Pre-Modern Leadership:
Knights and Robber Barons
David M. Boje
December 22, 2000
What is Premodern Society and its Leadership?
To understand the relations of leadership and society requires a careful reading of premodern times. My reading is that what we have studied as leadership the pasty half century, is a small slice of leadership. And by focusing on a small slice of history, we have missed the big picture. In rhe big picture, society changes its mind frequently about its ideas of leadership. Leadership ideology changes its definition of what is leadership in a given society?
The best treatise I know on premodern society and leadership is by Michael Nerlich (1987a, b). He does something quite exciting, positioning Camelot's Knights of the Round Table, Machiavelli's The Prince, Don Quixote as The Knight Errant, and Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice in a theory of premodern leadership and society. Nerlich argues that leadership is an "ideology of adventure," one where society has redefined from one generation to the next just what is a Knight, and for our interest, what is a leader. the knight of the roundtable is now the bureaucratic knight of the board room, and these are really quite different characters, but both called leader. My basic thesis is that the ideology of what constitutes a leader will change radically from one generation and one society to the next.
To dream the impossible dream
To fight the unbeatable foe
To bear with unbearable sorrow
To run where the brave dare not go.
To right the unrightable wrong
To be better far than you are
To try when your arms are too weary
To reach the unreachable star
This is my quest, to follow that star,
No matter how hopeless, no matter how far
To be willing to give when there's no more to give
To be willing to die so that honor and justice may live
Welcome to
Camelot, the leaderly ideals of chivalry and heroics! Premodern society
and its leadership begins with the Knights of the Roundtable who have real
dragons to slay, onto sending knights to the crusades, proceeds to the
Machiavellian Princes hiring knights as mercenaries in the Italian
Renaissance, then to Don Quixote who has no real dragons to slay to prove he
is heroic, and ends with the battle cry of modernity, as the merchants of
commerce and trade becomes anointed as the Knights of Business and Commerce.
Antonio in Merchant of Venice was in fact the Royal Adventurer, the business
knight. But the Knights of Business do not face down dragons in
tournament, they do not go on some voyage of crusade or adventure, these are
knights who like Antonio, in the Merchant of Venice, just stay at home and
count their booty, sending others like Bassanio to go on the adventure.
Nerlich posits a class struggle with several contenders, each wanting to be on top of the heap. And at different historical points, each takes a turn at being society's chosen leaders. What follows is my own satire.
Table One: The Changing Characters' Personas in Premodern Leadership
Religious Saints - From the ethical and spiritual leaders to the anointed popes and heads of all religions. Soon the Kings and Queens would form nation states and religious feudalism would have to await fundamentalism to be reborn.
Kings and Queens - The Kings set up castles and towns to rule commerce and plantations to rule the peasants. But, they needed armies to protect the commerce of their castles and nearby towns and plantations. The armies' knights had to be paid, so when the cash ran short, the knight errants raped and pillaged as their repayment. This proved quite upsetting to the masses, who asked the crown to tame the unruly knights. The successors to King and Queen are dictatorship and democracy. And in democracy, "public/government" is everywhere equated to central bureaucracy.
Princes - Those aspiring kings who Machiavelli described so well. They exercise leadership in a politics of power. Nerlich points out that Machiavelli had an ideal image of a Princely leader who could bring order to the chaos of the feuding towns of Italy. Funny thing is the Prince reigns still in the corporate empire, but leader theory elects to ignore the politics of power.
Knights - (What follows in not linear history) - First the noble knights of King Arthur's roundtable doing battle with dragons to win the heart of Guinevere until all the dragons were slain (this could be myth); secondly, knights were recruited to be heroes in the armies of the crusades; thirdly, knights were hired by kings and nobles as mercenaries until the invention of the long box made it cheaper to convert peasants into militia; fourthly, the knights of commerce, who rose to power by being lenders, merchants, and shipping lane owners. Knights in more modern times were once again taught the courtly virtues of chivalry and the romantic legend of the roundtable. But, once they had touched gold and tasted blood...
