Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
John Schostak
invited talk:
BELMAS
I start from the view that there are no natural laws ruling society, that is to say, there are
no laws of physics nor chemistry nor indeed biology that compel any particular vision
concerning the ‘good society’, nor how to construct the best forms of social organisation
that can benefit each and every individual. As such then, I do not take for granted that
and education in particular. In short, we make our laws and our visions of society - and
education needs to be organised in ways that support this. But as I also accept that
people will have different views and may never agree with each other concerning the best
forms of social organisation, then the ways in which political, community, and
My concern in this talk is ‘democracy’ and how best to bring it about and whether
schools or some other form of educational organisation are a way to bring about
‘democracy’. In thinking about that, then what is, if any, the role of leadership, the notion
of a ‘leader’ and whether the promotion of leaders and leadership is a desirable thing or is
injurious to the notion of democracy, or indeed, a notion of education. I think we’ve been
reminded sufficient times during the last few years that democracy is not just a form of
political governance over citizens. People will give their lives for it. It is inextricably tied to
the twin concepts of freedom and equality - that is, the freedom to speak fearlessly with
an equal voice to all others. Democracy in its widest application is a form of critique, a
way of getting critical purchase on how we live as human beings and is itself a way of
living with others. In that sense, I can argue that democracy is an educational process.
So, in being asked to say something about leadership, I am immediately worried about
the privileged position that the leader occupies in relation to others as followers and as
‘learners’, for a leader is nothing without followers, and nothing without an assumed
without an opposition, real, implied or imagined. But I could be mistaken in thinking this.
To what extent is leadership needed for a democratic life? Or to put it another way, what
Then I want to end with a final couple: is democracy undermined by leadership? If it is,
First off, I’ll make clear the kind of democracy that I support. In contemporary academic
discourse it goes by the name of radical democracy. From my own reading of some of
contributors to this discourse it seems to me that the following provide some useful
pointers for evaluating whether or not a given practice, organisation or system of
organisations is democratic to its roots or is simply a veneer that covers over something
These are the 5 key criteria that I shall employ in exploring the question of ‘leadership’
1. the place of power over people is not occupied, or in other words, the place of power
2. all social relations operate under the principle of égaliberté (equaliberty) (Balibar 1994)
3. all decisions are made according to the principle of being ‘faithful to the
4. all intelligences are equal, or to put it another way, there is a suspension of the claims
One could, no doubt increase the number to appear on such a listing as this but I think
these are enough to begin a discussion. I shall provide a rationale for each of these as I
explore the notion of a) a leader and b) the desirability of promoting leadership in the
expression of agency, action, power that requires a response by others. So, with this
demand in mind, let’s start with the place of power and how and by who, or what, this
There is a view expressed by some that without leaders there is chaos. What this
effectively means is that, in the place of power where decisions are taken and compliance
ensured, there needs to be someone able to set in motion a machinery that guarantees
actions are undertaken in an orderly fashion. I shall argue that the idea that leaders are
necessary to all apsects of life forms the dominant organising framework through which
use the term dispositif rather than its usual english translation as apparatus because, the
French word means much more than the english word. Like apparatus it connotes the
machineries through which activities are organised. But it also refers to resources and
most usefully, following Agamben (2009) and its development in Schostak and Schostak
(2013) it refers to the arrangement of resources that can be called into action to resolve or
Take for example the early days of the Arab Spring when large numbers of people were
occupying Tahrir square, there was an often heard Western complaint that there were no
leaders with whom to talk, negotiate and agree action (Witte 2011). To the protesters,
many said that this was itself a strength. As Roberts and Schostak (2012) argued, what
was missing was not so much leadership but the concrete practices, organisations and
institutions of democracy. When Mubarak toppled what was left securely in place was
the military, police, judicial and financial machineries which had been built up over
decades of dictatorship. In short, the place of power remained occupied. Only the
symbol of power fell. In such a circumstance new leaders appear and contest each other
for the place of power but as the machineries do not change then not much changes for
the people. As Jones (2013) reported, three years on from the suicide of Mohamad
Bouazizi that became the trigger for the Tunisian protests in 2010
"Absolutely nothing has changed," says Mohamed Ali, a math teacher turned
political activist, as he sips hot coffee in a youth center named after the uprising.
