The ineluctable primacy of application and utility within the field of leadership education is both the consequence of embracing ideologies typified by dictums such as ‘knowledge into action’, as well as the ground on which such pragmatist catchphrases are founded. Asking which of these values came first – is the value ascribed to pragmatism, or is the value attributed to the intentionality of the lexical device? – is not only a good determinant of one appetite for philosophical analysis, but holds to account the notion of pragmatism itself. Some instrumentalist educators[i] look to pragmatism as a ruse to bolster the fiercely unphilosophic[ii] tendency in their thinking. Few in leadership education are sufficiently politically brave to ‘dare question the ontology of the market, or the causality of customer demand, or the superordinacy of economic efficiency, or the sanctity of profit’[iii], say Carter and Jackson, quoting the poststructuralist philosophers Deleuze and Guattari. The notion of ‘perfectibility’ (of apparently discretely defined organizations and individuals) inherent in the instrumentalist’s faith in the ‘application of knowledge’ is strongly critiqued by Deleuze and Guattari, for whom perfectibility is a meaningless construct. My contention is that leaders are ‘understood to be only ever in a state of becoming and emergence [where] [p]erfection cannot (literally, is not possible to) be prescribed [and where] [m]oreover, the very concept implies the desirability of a stasis, which is unachievable’[iv] no matter how pragmatic one’s thinking is.

Pragmatism (or anti-Platonism or anti-foundationalism as it is sometimes called) has strong links with the Nietzschian anti-essentialist traditions on which much of so-called continental philosophy is based, and from which my philosophical and political arguments are based. According to Rorty, the late recent champion of the Deweyan tradition of American pragmatism, Nietzsche is of little use to political theory apart from how ‘his thought can help contemporary, liberal societies recognize the groundlessness and contingency of their values and their existence’[v]. Like me, Rorty does not believe that one can get ‘outside our language’[vi] to ‘a self which is [not] a tissue of contingencies’[vii]. As a formal philosophy, pragmatism concerns the view that inquiry aims at utility for us, as language users, rather than an aiming for an accurate account of how things are in themselves. Pragmatists, not unlike Illich, cannot make sense of the idea that we should pursue truth for its own sake: pragmatists cannot regard truth as a goal of inquiry. So, says Rorty, ‘[t]he purpose of inquiry is to achieve agreement among human beings about what to do, to bring about consensus on the ends to be achieved and the means to be used to achieve those ends’ [viii].I argue that whilst pragmatism is an apparent first choice philosophical basis for examining the truth claims of leadership education of the ‘knowledge into action’ orientation, it fails to acknowledge the political import of action. Whilst Deweyan pragmatism claims to be an educational philosophy of action, ‘a philosophy that takes action as it most basic category [emphasis in orginial]’[ix], I share Mouffe’s[x] serious concern over Rorty’s treatment of politics as ‘something to be deliberated about in banal, familiar terms – terms which do not need philosophical dissection and do not have philosophical presuppositions’ [xi].My claim is that an explicit political formulation of leadership education is prescient of the issues of pluralism, multiculturalism, and antagonism that lay dormant in the educational language of leadership education. These issues are neither familiar nor banal. Instead they will allow me to conclude that a significant displacement of meaning in the concept ‘action’ in the innocuous phrase ‘knowledge into action’ ushers into leadership education new forms of activism and new forms of educational practice. As to which of these comes first, that is yet to be seen.

