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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 (nkeohane@princeton.edu)
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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 (nkeohane@princeton.edu). 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

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