Leaders,Leadership and Democracy - are they compatible?

To what extent is leadership needed for a democratic life?

First off, I’ll make clear the kind of democracy that I support. In contemporary academic discourse it goes by the name of radical democracy. From my own reading of some of the contributors to this discourse it seems to me that the following provide some useful pointers for evaluating whether or not a given practice, organisation or system of organisations is democratic to its roots or is simply a veneer that covers over something its architects and its beneficiaries would rather not show.

These are the 5 key criteria that I shall employ in exploring the question of ‘leadership’

the place of power over people is not occupied, or in other words, the place of power is empty (Lefort 1988)

One could, no doubt increase the number to appear on such a listing as this but I think these are enough to begin a discussion. I shall provide a rationale for each of these as I explore the notion of a) a leader and b) the desirability of promoting leadership in the context of a demand for democracy. I say demand deliberately. A demand is an expression of agency, action, power that requires a response by others. So, with this demand in mind, let’s start with the place of power and how and by who, or what, this becomes a place of contestation for occupation.

What form of democratic organisation, if any, is compatible with leadership?

Fundamental, it seems to me, to any organisation or system that claims to be democratic is the capacity for all its members to speak fearlessly and equally. And I mean everyone - that includes all children and all immigrants who want to settle in a given territory, ideally, the whole population of the planet. But I guess, meantime, as a first step, we’ll have to set our sights on a given state or federation of states such as the EU. For that condition to be met people have to feel free and they have to feel that their voice can be heard equally and be taken equally into account alongside all other voices. For this kind of condition Balibar coined the word égaliberté, often translated as the neologism equaliberty. His argument is that an individual’s freedom is reduced if another individual is able to weald power, say through wealth or bullying, to prevent the acts of the other. This of course is the contemporary situation where corporations and millionaires are able to influence and dominate political parties and the top jobs in governments. Neoliberalism is founded upon a principle of freedom where the strongest are free unencumbered by what they call ‘big government’ or ‘socialism’ to compete to exercise their freedom of action over those who are weaker. They have a horror of equality and socialism which, in Hayek’s terms is equated to serfdom. However, for Balibar, there can be no freedom for all without equality - they are co-extensive. Hence he joined them as one word: égaliberté. By this criterion, there are few contemporary organisations and no states that can claim to be democratic. If it is considered that this ideal is impossible to meet, and perhaps it is, then what compromises are acceptable?

There are four key pragmatic rationales that I will mention for the adoption of a compromise that are often employed to justify this.

The first is that private property and its accumulation underpins the freedom, the self responsibility, and the security of the individual. It is considered natural to the extent that people are assumed to be self interested and thus motivated through the opportunity to gain private wealth that working hard provides.

The second is that people are naturally competitive. Thus driven by self interest they compete to outdo each other. This it is typically argued drives creativity as well as productivity.

The third is the one Lippmann gave, people are too busy with their lives to be able to be involved in politics, they need experts to do the decision making for them.

The fourth, is that populations cannot be asked to vote on every thing. There are simply too many people and it would take too long. In a fast paced world you need fast paced decisions. So, best leave it to the elites, the leaders, the managers and their expertise. To provide a degree of democracy, political elites can be subjected to voting. However, people may of course vote for the ‘wrong’ leaders hence Lippmann’s strategy can be employed to manufacture consent or as Bernays termed it, engineer consent through the use of public relations campaigns. Pragmatically then, leaders can best lead under a veneer of democracy. Thus leaders and leadership fit well with a model of democracy that has been hollowed out and where the public is no more than a ghost in the machinery of political organisation. The reduction of the involvement of the public to being a ‘phantom’ with populations thus being manipulated by leaders is the strategy through which any emergent democracy can be tamed as Bouton (2007) called it in his study of the American War of Independence. He described the emergence in Pennsylvania of a people’s democracy where equality was directly linked to freedom. However, as time went on the wealthy grew impatient with the lower classes who insisted on contributing to decision making and counter strategies were employed by the leaders greedy for self enrichment. Bouton describes the strategy of Robert Morris the richest and most powerful man in America at the time as being

to channel money to the wealthy, either through direct payouts or by privatising the most lucrative parts of the state and turning them over to new for-profit corporations owned and run by the gentry. If Morris had proposed this today, it might be called “neoliberalism” or supply-side/trickle-down economics.