The issue, as it always is, is how can change be made to take place. For the people who
engaged in the Arab Spring demanding greater freedoms there was no countervailing
democratic dispositif that was adequately developed to take fill the empty place of power.
It is an issue, that in very different contexts and circumstances made Dewey skeptical
about the role of schools being able to generate the conditions for an informed
democratic citizenry. But before exploring this question further, I want to return to the
issue of the empty place of power because it is in understanding its significance for
democracy that is critical for generating the conditions for an informed and effective
public.
For the French political theorist Lefort (1988), the empty place of power emerges when
there is no immediate obvious candidate who can occupy it following the fall of a tyrant
and the regime that had supported the power of the tyrant. At this point in time, however
fleeting and ill defined it might be, there is the possibility of a) the emergence of a leader
who can bring order under his or her name as a new tyrant that people will follow
because, for example, there is the promise of a kinder regime than the previous one; or b)
rather than one leader, there is an elite group; or c) there is the emergence of meetings
between equals who mutually create the rules and procedures through which a
democracy of voices for decision making can be constituted - that is, they are capable of
creating the countervailing discourses, practices, tools, forms of organisation and social
machineries required for the emergence of a democracy without leaders. It is this latter
possibility that interests me. is it possible to fill the empty place of power with a
Reflecting upon the Arab Spring and other revolutionary moments Zizek (2013) agreed
that
Yes, there are moments of intense collective participation where local communities
debate and decide, when people live in a kind of permanent emergency state, taking
things into their own hands, with no Leader guiding them. But such states don’t last,
ontology.
Admitting that he also is into tired politics, he called upon the work of Walter Lippman, a
journalist who was, along side Edward Bernays, an early pioneer of the modern public
relations industry, to justify his desire for an efficient state apparatus that would never
trouble him for a political opinion or act apart from the ritual of voting for a new party
every few years. Lippmann (1927) wrote a book called the Phantom Public in which he
argued that people do not have the time to be involved in day to day politics and that
therefore experts should do the thinking, the deciding and the acting for them. Our job,
as the phantom public is to consent to the decisions of the experts, the leaders. They
have the machineries, the dispositifs available to massage our egos, make us frightened
of the new, the outsider, the scrounger and seduce us with pomp, displays of wealth and
We act as if we are free and freely deciding, silently not only accepting but even
demanding that an invisible injunction (inscribed into the very form of our free
speech) tells us what to do and think. “People know what they want” – no, they
don’t, and they don’t want to know it. They need a good elite, which is why a proper
politician does not only advocate people’s interests, it is through him that they
This, of course, is a seductive message for all leaders in whatever system, community or
organisation. It fits with the oft rehearsed justification that ‘hard decisions’ have to be
made for us ‘in our best interests’. Leaving aside for the moment, the twin issues of 1)
what counts as the ‘good elite’ and 2) who gets to decide on who can decide who the
good elite are, the key issue is about the inevitability of elites and leaders. For Zizek
(2013), who was praising the leadership qualities of Thatcher in the article from which the
above quotes are drawn, the inevitability of elites and leaders means that we need a
Thatcher of the Left if we want to have a political vision that includes social justice. I
hesitate to remark that Jeremy Corbyn, the new left wing leader of the opposition recently
elected to lead the labour party in the UK, is this Thatcher of the Left. But even if he
were, is this desirable for those of us who hope for a more democratic, socially just
society?
democracy. I will come back to him later but for now simply point out that Lippmann and
Dewey were contemporaries and where Lippmann saw the public as a phantom, Dewey
saw the education of a public as vital to the constant renewal of democracy. Although
they knew of each others work and indeed admired each others work, they never had a
face to face debate. This is not important, of course, because Lippmann has, to date,
won hands down. Dewey’s hopes to ground democracy through education never really
materialised and he became increasingly disillusioned that schools - his chosen vehicle -
would be enough. But while there is still a future there is always the possibility of a
different outcome and thus I’ll continue on with my hopes for the time being and move to
the next cluster of principles which I see as necessarily operating together in the empty
place of power.
