Leadership

Abstract

leadership, we are left with a bewildering mass of findings,1 a claim that lends confirmation to similar conclusions by other scholars.2 Perhaps the depth of the problem is best stated by James MacGregor Burns in his claim that: Without a modern philosophical tradition, without theoretical and empirical cumulation, without guiding concepts, and without considered practical experiences, we lack the very founda tions for understanding leadership.3 His work incorporates empirical and theoretical dimensions with which this paper fundamentally agrees, but the powerful modern philosophical tradition4 needed to develop what he calls a school of has not been forthcoming. And, in fact, the long-standing, implicit philosophical underpinnings are in adequate for new understandings of leadership emerging in the current literature. The long-standing, implicit philosophical assumption which is most relevant for the present discussion is the atomistic view of individuals, rooted ultimately in the presuppositions of a passive spectator theory of knowledge in which reality is viewed as atomic, separable, isolatable units. According to this assumption, the individual is the basic building block of a society or a community, and the society is no more than the sum of the individuals of which it is comprised. The relationship of individuals is purely external. This view of the atomic individual pro vides the unquestioned foundation for social contract theories as diverse as those of Locke and Hobbes and, more recently, John Rawls. It perhaps achieves its culmination in the economic theory of Adam Smith,