ten thousands in forcing people to build the Great Wall.

The question is how do you define "Good"?

Julius Ceaser killed the Roman republic, and set the stage for Imperial Rome. That may seem anti-good to us in retrospect, but there was no way the republic could continue to govern the size of empire Rome had become.

Even someone as evil as Hitler did a great deal of "good" for his own people. He brought the Germans out of crippling depression and made them a world power again.

However, I'm going to nominate Alexander the Great. Not that anything he did in his military conquests needs to be considered "good", nor did his "empire" survive his death, so we can't say that he left behind and "good" political institutions. But what he did do was spread Hellenistic ideas throughout the Europe, the middle east and north africa. Ultimately, a great deal of western civilization is rooted in Greek origins. If Alexander hadn't spread Hellenism, the world we know today would be in a significantly different configuration.

Although, I do have to give a nod to President Washington. By stepping peacefully aside handing over supreme executive power to someone else without there being the threat of violence, he truly demonstrated the US constitution was a new force to in the world, and that transfers of power need not be the result of the death of monarchs or through violent revolutions.

Answer 3

Dali Lama- Tibet
Brave enough to seek the worlds help and leave his home to bring relgious and human rights to his own people.-Peacefully

Ghadi- India
Lead by example- peace and intelligance. Most never knew he was an Oxford Grad from England.- Peacefully

Thomas Jefferson- USA
Understood that education and world knowledge/experience was a universial tool and the world is much smaller than we think. He documented everything and believe inventions should be shared to increase productivity for all mankind.

Abraham Lincoln-USA
Believed that "human rights" are worth fighting for, even in your own back yard. Too bad he wasn't 5 years sooner, we may have avoided a civil war with good finacial arrangements. It was about the money- not the slaves- that was just the "hot topic". Believe me- it was the 1960's that real reform happened.

Answer 4

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Answer 5

Since each nation would have a differing opinion based on their own bias, there is no such thing as 'the greatest good'. It's all relative.

Answer 6

Washington. He was asked to become King of the U.S. and refused on the grounds that we had just fought a war to rid ourselves of a monarch.