To recall, these principles are: égaliberté, being ‘faithful to the disagreement’, the equality
of intelligences, and the equality of powers. They are important because they help to
think about the kind of conditions that have to be created if leaders and leadership -
whether of the right or the left - are to be constrained to the benefit of all and not just for
the wealthy, the privileged and the experts who compose elites no matter how kind and
wise they might be. I shall call these principles, the conditions for creating a
countervailing democratic dispositif and turn now to the question of whether leaders and
is the capacity for all its members to speak fearlessly and equally. And I mean everyone -
that includes all children and all immigrants who want to settle in a given territory, ideally,
the whole population of the planet. But I guess, meantime, as a first step, we’ll have to
set our sights on a given state or federation of states such as the EU. For that condition
to be met people have to feel free and they have to feel that their voice can be heard
equally and be taken equally into account alongside all other voices. For this kind of
condition Balibar coined the word égaliberté, often translated as the neologism
equaliberty. His argument is that an individual’s freedom is reduced if another individual is
able to weald power, say through wealth or bullying, to prevent the acts of the other. This
of course is the contemporary situation where corporations and millionaires are able to
influence and dominate political parties and the top jobs in governments. Neoliberalism is
founded upon a principle of freedom where the strongest are free unencumbered by what
they call ‘big government’ or ‘socialism’ to compete to exercise their freedom of action
over those who are weaker. They have a horror of equality and socialism which, in
Hayek’s terms is equated to serfdom. However, for Balibar, there can be no freedom for
all without equality - they are co-extensive. Hence he joined them as one word:
égaliberté. By this criterion, there are few contemporary organisations and no states that
can claim to be democratic. If it is considered that this ideal is impossible to meet, and
There are four key pragmatic rationales that I will mention for the adoption of a
The first is that private property and its accumulation underpins the freedom, the self
responsibility, and the security of the individual. It is considered natural to the extent that
people are assumed to be self interested and thus motivated through the opportunity to
The second is that people are naturally competitive. Thus driven by self interest they
compete to outdo each other. This it is typically argued drives creativity as well as
productivity.
The third is the one Lippmann gave, people are too busy with their lives to be able to be
involved in politics, they need experts to do the decision making for them.
The fourth, is that populations cannot be asked to vote on every thing. There are simply
too many people and it would take too long. In a fast paced world you need fast paced
decisions. So, best leave it to the elites, the leaders, the managers and their expertise.
people may of course vote for the ‘wrong’ leaders hence Lippmann’s strategy can be
the use of public relations campaigns. Pragmatically then, leaders can best lead under a
veneer of democracy. Thus leaders and leadership fit well with a model of democracy
that has been hollowed out and where the public is no more than a ghost in the
being a ‘phantom’ with populations thus being manipulated by leaders is the strategy
through which any emergent democracy can be tamed as Bouton (2007) called it in his
However, as time went on the wealthy grew impatient with the lower classes who insisted
on contributing to decision making and counter strategies were employed by the leaders
greedy for self enrichment. Bouton describes the strategy of Robert Morris the richest
to channel money to the wealthy, either through direct payouts or by privatising the
most lucrative parts of the state and turning them over to new for-profit corporations
owned and run by the gentry. If Morris had proposed this today, it might be called
In Morris’s view ‘the chief obstacle to this plan was democracy’ (Bouton 2007). Morris
was against the Pennsylvanian democratic revolution and was against the Declaration of
Independence. However, he joined the government and used his position as the friend of
presidents and at the head of departments to channel money into his own pockets and
those of his allies as well as contribute to the construction of laws in such a way as to
limit democracy and create, in effect, the phantom public as a substitute to what Jill and I
called the effective public in our last book (Schostak and Schostak 2013).
