Leadership and Democracy: Perspectives from 20th-century and Contemporary Political and Legal Theory

Leadership is a constitutive element of modern democracy, yet it also reveals a friction between core democratic ideals (freedom, equality, and the promise of self-government) and everyday political practice (structurally built upon the divide between citizens and their representatives). Predominantly overlooked in contemporary democratic theory and its most influential strands (e.g., participatory, deliberative, procedural), the question of political leadership lay at the core of some major works of 20th-century political thought, dissecting its foundations and features, alerting to its virtues and pathologies, and thus offering a nuanced understanding of its various forms against the backdrop of real-world political life. The course will shed new light on some influential visions of political leadership in 20th-century political, legal, and social theory (e.g., Robert Michels, Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen, Antonio Gramsci, Joseph Schumpeter, just to name a few), recover the timely resources — conceptual, normative, and practical — that they can offer to the recently rejuvenated study of leadership among democratic theorists, and offer tools to distinguish between leaders that enhance and leaders that undermine liberal democratic values in our populist era.