• Critically evaluate influential Western worldviews and ethical frameworks and how these conceptions have informed leadership relationships throughout history.
• Demonstrate understanding that, within the Western world, human existence has been interpreted through diverse perspectives and that there is no authoritative criterion for deciding which is superior.
• Demonstrate knowledge of the major differences between management and leadership and between such related constructs as power, authority and legitimacy.
• Communicate more effectively thanks to the acquisition of philosophical, moral, epistemological, logical and aesthetic concepts.

This course takes an intellectual-historical perspective of leadership by sketching in general outline the evolution of Western thought and ethics. Various ethical systems and philosophies – including ancient heroism, Greek rationalism, Machiavellianism, modern rationalism, romanticism, heroic individualism and existentialism – are explored through a critical analysis of those ideas which have had an enduring influence on the way philosophers, sociologists and psychologists have conceived of leadership and of the authority and power relationships that underpin it. The ability to critique these bodies of ideas is essential to management students aiming at responsible leadership and meaningful citizenship engagement. Indeed, critical evaluation of blueprints for behavior brings about awareness of alternatives. More generally, to the extent that leadership is a relationship mediated by oral and written communication, leading is impossible in the absence of ethical references, in the darkness of an imprecise language or in the senseless outline of a world without intellectual foundations. The course aims to provide students with an outline of such references and foundations.

As the course progresses from the examination of a selection of ancient philosophies and ethics to more recent ones, it highlights significant changes in what people have accepted as the basis for leadership. Philosophers have not merely analyzed political, military and religious leadership; indeed, for more than 2,500 years, they have educated and counseled those who turned to them for advice about how to attain and retain power and authority. For better or worse, their recommendations have guided rebels and revolutionaries, statesmen and popes. Although philosophers have been at times executed for questioning assumptions widely taken for granted, they are also liberators because their ideas changed lives. The course is a tribute to their work.

Contribution to the Nordic nine

• Classic and basic theory
• Teacher’s own research

• Analysis
• Discussion, critical reflection, modelling

Spillane, R. & Joullié, J.-E. 2015. Philosophy of Leadership . London: Palgrave Macmillan.