We are now at what may be called the Machiavellian moment where the equality of voices
of an effective public is in conflict with the manufacture of the consent of the phantom
public by the voices of the elite and their leadership dispositifs managing the key
organisations through which the lives of populations are manipulated. This conflict
open to all possible discourses from all possible points of view where each view is held
freely, expressed fearlessly and is counted as equal to all others where decisions are to
be made - under the principle of égaliberté. That is to say, an effective public is one
where disagreements are both expressed and counted in the decision making process -
in Rancière’s terms, the decision that arises is one that is faithful to the disagreement. If it
is not faithful to the disagreement then some voice or collection of voices are
marginalised at best and at worst suppressed and oppressed. Being faithful to the
disagreement is a demand for creativity where each voice much contribute its demand to
This creativity is required because no one knows everything and everyone’s experience,
circumstances and points of view are significant in mapping what is at stake for who
when one decision is made rather than another. In that sense, where all are to some
extent ignorant and acting under conditions of uncertainty, then the more intelligences at
work on what decision to make is desirable if the decision is to be to the benefit of all
rather than the elite few or even the majority. The few and the majority are a significant
bias. Hence calling upon the principle of égaliberté we come to Rancière’s principle of
the equality of intelligences that he drew from his study of Jacotot’s approach to
teaching. In this sense, intelligence is not equivalent to IQ nor the forms of technical
a very limited set of mental powers and functions to produce elites in a society devoted to
puzzle solving in the interests of the privileged few. Rancière’s argument is that we are all
ignorant in some matter, that we cannot know everything but that we all have insights and
experiences from our own individual points of view and we can draw upon our own
overpowers that of a learner then in Rancière’s terms this intelligence will be stultified.
The intelligence is emancipated only when there is a relation of equality rather than
dominance between the two. In a relation of equality, it is not about explaining to another,
nor about telling another but about i the attention given to the materialities of the world
There is no intelligence where there is aggregation, the binding of one mind to
another. There is intelligence where each person acts, tells what he is doing, and
gives
the
means
of
verifying
the
reality
of
his
action.
(1987:
33)
Hence
This is the way that the ignorant master can instruct the learned one as well as
the ignorant one: by verifying that he is always searching. Whoever looks
always Dinds. He doesn’t necessarily Dind what he was looking for, and even
less what he was supposed to Dind. But he Dinds something new to relate to the
thing that he already knows. What is essential is the continuous vigilance, the
the learned one, like the ignorant one, excels at. The master is he who keeps
the researcher on his own route, the one that he alone is following and keeps
This route is quite different from that of the dominant form of modernity which is always
about engineering the attention of the other to conform to a vision of ‘rationality’, that is,
technical rationality employed by the teachers, the managers, the leaders who have
aggregated their mind in conjunction with their will to those of the elites. The alternative
route that I draw upon is what Mack (2010) calls the ‘other modernity’, stemming from
Spinoza. Spinoza does not make a hierarchical separation between mind and body and
indeed argues for an equality of powers, that is, a democracy of powers not just an
equality of intelligences. The powers of the body include thinking, feeling, imagining as
well as all the powers of the individual body to sense, to reach out, to move, to speak and
in utilising all the powers of perception and expression to communicate and engage with
In this context, unequal relations between powers and between individuals damages the
the will of a leader over that of others means that mutuality dissolves into the course of
action favoured by the leader. Hence, there are potentials for development that are
suppressed, marginalised or ignored. The benefits for all are reduced to the benefits for
some.
I now come to the question raised at the beginning: What form of democratic
organisation, if any, is compatible with leadership? To this I answer “none!” apart from
what may be called a lazy democracy which respects none of the key principles of a
democracy substituting the dominance of one will over another whether through coercion
That leads then to the final pair of questions. The first asks: is democracy undermined
equals as articulated through the principles already outlined of égaliberté, being ‘faithful
So, I am now drawn to my final question that given that democracy is undermined by
leadership, and given that leaders abound in all the key organisations of everyday life,
put into place to stop it from being subverted by elites whether or not they see
themselves as benign experts, managers, leaders or have some rather darker motives.
This is the strategy that McCormick (2006, 2011) calls Machiavellian democracy. Here,
perhaps, there is a role for a leader who is able to adopt the position of what is
sometimes called, the vanishing mediator. That is to say, the leader as vanishing
mediator is one who seeks to abolish his or her own role. Such a leader occupies a
position in the place of power only to replace the role of leader with other forms of
organisation that do not reinforce hierarchical decision making but creates the conditions
for the values, the practices, the discourses, the forms of organisation to emerge that
are democratic. However, leaders may well succumb to the rewards, privileges and
powers associated with the elites. Hence, Machiavelli, according to McCormick sought
to develop mechanisms and procedures by which to constrain the insolence of the elites,
who in his time were the princes, but nowadays are the super rich and their senior
directors and management teams whether these are in the private or the public sector.
