Legitimate Leadership Under Conditions of Plurality. Arendt and the Limits of Horizontal Power Relations

Abstract

In dialogue with Hannah Arendt’s commitment to politics as the exercise of freedom, this article seeks to identify legitimate as opposed to illegitimate leadership while embracing Arendt’s account of plurality. In The Human Condition and elsewhere, Arendt is critical of the separation of ruling and acting in a way that eschews all instantiated hierarchies, even impermanent ones. In what follows, I will try to show how Arendt’s analysis of power and of politics as freedom can be consistent with a model of legitimate leadership.  In this model, human beings pursuing projects fulfill one or more of three roles: rectors; actors; and others. Following Isaac Ariail Reed (2017) we can define rectors as persons who not only have a project, but also the wherewithal to induce or constrain actors to subordinate their project(s) to the rector’s project(s), or even to abdicate their independent projects for the sake of those for which a rector commissions them; while actors are those persons who thus perform and complete the projects rectors have commissioned, and/or act on behalf of or in the name of such projects. The relationship between actors and rectors is thus an agency relationship in the sense of Julia Adams (1996), who makes clear how and why agents (defined here as “actors”) find and partially place themselves in these inferior positions in order to advance their own individual gains. Others, finally, are all those who are outside the intersubjectivity of the articulation of a project, and who may be obstacles to it. Legitimate leadership, within this model of agency relations, would occur whenever there are projects guided by rectors who successfully recruit actors for the purpose of completing the project on the basis of a partially mutual understanding both of the project and the roles to be played by both rector(s) and actors in the completion of the project.