Foucault on Leadership: The Leader as Subject

This book summarizes Michel Foucault’s last lectures - ranging from Socrates to the Cynics -- as they pertain to the study and practice of leadership, emphasizing the role of ethics and truth-telling as a check on power. It then presents several other contexts where these same lessons can be seen in practice, including in the life of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose career as a writer epitomized speaking truth to power, and somewhat surprisingly in the United States military, in response to its twenty-first century mission of counterinsurgency.

Nathan W. Harter is Professor of Leadership and American Studies and Director of Interdisciplinary Studies, Christopher Newport University, USA.