Machiavelli had his strategies. McCormick (2006) in the context of ancient and
• lotteries
• election
• tribunals
• preventing the rich from voting and engaging in office in exchange for them keeping
their wealth and paying no tax - that is, buy them out of the political process
Each of these suggestions are about preventing leaders from retaining and reinforcing
their grip on decision making at the expense of others. For immediate practice in most
forms of hierarchical organisation these specific mechanisms are unlikely to be
employable. More useful would be to imagine what kinds of mechanisms are already
available that can be employed to constrain the grip of leaders on decision making
In the educational context, there are of course legacies from democratically and co-
operatively formed organisation as for example described by Fielding and Moss (2011)
However, much as we may look to the legacies of Robert Owen, Dewey’s Laboratory
School or Neill’s Summerhill or indeed Reggio Emilia these have by no means become
mainstream. However, each of these in their different ways have taken seriously the
ability of people to organise for mutual benefit. It is that seriousness I think that is the
most subversive of leadership power and the insolence of elites. If a leader adopting the
role of the vanishing mediator seeks to incorporate democratic practice, then the means
by which decision making on the ground gets to be improved and made effective must be
enhanced at every opportunity. As a vanishing mediator, perhaps the leader becomes the
ignorant leader in conjunction with Rancière’s ignorant master, that is, one whose only
decision is to facilitate the attention to detail of all participants that a mutually agreed
project requires. Once the democratic culture, practice and organisation is in place in the
empty place of power, the leader simply vanishes as a role. Perhaps at this point we may
return to Dewey’s conception of the laboratory school and see in it the possibility of all
organisations being constructed upon the principle of a democratic test for the
exploration of forms of social action for mutual benefit. And perhaps, if we take it on
board as a mutual project and work for it, we might have a little more optimism than
Finally this hope relates to one last pair of questions echoing Zizek’s complaint about
politics being tiring: do we want a lazy democracy run by those who claim expertise,
wisdom and the psychological make up to take hard decisions on our behalf?: or do we
where we make our own decisions fearlessly about how to run our lives? In short, must
References
Other Essays, trans. by David Kishik & Stefan Pedatella. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Balibar, E. (1994 ) “Rights of Man” and “Rights of the Citizen”: The Modern Dialectic of
Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx, New York: Routledge. The
Bouton, T. (2007) Taming Democracy. “The People,” the Founders, and the
University Press
Fielding, M., & Moss, P. (2011). Radical democratic education & the common
Jones, S. (2013) Three Years After Tunisian Street Vendor Ignited Arab Spring, His
http://www.hufDingtonpost.com/2013/12/18/tunisia-‐revolution-‐arab-‐
Lefort,
C.
(1988).
Democracy
and
Political
Theory.
Oxford:
Polity
Press.
Lippmann,
W.
(1927)
The
Phantom
Public,
New
York:
Macmillan;
13
Transaction
Mack, M. (2010) Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity. The Hidden
Enlightenment of Diversity from Spinoza to Freud, New York, London:
continuum
McCormick, J. P. (2006) Contain the Wealthy and Patrol the Magistrates: Restoring
University Press.
Rancière, J. (1987) Le Maître ignorant. Cinq leçons sur l’émancipation
intellectuelle, Paris, Fayard; translated, with an introduction, by Kristin Ross,
Roberts, L & Schostak, J (2012) Obama and the ‘Arab Spring’: Desire, hope and the
Special Issue. Guest Editor John Schostak. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural
Ross, A. (2008) Why is ‘speaking the truth’ fearless? ‘Danger’ anD ‘truth’ in
www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia04/parrhesia04_ross.pdf. Downloaded
24/09/2015
Schostak, J. F., and Schostak, J. R. (2013) Writing Research Critically – the power to
Tourish, D. (2013) The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership. A critical
Witte G. (2011) In Egypt, an opposition without a clear leader gathers in Tahrir Square,
vowing to bring out 1 million people. Washington Post, February 1. http://
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-‐dyn/content/article/2011/01/31/
Zizek, S. (2013) The simple courage of decision: a leftist tribute to Thatcher. New