Nobles - At first a part of the court, collecting taxes for Kings and Queens and part of the spectacle of the court, their right to court exchanged for taxes collected from the peasants on noble estates. Oh and the peasants lands given over to the nobles for obvious reasons.
Merchants - Those bourgeoisie upstarts who bought noble privilege and knightly titles in exchange for financing the crown and doing the shipping and outfitting for the crusades. Merchants in 1083 formed guilds based on apprenticeship, journeyperson, and master structures, in Paris to give each other guild masters, mutual protection on water and on land (Nerlich, 1987a: 55). Overtime, guilds became aristocratic and restricted their membership to purchase. Soon merchants hired the knights to protect trade routes, and to be security guards of malls on foreign soil. The terminology gets quite overlapped to other types in my list. There were Merchant Knights of the Order of Trade Goods and Princes of the Wine Trade. Merchant guildsmen and women had coats of arms, and Printers had the right to bear a sword. Early on the merchant adventurers sent on the sea voyages, risking their death, but in subsequent generations, merchants such as Antonio (Merchant of Venice) stayed at home, and risked only their fortune. Antonio was a member of the Royal Merchant Adventurers of England (though Shakespeare did pretend he was from Venice; why, but to keep his head while ridiculing the global conquest). Adventure became narrowly defined to a financial, capital risk context. Today, the Merchant Adventurer is a stock investor or worse, a banker.
Peasants - They live and die at the mercy of all the above leaders. Adam Smith argues the peasants were stripped of their lands in agrarian capitalism, then this excess relocated to the town's factories for slavish employment. Karl Marx believed, for a time, that this working class would rise up to overthrow the merchant class (the bourgeoisie capitalists). But, instead McDonalds, TV, Disneyland, and Las Vegas was given to the masses, and consumption of the spectacle became all the rage. Production was not the route to revolution.
In postmodern theory, we debate whether Marx's theory of social and economic classes is out-dated. In the U.S. in particular, we are taught in school and TV, that we are the classless society. But, if this be true, then why is the son of the royal Bush family, now president?
Relevance to Theatrics of Leadership
In the play, Tamara (Boje, 1995) the characters change their identity, from scene to scene, and stage to stage. This is also true for each of the leader characters in Table One.
Tamara is a play that enacts a true story taken from the diary of Aelis Mazoyer. It is Italy, January 10, 1927, in the era of Mussolini. Instead of remaining stationary, viewing a single stage, the audience fragments into small groups that chase characters from one room to the next, from one floor to the next, even going into bedrooms, kitchens, and other chambers to chase and co-create the stories that interest them the most. If there are a dozen stages and a dozen storytellers, the number of story lines an audience could trace as it chases the wandering discourses of Tamara is 12 factorial (479,001,600).
The ideology of what is leadership changes for a given society. Each of the characters in Table One Tamara, changes with the times, and the needs and expectations of society. I got this idea from being a spectator, then actor in the Tamara play. For example, when attending the play I followed the chauffeur from the kitchen to the maid's bedroom; there she met the butler, who had just entered the drawing room. As they completed their scene, they each wandered off into different rooms, leaving the audience, myself included, to choose whom to follow. At this point I become more than spectator, I must decide how to participate in the play. And in various scenes, I become an actor, even trading lines and stances with other actors (some of whom are paid to be there, and others like me, who pay for the privilege). There is great indeterminacy about each character in Tamara. I think, I am following a chauffeur, who in one discourse changes the rules and becomes a spy disguised as a chauffeur and who then becomes an aristocrat pretending to be a spy pretending to be a chauffeur. Now, in his love affair with the maid, is he indeed in love with the maid, is he using her to spy on the aristocracy, or is he toying with her as an exploitable subject?
Tamara is a way to understand the ideology and theatrics of leadership. One thinks they are studying a princely leader, who turns out to be a bureaucrat pretending to be a prince, who in the final scene is revealed to be a superwoman pretending to be bureaucrat who is pretending to be a prince. Do we know what kind of leader Bill Gates, Phil Knights, or Steve Jobs is - or do we make our guesses seeing them on one stage, when they shift their characterization from one stage to the next? And as a society, have we changed our expectations of leader, preferring the more bureaucratic to the sly princely ones?