[i] R. Barnett, Beyond all Reason (Maidenhead: The Society for Research into Higher Education & Open University Press, 2000), p.17

[ii] N. Blake, P. Smeyers, R. Smith & P. Standish, The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), p.8

[iii] P. Carter & N. Jackson in S. Linstead (ed) Organization Theory and Postmodern Thought (London: Sage, 2004), p.113

[iv] Ibid., p110

[v] N. Widder, in D. Boucher and P. Kelly (eds), Political Thinkers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p.451

[vi] R. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin Books, 1999), p.59

[vii] R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p.32

[viii] R. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin Books, 1999), p.xxv

[ix] G. Biesta & N. Burbules, Pragmatism and Educational Research (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003), p.9

[x] C. Mouffe (ed), Deconstruction and Pragmatism (London: Routledge,1996), p.6

[xi] R. Rorty in C. Mouffe (ed), Deconstruction and Pragmatism (London: Routledge,1996), p.17

Given the foregoing, leadership education is leadership itself once it acknowledges its ethico-political agency and capitalises on poststructural leadership’s hegemonic status. Maybe the form of leadership that institutional sites of leadership education can claim is that of edification not education. Rorty champions edification as the embrace of abnormal discourse “for finding new, better, more interesting, more fruitful ways of speaking” (1980, p360). For normal discourse there is a consensus among parties concerning the rules that must be followed in order for a question, an answer or an argument to be considered. Contrarily, abnormal discourse breaks all the rules: “the product of abnormal disourse” says Rorty, “can be anything from nonsense to intellectual revolution, and there is no discipline which describes it, any more than there is a discipline devoted to the unpredictable, or of ‘creativity’” (1980, p320). I would like to encourage the reader to take up Rorty’s challenge of abnormal discourse and, thereby, progressive leadership edification.

Reading Richard Rorty’s embrace of liberalism (in Achieving Our Country, and Contingency, Irony and Solidarity and Philosophy and Social Hope) you’d be forgiven for thinking that pragmatism’s close links with the deconstruction of Derrida implies that these two programmes of rejection of foundationalism naturally embrace liberalism (phew; I can’t believe I wrote that!). Thankfully, help is at hand, in the guise of Michael Sandel and his Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. I’m seeing now that liberalism as per Sandel reaches it limits at its conception of the person – the autonomous, free though strangely transcendent agent that traditional (Rawlsian) liberalism posits. This struck me as an interesting (in a nerdy kind of way) critique of liberalism, which hitherto I’d felt some allegiance to, via Rorty and inferentially via Derrida. So maybe I’m no longer a liberal? Right now I need to find out how Sandel’s communitarian views fit with deconstruction, it at all, as well as the impact his critique has on Rorty’s liberal conception. For this I’m reading Sandel and the intriguing symposia proceedings from Critchley, Derrida, Laclau & Rorty called Deconstruction and Pragmatism. Wouldn’t it be great to build a communitarian based critique not just of liberalism, but of deconstruction and pragmatism? I suspect deconstruction will come out clean.

Surely it is the business of business schools to wean its consumers off notions of certainty and totally founded knowledeges? If, as the view executivezen holds asserts, there is no extra-linguistic certainty, no foundation external to the “conversations” (as Zabala says) that form knowledge, then education becomes ‘edification’, a self-improvement.

 If I’m searching for a nexus with which to anchor further study then ‘representation’ seems to be it: as in Rorty’s distrust of the modern notion that to know is to represent accurately. There are no “permenant, neutral frameworks of inquiry” (Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 1979) and so the whole edifice of epistemology in modern analytic philosophy is built on shifting sands. True assertions are only true by virtue of social context; in which case ‘conversation’ is the ultimate context in which knowledge is to be understood; distinct from getting the facts right, education is about exposure to and aptitude in discourse. This is what Rorty calls “edifying discourse”.

Edification is Rorty’s substitution of Gadamer’s phrase Bildung, which means education or self-formation. Rorty reckons that education sounds too flat and that Bildung sounds too foreign. Edification “stands for this project of finding new, better, more interesting, more fruitful ways of speaking.” (Rorty, 1979, p360). Edifying discourse is supposed to be abnormal, to take us out of our old selves by the power of strangeness, to aid us in becoming new beings. Edification is not a matter of knowing what is out there, as the Platonic-Aristotelian view dictates. This has implications for leadership education.