How do we make sense of political leadership? All the time, we see presidents and prime ministers on television; we hear them on the radio; we read about them in the newspapers; we see them on billboards; we follow them on social media; we may even come across them in the flesh, sometimes being awed by what we think of as their charisma. We witness them debating with opponents, delivering press conferences, giving short interviews to reporters, visiting workers and patients in hospitals; we even see them holidaying āin privateā. We parse their words, look at their body language, consider their clothes, examine their haircut, and sometimes even judge them by their spouses, especially if they do not have one. We read about the offices that political leaders occupy; we discover information about their background and personal characteristics; and we learn about the historical, social, cultural, economic, and international context in which they are operating. We call upon theories, ideas, and concepts to describe, understand, and perhaps explain what we observe. In short, we examine political leaders and we study their actions. And yet still the question needs to be asked. How do we make sense of political leadership?
To answer this question, we need to ask a bigger one. How do we make sense of anything? How do we make sense of the world and our experience of it generally? These are philosophical questions. They have nothing to do with political leadership in isolation. Instead, they have to do with the nature of reality and what we can know about the world. Is there a āreal worldā out there separate from our subjective experience of it? If so, what form does it take? Whatever form it takes, what can we know about the world? Can we be sure of everything about it, or just some things and, if the latter, which things can we be sure of and to what extent can we be sure of them? Perhaps we cannot be sure of anything about the world at all. These are long-standing and yet still current philosophical questions. There have been and there remain many different answers to them. The key point is that these questions and the answers to them are prior to any questions we might ask about specific aspects of the world. In other words, before we ask how we can make sense of political leadership, we need to ask how we can make sense of the world more generally.
In this book, we aim to present a philosophically informed study of political leadership. We do so because the study of political leadership is always founded, knowingly or otherwise, on a particular philosophical position. In a previous volume (Elgie 2015), we identified a number of basic philosophical approaches and showed how existing studies of political leadership corresponded to these different approaches. However, in that volume we also showed that in the vast majority of cases the philosophical underpinnings of the studies were only implicit. We had to infer the foundations on which they were based. In this book, rather than leaving such foundations unstated, we prefer to bring them to the front. There is an advantage to this strategy. Some philosophical positions are incompatible with each other. Here, we understand incompatibility to mean that the relative validity of different foundational approaches is not susceptible to empirical testing. By identifying the foundations of our approach, we identify the sorts of studies with which it can reasonably be compared as well as those with which it cannot. We do not claim that everyone should necessarily study political leadership in this way. We are not engaged in a process of foundational imperialism. However, we do hope to present a study of political leadership that is constructed on a very general but nonetheless coherent and logical foundation that could serve as a basis for comparison with other studies built on a similar foundation.
In this chapter, we establish the philosophical foundations of our approach to the study of political leadership . We begin with a general discussion of ontology and epistemology before presenting two basic philosophical positions, positivism and constructivism , demonstrating that they are incompatible with each other. We then focus on a third position, scientific realism , setting out how we understand the world on the basis of it. In philosophy, all terms are loaded. So, we leave it until later in the chapter to state exactly what we mean and do not mean by this term. Within the framework of scientific realism, we identify with an approach that is consistent with the philosophical tradition of American pragmatism. We present a summary of the pragmatic tradition, distinguishing between two variants of it, and identifying the implications for scientific inquiry of the Peircean version that we prefer to adopt. In these ways, we establish the philosophical foundations of our institutionalist account and the empirical inquiry that we will conduct in subsequent chapters.
1.1 Making Sense of Philosophical Foundations
Philosophical foundations are metaphysical. That is to say, they do not in themselves constitute the world. Instead, they are the basis of our beliefs about how the world is constituted. Philosophical foundations are also meta-theoretical. They are prior to the theories that we might have about how the world works, whatever way we think the world is constituted. More than one theory can be consistent with a given foundation, but the adoption of a certain foundation may necessarily entail the rejection of a particular theory.
Philosophical foundations are important because they shape the way we think about the world. However, they are also highly contested. This point applies to all domains of philosophical inquiry. There are different philosophies, different philosophies of science, different philosophies of social science, and so on. Many of the same philosophical debates are common to each domain of inquiry. Nonetheless, there are different foundational positions whatever the domain. Here, we are interested in the philosophy of science and the social sciences.
Philosophical foundations vary in terms of their ontology and epistemology. Ontology is the study of existence or being. What is the nature of the world? What properties are there in the world? Do the properties of the world exist independently of our own experience, or do we bring the world into existence? Epistemology is the study of knowledge. What can we know about the nature of the world? How do we come to know anything about the world? For both ontology and epistemology , we can distinguish between two opposing sets of assumptions.
Ontologically, there is a fundamental division between what we might call ārealismā and ānon-realismā. Realism ādenotes a belief in the reality of something ā an existence that does not depend on minds, human or otherwiseā (Chakravartty 2007: 8). This may seem like a common-sense belief. Of course, we might say, there is a real world out there. We experience it every second we are awake. We experience it when we bang our toe against the leg of the table in front of us. However, the radical, non-realist sceptic thinks differently. We experience the world only through our senses. Yet we know that our senses can deceive us. For example, we think we see something in the desert, but it turns out to be a mirage. It is not real. So, how do we know that our senses are not always deceiving us? Maybe we merely think there is a real world out there when we are, in fact, mistaken. Maybe the table in front of me is an illusion and the pain from my toe is just my senses deceiving me? Few people adopt this radically sceptical subjective position that accepts nothing for real outside our own consciousness. However, there is another much more common non-realist position in the social sciences. One version is Laclau and Mouffeās (2001: xiv) āontology of the socialā. Here, there are real, mind-independent objects in existence. However, these objects only gain meaning though discursive social activity. In other words, the world exists, but we give meaning to the world only through language. This position avoids the radical metaphysical scepticism of pure subjectivism , but it is still an essentially non-realist perspective. For sure, the material world may have an ontological existence, but it has no meaning outside our engagement with it, outside the language we use to make sense of it. As we shall see, adopting a realist or non-realist position is only a starting point. All the same, it is useful to make a basic distinction between these two ontological positions, not least because, by definition, it is impossible to be simultaneously both a realist and a non-realist.
Epistemologically, there is a division between those who believe we can have objective knowledge about the world and those who believe that all knowledge is essentially subjective or relative. Like the ontological realist, the objectivist seems to adopt a common-sense position. After all, we make knowledge-based claims all the time. We know what the time is. We know the milk is in the fridge. Certainly, we might disagree about what we can claim to know, and about the extent of our knowledge about what we can claim to know, but surely, the objectivist would claim, we can at least know something about the world. Once again, though, the subjectivist or relativist is sceptical. The radical sceptic might again claim that we can come to know things only through our senses. Yet, as we have seen, our senses can deceive us. When we were in the desert, we claimed to know that there was an oasis in front of us, but we were mistaken. Perhaps that experience is more general. Maybe our senses are always deceiving us and we cannot know anything for sure. As before, though, we do not have to adopt such a radically sceptical position. The subjectivist or relativist might simply argue that if we give meaning to the world, then we can know the meaning we have given to it but no more. This means there can be no objective knowledge, or knowledge that is independent of the meaning we have given to it, but there can be subjective knowledge. Put differently, knowledge exists, but it is a social construction. Again, there are many variants of these arguments, but it helps to distinguish between the claim that there can be objective knowledge and the competing claim that knowledge is purely subjective or relati...