As we shall explore below, leaders are re-written throughout history, to make them appear robber baron in one era, and entrepreneurs bringing economic progress in the next.
The Non-Linearity of Premodern, Modern, and Postmodern Leadership and Society
Premodern has never been replaced by modern or postmodern. Rather, all three discourse play in this world. Julius Caesar knew how to initiate structure and act with consideration to his Shock Troops. He did not need the modern managerialist 9,9 Managerial Grid of the Ohio State 2-factor leadership model. The idea of linear progress of modern over premodern, and postmodern over modern is a fiction. It is modern fiction of leadership that leaders act with trust, participation, consideration, and initiate their structure with rational calculability. Mostly, what I see are bully leaders trying to pretend they are considerate or incompetent ones that pretend they know how to be justice in the exercise of power. The biggest progress myth of all is that leadership theory is know beyond the Prince, Machiavelli's classic strategic leadership and politics of power text. The second would be the myth that today's leaders can be as heroic as those in antiquity. The third mythic would be that today's leaders have all the traits of Boy Scouts: considerate, kind, gentle, caring, trustworthy, honest, and ethical. Today leadership theory acts as a form of social control, a way to discipline leaders in their training to be boy scouts. Yet, anyone who follows business or political leaders, knows these are not boy scouts, these are Princes of manipulation, deceit, and exploitation who campaign with boy scout and heroic masks.
The Premodern leader of antiquity faced In the Intro to the Stogdill Handbook of Leadership (Bass, 1981: 5-6), there is homage to the study of leadership in ancient times. I have extended their list a bit.
Egyptian Leaders
Authority is in thy mouth (see 1st voice).
Perception is in thy heart (see 2nd voice)
And thy tongue is the shrine of justice (see 3rd voice).
Greek Leaders in Homer's Iliad
Justice and Judgment of Agamemnon
Wisdom and Council of Nestor
Shrewdness and Cunning of Odysseus
Valor and action of Achilles
Italian Renaissance Leader of Machiavelli's Prince
Create Fear in the people
Create Love in the people
Create Hate in the people
Chinese Leadership
Sun Tsu and Art of Leadership
I' Ching of Leadership
Mao and Leadership
New Zealand
Maori tribes who seek to reclaim indigenous leader knowledge from the colonizers of modern study.
This is done by reclaiming ancient texts and studying them for insight in how to lead in contemporary times.
Native American
Each tribe has its own model of leadership
The mistake is to reduce the ancient knowledge to the modern 2 or 3 factors of leadership obsession.
Shakespeare's England
Henry V the heroic leader
Antonio in Merchant of Venice, the stay-at-home(knight) adventurer who sent others on adventure, risking money, but not his life.
Antony (the one with Cleopatra) who had such a uni-focused style of leading, he failed to adapt.
The point of these charts is that the roots of various leaders schools run into premodern knowledge of leadership. And now after decades of searching for universal traits, behavioral factors, and situational determinants, leadership science is headed out to discover what premodern leadership studies advocated all along. I am saying that modern leadership study is the Omega, the detour to rediscover a basic truth. That is, leadership is defined and enacted differently by cultures across time and place. Bob House and the Globe Project (with hundreds of leader researchers) is colonizing the planet, in a effort to prove that leaders vary by culture. I would add that they vary also by time, in their historicity. each time and place expects a different leader behavior, presents its own situation determinants, and calls forth different leader personalities in its socialization. Universal leader behaviors, traits, and situations is a modern mythic, to keep us from taking premodern leadership, and it pension for individual initiative seriously.
Premodern Leaders can be studied to reveal how they different in their social and historical circumstance, thereby negating universalizing claims of modern leadership study.
