Decades ago, I edited a volume titled Leadership: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. As the title makes clear, my purpose was to look at leadership through different disciplinary lenses. To get people to understand that knowing something about leadership requires knowing something about several disciplines, not just one. The book (still available on Amazon) includes chapters written by, among others, a psychologist, sociologist, and political scientist, an anthropologist, organizational behaviorist, and philosopher.
The Foreword was written by James MacGregor Burns, a historian and political scientist who was then and still is considered a preeminent expert on leadership. Burns was cautiously optimistic about leadership as a discipline. But as he admitted in his Foreword, the subject was singularly knotty, it was especially difficult to wrestle to the ground. “The problem,” he wrote, “is that no field of study calls for more difficult and daring crossing of interdisciplinary borders than does the study of leadership, and no field suffers from more narrow specialization.”
The point pertains now as it did then. Now as then leadership is or it should be an interdisciplinary field of inquiry. But now as then rare is the scholar who undertakes an interdisciplinary (or multidisciplinary) inquiry if only because rare is the institution of higher education that rewards interdisciplinary (multidisciplinary) work.
The point came to mind again recently when I was made aware for the umpteenth time what an astonishment is the current American president. He is so far out of the previous presidential mainstream that we the American people were not merely unprepared for a leader like him. We were unequipped. As was, as is, the political system within which we used to operate. Nothing about America – not its laws or norms, not its history or ideology – prepared the American people for what we have now. A leader at the helm who threatens unilaterally to snatch Greenland and thereby single-handedly destroy NATO.
Trump in full is mind bending in the extreme. Which is precisely why leadership is or should be the stuff not just of the social sciences but also of the liberal arts. Trump’s presidency personifies – exemplifies – the large failure of our small imaginations. Which is why in that book I mentioned should have been a chapter on Shakespeare.