In Morris’s view ‘the chief obstacle to this plan was democracy’ (Bouton 2007). Morris was against the Pennsylvanian democratic revolution and was against the Declaration of Independence. However, he joined the government and used his position as the friend of presidents and at the head of departments to channel money into his own pockets and those of his allies as well as contribute to the construction of laws in such a way as to limit democracy and create, in effect, the phantom public as a substitute to what Jill and I called the effective public in our last book (Schostak and Schostak 2013).

We are now at what may be called the Machiavellian moment where the equality of voices of an effective public is in conflict with the manufacture of the consent of the phantom public by the voices of the elite and their leadership dispositifs managing the key organisations through which the lives of populations are manipulated. This conflict requires Machiavellian strategies. Critical to understanding this Machiavellian moment and the strategies to be employed is that if democracy is to exist at all it is necessarily open to all possible discourses from all possible points of view where each view is held freely, expressed fearlessly and is counted as equal to all others where decisions are to be made - under the principle of égaliberté. That is to say, an effective public is one where disagreements are both expressed and counted in the decision making process - in Rancière’s terms, the decision that arises is one that is faithful to the disagreement. If it is not faithful to the disagreement then some voice or collection of voices are marginalised at best and at worst suppressed and oppressed. Being faithful to the disagreement is a demand for creativity where each voice must contribute its demand to be taken into account if one is not to be suppressed by another.

This creativity is required because no one knows everything and everyone’s experience, circumstances and points of view are significant in mapping what is at stake for who when one decision is made rather than another. In that sense, where all are to some extent ignorant and acting under conditions of uncertainty, then the more intelligences at work on what decision to make is desirable if the decision is to be to the benefit of all rather than the elite few or even the majority. The few and the majority are a significant bias. Hence calling upon the principle of égaliberté we come to Rancière’s principle of the equality of intelligences that he drew from his study of Jacotot’s approach to teaching. In this sense, intelligence is not equivalent to IQ nor the forms of technical reason favoured by contemporary forms of Modernity. IQ and technical reason focus on a very limited set of mental powers and functions to produce elites in a society devoted to puzzle solving in the interests of the privileged few. Rancière’s argument is that we are all ignorant in some matter, that we cannot know everything but that we all have insights and experiences from our own individual points of view and we can draw upon our own intelligence in debate with others to form understandings. If the will of a teacher overpowers that of a learner then in Rancière’s terms this intelligence will be stultified. The intelligence is emancipated only when there is a relation of equality rather than dominance between the two. In a relation of equality, it is not about explaining to another, nor about telling another but about the attention given to the materialities of the world that manifests the deployment of intelligence. In Rancierè's terms:

There is no intelligence where there is aggregation, the binding of one mind to another. There is intelligence where each person acts, tells what he is doing, and gives the means of verifying the reality of his action. (1987: 33)

Hence

This is the way that the ignorant master can instruct the learned one as well as the ignorant one: by verifying that he is always searching. Whoever looks always finds. He doesn’t necessarily find what he was looking for, and even less what he was supposed to find. But he finds something new to relate to the thing that he already knows. What is essential is the continuous vigilance, the attention that never subsides without irrationality setting in—something that the learned one, like the ignorant one, excels at. The master is he who keeps the researcher on his own route, the one that he alone is following and keeps following. (1987 33)

This route is quite different from that of the dominant form of modernity which is always about engineering the attention of the other to conform to a vision of ‘rationality’, that is, technical rationality employed by the teachers, the managers, the leaders who have aggregated their minds in conjunction with their will to those of the elites. The alternative route that I draw upon is what Mack (2010) calls the ‘other modernity’, stemming from Spinoza. Spinoza does not make a hierarchical separation between mind and body and indeed argues for an equality of powers, that is, a democracy of powers not just an equality of intelligences. The powers of the body include thinking, feeling, imagining as well as all the powers of the individual body to sense, to reach out, to move, to speak and in utilising all the powers of perception and expression to communicate and engage with others in projects of mutual benefit.

In this context, unequal relations between powers and between individuals damages the democratic development and organisation of mutual projects because the imposition of the will of a leader over that of others means that mutuality dissolves into the course of action favoured by the leader. Hence, there are potentials for development that are suppressed, marginalised or ignored. The benefits for all are reduced to the benefits for some.

