Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T06:37:04.581Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

On Leadership

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 November 2005

Nannerl O. Keohane
Nannerl O. Keohane
Affiliation:
Woodrow Wilson School and the Center for Human Values, Princeton University ([email protected])
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Political theorists seldom have direct experience of power. Bringing together two decades of experience in educational leadership and my vocation as a political theorist, I offer advice to prospective leaders. This essay takes Machiavelli's Prince as a model in terms of format, and occasionally draws on his prose, either in agreement or to offer a different opinion. I emphasize the importance of context and organizational type in thinking about leadership, and of paying attention to what leaders actually do. I describe some of the qualities that often prove helpful to leaders, and discuss the distinctive attractions and pitfalls of power-holding.Nannerl O. Keohane is Laurance Rockefeller Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Woodrow Wilson School and the Center for Human Values, Princeton University ([email protected]). From 1981 until 2004, she served as President of Wellesley College and then of Duke University. She is the author of Philosophy and the State in France and essays on political philosophy, education and feminism. An earlier version of this essay was delivered as the Godkin Lecture at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, in February 2005. I acknowledge with gratitude comments on earlier drafts from colleagues at Harvard, Stanford, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, especially from Charles Griswold, Robert O. Keohane, James G. March, Norman Naimark, Joseph S. Nye Jr., Josiah Ober, and Samuel Popkin. I am also grateful to the assistant to the editor at Perspectives on Politics who suggested that I recast the lecture in the spirit of Machiavelli's The Prince. The reader who is familiar with this work will note multiple occasions where I have used his tone and even occasionally his prose, with minimal emendations, to make my own points, sometimes in agreement and sometimes in dissent, but without direct citation. After the essay was submitted for review, Harvey Mansfield made a number of helpful suggestions and drew my attention to Carnes Lord's The Modern Prince, which also uses Machiavelli's treatise as a “literary model of sorts.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 3 , Issue 4 , December 2005 , pp. 705 - 722
Copyright
© 2005 American Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Arendt, Hannah. 1982. Postscriptum to Thinking. In The life of the mind, vol. 1. In Hannah Arendt: Lectures on Kant's political philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Aristotle. 1956. Nicomachean ethics. Ed. H. Rackham. Loeb Classical Library. London: Heinemann.
Aristotle. 1958. Politics. Trans. Ernest Barker. New York: Oxford University Press.
Aristotle. 1985. Nicomachean ethics. Trans. Terence Irwin. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Barber, James David. 1977. The presidential character: Predicting performance in the White House, second edition. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Bass, Bernard M. ed., 1981. Stogdill's handbook of leadership. New York: Free Press.
Bennis, Warren, and Burt Nanus. 1985. Leaders: The strategies for taking charge. New York: Harper and Row.
Berlin, Isaiah. 1971. The question of Machiavelli. A special supplement to the New York Review of Books 17 (7).Google Scholar
Burns, James MacGregor. 1978. Leadership. New York: Harper and Row.
Ericsson, Anders. 1999. Expertise. In The MIT encyclopedia of the cognitive sciences, ed. Robert A. Wilson and Frank Keil. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Heifetz, Ronald A. 1994. Leadership without easy answers. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Hobbes, Thomas. 1963 [1651] Leviathan. Cleveland: Meridian Books, World Publishing Co.
Kahneman, Daniel. 2003. Maps of bounded rationality: Psychology for behavioral economics. American Economic Review 93 (5): 1449–1475.Google Scholar
Kellerman, Barbara, ed. 1986. Political leadership: A source book. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Kellerman, Barbara 2004. Bad leadership: What it is, how it happens, why it matters. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Kennedy, David M. 1986. The qualities of leadership: Dwight D. Eisenhower as warrior and president. In Power and responsibility: Case studies in American leadership, ed. David M. Kennedy and Michael E. Parrish. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Keohane, Nannerl O. 1994. Annual report to the faculty of the university. Duke University.
Lord, Carnes. 2003. The modern prince: What leaders need to know now. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Machiavelli, Niccolò. 1940. The prince and the discourses. Trans. Luigi Ricci, with introduction by Max Lerner. New York: Random House.
Machiavelli, Niccolò. 1961. The prince. Trans. George Bull. London: Penguin.
March, James G. 1994. A primer on decision making: How decisions happen. New York: Free Press.
Montaigne, Michel de. 1958. The complete essays of Montaigne. Trans. Donald M. Frame. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Neustadt, Richard E. 1980. Presidential power: The politics of leadership from FDR to Carter, revised edition. New York: John Wiley and Sons.
Norris, Floyd. 2005. Chief executive was paid millions, and he never noticed the fraud? New York Times, January 7.
Norris, Floyd. 2005. Ebbers mounts an “I never knew” defense, New York Times, March 1.
Pfeffer, Jeffrey. 1992. Managing with power: Politics and influence in organizations. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Plato, The Republic. Trans. Raymond Larson. Wheeling, IL: Harland Davidson Inc.
Samuels, Richard J. 2003. Machiavelli's children: Leaders and their legacies in Italy and Japan. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press 2003.
Simon, Herbert A. 1946. The proverbs of administration. Public Administration Review VI (1), 53–67.Google Scholar
Simon, Herbert A. 1987. Making management decisions: The role of intuition and emotion. Academy of Management EXECUTIVE I (1), 57–64.Google Scholar
Useem, Michael. 1998. The leadership moment: Nine true stories of triumph and disaster and their lessons for us all. New York: Times Books, Random House.
Walzer, Michael. 1973. Political action: The problem of dirty hands. Philosophy and Public Affairs 2 (2).Google Scholar
Weber, Max. 1958. Politics as a vocation. In From Max Weber: Essays in sociology, translated and edited by H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press.
Williams, Bernard. 1981. Moral luck: Philosophical papers 1978–1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Woolf, Virginia. 1966 [1938]. Three guineas. Orlando, FL: Harcourt.