I've been reading a great deal of Herbert Read, most recently his Politics of the Unpolitical.
One of the things I'm struck by at the moment is how Read challenges what he calls the "general desire for leadership" which we're told is the attribute that people need to develop. (I spent far too much of my time as a teacher dealing with the quotidian horror of schools' obsession with "leadership" so something about which I'm acutely sensitive.)
Read sees leadership as an aspect of the Will to Power and associated with ideas of discipline, command and obedience. He points out that when the everyday call for "better leadership" (or "efficiency" ) is made, it's actually a call for increasingly authoritarian measures and requirements of compliance. Read talks of the "evil of assertiveness" which "poisons minds with pride and ambition". He llinks leadership with bullying and tyranny.
Read calls it a "cult of leadership" and links its outcome with fascism.
Instead, Read argues that leadership is frequently confused with individual initiative ("fundamentally the impulse to originate, to construct, and, in relation to other individuals, the desire to distinguish oneself") which is something that should be seen as positive.
Read offers collective responsibility as the corrective of "leadership":
"Collective responsibility is the alternative to leadership, and the counterpart of equality. If each individual in the social body is a responsible member of that body there is no need for external control. The body acts as an organic whole, and acts spontaneously."
Read does, however, accept that "leaders" are needed by society - a somewhat Romantic notion:
"the [wo]man of imagination, the poet and philosopher above all, but equally the [wo]man who can present ideas in the visual images of painting and sculpture or through the still more effective medium of drama —the idea that it is this individual whom society should accept as its only leader."
Imagine if our leaders were really drawn from the best poets, philiosophers, artists and writers!
#HerbertRead #leadership #leaders #CollectiveResponsibility #hierarchy