I now come to the question raised at the beginning: What form of democratic organisation, if any, is compatible with leadership? To this I answer “none!” apart from what may be called a lazy democracy which respects none of the key principles of a democracy substituting the dominance of one will over another whether through coercion or the manufacture of consent.

That leads then to the final pair of questions. The first asks: is democracy undermined by leadership? To that, my answer is: yes if by democracy we mean the community of equals as articulated through the principles already outlined of égaliberté, being ‘faithful to the disagreement’, the equality of intelligences, and the equality of powers. In its relatively short history, democracy has been ‘tamed’ (Bouton 2007) and certain kinds of inequality accepted as somehow natural (Rosenvallon 2013). If some people are ‘naturally’ more intelligent, more hard working, more moral, more educated, then of course there will be inequalities is the argument that undermines equality as a basic principle of democratic organization. Under these conditions then Lippmann’s form of ‘democracy’, where experts decide and shape the masses, beats Dewey and all other experiments in democratic organization where individuals are enabled to develop their powers of democratic decision making.

The concluding question: what to do about it

So, I am now drawn to my final question that given that democracy is undermined by leadership, and given that leaders abound in all the key organisations of everyday life, what can be done about it?

In short, if a democratic form of social organisation is wanted, then strategies have to be put into place to stop it from being subverted by elites whether or not they see themselves as benign experts, managers, leaders or have some rather darker motives. This is the strategy that McCormick (2006, 2011) calls Machiavellian democracy. Here, perhaps, there is a role for a leader who is able to adopt the position of what is sometimes called, the vanishing mediator. That is to say, the leader as vanishing mediator is one who seeks to abolish his or her own role. Such a leader occupies a position in the place of power only to replace the role of leader with other forms of organisation that do not reinforce hierarchical decision making but creates the conditions for the values, the practices, the discourses, the forms of organisation to emerge that are democratic. However, leaders may well succumb to the rewards, privileges and powers associated with the elites. Hence, Machiavelli, according to McCormick sought to develop mechanisms and procedures by which to constrain the insolence of the elites, who in his time were the princes, but nowadays are the super rich and their senior directors and management teams whether these are in the private or the public sector. Machiavelli had his strategies. McCormick (2006) in the context of ancient and contemporary state practice discuss the use of

lotteries

Each of these suggestions are about preventing leaders from retaining and reinforcing their grip on decision making at the expense of others. For immediate practice in most forms of hierarchical organisation these specific mechanisms are unlikely to be employable. More useful would be to imagine what kinds of mechanisms are already available that can be employed to constrain the grip of leaders on decision making processes regardless of the views of others.

In the educational context, there are of course legacies from democratically and co-operatively formed organisation as for example described by Fielding and Moss (2011) and the contributors to Woodin’s (2014) book on co-operative forms of education. However, much as we may look to the legacies of Robert Owen, Dewey’s Laboratory School or Neill’s Summerhill or indeed Reggio Emilia these have by no means become mainstream. However, each of these in their different ways have taken seriously the ability of people to organise for mutual benefit. It is that seriousness I think that is the most subversive of leadership power and the insolence of elites. If a leader adopting the role of the vanishing mediator seeks to incorporate democratic practice, then the means by which decision making on the ground gets to be improved and made effective must be enhanced at every opportunity. As a vanishing mediator, perhaps the leader becomes the ignorant leader in conjunction with Rancière’s ignorant master, that is, one whose only decision is to facilitate the attention to detail of all participants that a mutually agreed project requires. Once the democratic culture, practice and organisation is in place in the empty place of power, the leader simply vanishes as a role. Perhaps at this point we may return to Dewey’s conception of the laboratory school and see in it the possibility of all organisations being constructed upon the principle of a democratic test for the exploration of forms of social action for mutual benefit. And perhaps, if we take it on board as a mutual project and work for it, we might have a little more optimism than Dewey’s fading hopes in his later years.

Finally this hope relates to one last pair of questions echoing Zizek’s complaint about politics being tiring: do we want a lazy democracy run by those who claim expertise, wisdom and the psychological make up to take hard decisions on our behalf?: or do we want a courageous democracy comprised of fully functioning, effective organisations where we make our own decisions fearlessly about how to run our lives? In short, must we wait for a leader to come along? If so, how long?