The modern leader is like Don Quixote, who does battle with windmills, unable to find any dragons. How can the modern leader be heroic when they can not really risk life and limb to battle dragons. Rather the modern leader does battle with the faux dragon called "bureaucracy." This is a battle fought on the edge of the abyss. What does this theatrics of leadership look like? On stage-left is the abyss, at center stage is the non-heroic leader, and at stage-right is bureaucracy. George Bataille put it this way (VE, 222):
For it is the foundation of things that has fallen into a bottom-less void. And what is fearlessly conquered-no longer in a duel where the death of the hero is risked against that of the monster, in exchange for an indifferent duration-is not an isolated creature; it is the very void and the vertiginous fall, it is TIME. The movement of all life now places the human being before the alternative of either this conquest or a disastrous retreat. The human being arrives at the threshold: there he must throw himself headlong into that which has no foundation and no head.
The modern heroic leader descended into the catastrophic abyss or retreats into the bureaucratic stasis of calculated order. This is a headless leader, one who can not see a dragon, but who imagines one anyway. Leadership is an enormous fetish, a phallus of imperial proportion, a social panic at the thought that chaos looms, and only the head can save them from the abyss. The abyss is part catastrophe, another part chance, and mostly just decomposition and decay, the stuff of death. A society would rather enter under fascist or totalitarian leadership than face up to the abyss that is all around. This is leadership in its spectacular form, performed with efficiency and the calculation of accountants, and putting the heroic mask over the headless leader who will save the masses from its simulacra dragon.
The Knightly Adventure of Modern Leadership and Society
After Shakespeare's gift of the theatrics of modern leadership triumphant over feudal capitalism, we see the rise of the modern knightly leader (Boje, 2000b). Modern society wants production, and leaders are selected who tame science into technology and people into factories.
Were late 19th century industrialists "Robber Barons" or "Knights of Industry?" Modernity is the age of the Robber Barons, the Vanderbilts, Morgans, Armours, Carnegies, Mellons, Duponts, Goulds, Fisks, and Rockefellers (See Robber Barons). Then came the Fords and today Bill Gates and Phil Knight. Robber Baron leadership is the pinnacle of laissez-faire capitalism and Social Darwinism..
J. P. Morgan
These corporate tycoons set up factories, railroads, steel mills, and chemical factories. They conglomerated and hoarded together massive empires of production. These great Social Darwinian leaders created an ideology that Herbert Spencer crafted and Charles Darwin imitated, that the great leaders are the survivors of the fittest over the weaklings. The poor were meant to be poor, and God selected the strongest to lead and dominate people and Earth. But these modern Princes wanted to be Loved and set hired writers to author heroic biographies (see Ford as prime example, but also Walt Disney). The Princes of Commerce and Lords of Industry are the stay at home knights with no beastly dragon to slay they are content to amass their wealth through exploitation. Robber baron has several definitions:
1. American industrial or financial capitalist of the late 19th
century who became wealthy by unethical means, such as questionable
stock-market operations, buying government influence, appropriating natural resources, and exploitation of labor (through low sweat wage scales) .2. A feudal lord who robbed travelers passing through his domain.
3. A Robber Baron was a "lord of industry." They made millions of dollars by monopolizing trade in one or two industries. They were often depicted as fat cats or wealthy scoundrels. To win the love of the people, many "robber barons" gave millions to charity.
Robber Barons have there defenders: "Sure, they were interested in making money, but who can deny their ingenuity, ability and force. They were the movers and shakers who built railroads, founded the oil industry, and created great national industries. Now comes a new breed of robber baron, the antithesis of the great builders of the nineteenth century. As I survey the carnage in the wake of our country's leveraged buy out (LBO) binge of recent years, it seems to me that we are looking at the rape of America" (Allmon, 1998). Klein (1995) argues that the history of robber barons as rapacious predators is false, and these were really helpful entrepreneurs. "The men Josephson (in his book Robber Barons, 1934) caricatured were in fact the creators of the industrial system that gave the United States the most powerful and dynamic economy in the world" (additions mine).
"Besides LBO baronism, there is Bill Gates. Then as now, robber barons are able to kill off the two countervailing forces (government and labor) that make the ethical capitalism, Adam Smith advocated possible.
