Leadership Across Boundaries

Leadership Across Boundaries: A Passage to Aporia. Nathan Harter. New York: Routledge, 2020.

The title of Nathan Harter’s latest book aptly captures its driving theme as well as the spirit in which it is written. In this work, Harter raises the possibility that leadership understood in broad, macro-level terms is both a complex, yet necessary undertaking. It is complex in the sense that trying to study it involves maneuvering through space and time while simultaneously juggling multiple levels of analysis. It is necessary in the sense that leadership studies, if it is to hold itself to a high standard, aims at informing those attentive to the way in which people, systems, and ideas organize themselves throughout time. Leadership studies as it currently stands, however, has yoked itself to a certain limited number of modes to carry out tasks far too complex for its existing tools, according to Harter. Thus, his ambitious project here is to open leadership to the possibility of considering new conceptual modes for students and practitioners of leadership.

To do this, Harter consults a wide literature. It is at once striking to the reader that the book is thoroughly philosophic. To take an example in the first chapter, Harter orients the reader by pointing out leadership is filtered through metaphors, images, and icons. The general thrust of this insight has its roots in Plato and finds its modern manifestation in thinkers like Arendt and Ortega y Gasset. The relevant application to leadership is that it should not limit its focus to a certain time and space, but it ought rather to seek continuity in images throughout history. Only then is it possible, within each situation, to identify the multiple forces at play. Harter offers a slew of historical examples to demonstrate this point such as Luther’s translation of the Bible into German and St. Francis’s extra-ordinary leadership, the paradox of spontaneous order institutions like common law, and the role of turbulence as a condition upon which the leader both emerges from, creates, or attempts to subdue. What all of these images of leadership elucidate is a confrontation with aporia or contradiction with the subsequent result that something new is generated from it.

In chapter two, Harter describes how Luther’s embraced the aporia of the worsening discord of the church and the world in his time as a generative opportunity. In the same vein, Harter describes this phenomenon at play in Hayek’s theory of spontaneous order in chapter three. Spontaneous order is often the result of a set of tensions or conflict that subsequently get synthesized to generate a new result. Chapter four helpfully applies Hayek’s insight to the common law system.

The midpoint and peak of the book makes the case for the richness of dialogue as a model for leadership. Dialogue as a mode of participation exemplifies what Harter is after in his new model. That is, dialogue is the process by which humans pursue questions about the human good together. In dialogue they necessarily run into aporias but, like in the common law, participants learn how to manage those tensions and build something new as a result. Chapters nine and ten shed further light on this mode of leadership as dialogue in terms of synchrony and turbulence. The chapter which closes the work on Aikido politics echoes the same lesson that dialogue imparts. The dialectical movement of opening up to tensions or conflict, learning from the other side that creates the turmoil, and then synthesizing and coming to harmony with what was previously a paradox exemplifies good leadership and if considered deeply, will perhaps enrich every soul.

Harter does not deny the evident theological presence in his work. Not only does he dedicate two chapters to two prominent religious leaders specifically hailing from the Christian tradition, but the theme of the book also illuminates the limits of clean-cut, conceptual knowledge and avoids hubristic attempts to understand the world like Spinoza’s sub specie aeternitatis. Yet, the foregoing raises questions about the proper relationship between leadership, philosophy, and religion. If leadership wants to understand the human condition through the practice of dialogue and actively recognizes its own limits in the process, what delineates it from the practice of philosophy? Likewise, if an openness to the divine or transcendence plays any role in leadership, does the nature of that role need to be spelled out more concretely? Whether there can be a conducive synthesis is left unanswered. Nonetheless, the work leaves healthy seeds for further study of these relations.

This work can also be profitably understood as a development in Professor Harter’s thinking about leadership. This work marks one rung on the ladder of his scholarly ascent. While his previous works attended to smaller levels of aporias and particular individuals, this work seeks to acknowledge them while subsequently moving past them into higher and wider levels of analysis. This attention to leadership as a large-scale mode at work throughout time and on various societal levels marks a distinct departure from traditional leader-centric models in scholarship. Harter certainly does not dismiss these approaches as defunct, however, his book proves that the field of leadership needs to heed the call for a more inclusive set of approaches as well as for interdisciplinary investigation.

Harter’s wonderful variety of source material provides readers from many backgrounds familiar paradigms and analogies with which to better understand the phenomena in question. Of note is Harter’s sustained consideration of his philosophic influences ranging from ancient to modern: from Plato to Heidegger. Yet, even if one is not versed in Heideggerian thought, he or she will not be dropped into the deep end unable to find refuge amidst scholarly jargon. Indeed, one of the great strengths of this book is that it makes honest use of ideas that span across traditionally separated academic disciplines as well as philosophical movements. Likewise, one will not be disappointed by the vast and deep engagement with leadership literature. Without aligning himself strictly with one tradition, Harter fairly explores how many scholars in the field have and continue to improve leadership studies utilizing interdisciplinary methods.

Harter’s overall thesis aims to demonstrate the complexity of social phenomena and the unique position of leadership to evaluate these phenomena. With great agility, Harter maneuvers in and through the worlds of history, philosophy, politics, and psychology offering us a holistic picture of how leadership shares important elements of each. He leads the reader through the process of examining multivariable social, political, historical, and religious phenomena by highlighting precisely what and who is at work in the dynamic. This book is a delightful yet penetrating read fit for anyone attentive to the human condition and wishes to explore its complexities.

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