Is Bill Gates a robber baron, the ruthless modern day feudal
lord? Some say Windows 98 = Mac 84 (Cynical
Optimist, 1998; Stop
Bill Gates; Cyberspace Inc;
Nader & Love, 1999).
Others argue, "Microsoft’s lynching [is] “high-tech” because it’s one in which the firm’s own
success and its own products are being used to weave a noose for its own
neck" (Salsman,
1999). Cyberspace is to a source of knowledge capitalism -- meaning commercial
knowledge products produced, distributed, and consumed via cyber hookup. Bill
Gates is the baron of the new frontier of adventure, cyberspace. And
this cyberspace spells doom for mechanistic production capitalism. Knowledge
capitalism is reterritorializing production capitalism, converting every
business and every cultural space into cyberspace. The state seeks to tame
this baron with courtly legality. Gates stands defiant in opposition to the
courtly ideology of his adventures.
Is Gates different from the robber barons Lloyd (1884) critiqued?
Free market capitalists are willing to overlook monopoly. If they have there way market forces advocates risk driving society back to the future Robber Baron days. Opponents have no sympathy for filthy rich robber barons who don't want to ante up their fair share. Is our society paving the way for robber barons of the information age? (House Telecom Bill, 1995).
But, Were the Robber Barons Really Robbers?
Many argue that Rober Barons continue to bring us economic progress.
The big business leaders of the 1880s and 1890s were controversial. to admirers, Andrew Carnegie (steel), John D. Rockefeller (oil), Jay Gould (railroads), and J. Pierpont Morgan (banking) were "captains of industry." Their vision, innovations, and skills paved the way for a bright economic future. To critics, they were "Robber Barons." they established monopolies, crushed their competitors, and raised prices. Many feared that their ruthless business tactics hurt consumers and exploited workers (Source).
And what is the Adventure of Postmodern Leadership and Society?
Society has defined its new ideology of leadership, it is no longer production, but consumption that defines leaders in postmodern society. Society's current idea of leader is one who helps society to consumer. Today's leaders are leaders of consumption. Our heroes are Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan and material girl Madonna. And our business heroes do not actually go on adventures, they make it legitimate to consume objects of mass desire; they ennoble our consumption in mass spectacle writ large on TV, WWW, and the Palaces of Las Vegas. And, these new knights of business commerce engage in a Theatrics of Global conquest, that is no less exploitative than the conquistadors, and the voyage of Columbus. For now we have the conquest of the Third World, and their enslavement into tens of thousands of sweatshops, subcontracted to First World global corporations, with Knightly CEOs.
Links:
References
Allmon, Charles (1988) Robber Barons Ride Again Reprinted from the January 1988 Better Investing, Growth Stock Outlook.
Boje, D. M. (2000a) Leadership in and Out of The Box: The Leadership of Princes, Heroes, Bureaucrats, and Supermen & Superwomen.
Boje, D. M. (2000b) "Global Theatrics of Capitalism." Paper for the 2001 Academy of Management symposium on Theatrics, Washington D.C. August.
Klein, Maury (1995) "The Robber Barons’ Bum Rap." Urbanities Vol. 5 (1).
Lloyd, Henry Demarest (1884) "The Lords of Industry," North American Review 331 (June 1884).
Nerlich, M. (1987a). Ideology of Adventure: Studies in Modern Consciousness 1100-1750. Vol. 1. Trans. By Ruth Crowley. MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Nerlich, M. (1987b). Ideology of Adventure: Studies in Modern Consciousness 1100-1750. Vol. 2. Trans. By Ruth Crowley. MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Shakespeare - main web site (Also see full text of Merchant of Venice play).
Salsman, Richard M. (1999) "The Injustice of Antitrust Laws as
Reflected in the High-Tech Lynching of Microsoft." Adapted from a lecture presented to Harvard University on 06 May, 1999.Yewell, John, Dodge, Chris & DeSirey, Jan (1992) Confronting Columbus: An Anthology. NC: McFarland & Company, Inc. Publishers.
For additional references consult Boje & Luhman, 1999