The Discursive Prince
Political Leadership and Popular Sovereignty
A book proposal by
Nico A. Heller
© 2014 by Nico Andreas Heller. All rights reserved.
The Discursive Prince
Political Leadership and Public Sovereignty
A book proposal by
Nico Andreas Heller
Contact email
[email protected]
Table of content
Background ..................................... 02
Aims ................................................. 03
Conceptual Framework .................. 05
Methodology ................................... 06
Target audience .............................. 06
© 2014 by Nico Andreas Heller. All rights reserved.
1|Page
The Discursive Prince
Political Leadership and Public Sovereignty
A book proposal by
Nico Andreas Heller
Contact email
[email protected]
Background
The Discursive Prince: Political Leadership and Popular Sovereignty (the proposed
book project) engages with and builds on my work with the Democracy School,
which I founded originally to help local politicians (councillors) address complex local
challenges more effectively, but which has since evolved and now sees its primary
purpose in fostering a new generation of ‘citizen-politicians’.
The Democracy School secured its first major contract in 2006/7 when I was asked
by Tower Hamlets Council to develop a 12 month community leadership programme
for their elected members (councillors). This programme was extended for another
12 months before it was superseded by a number of smaller contracts. Then from
2009 onwards I began also working with councillors at other local authorities and,
between 2009 and 2011, have worked across a wide range of different political
settings at both county and district/borough levels. In 2011 this work began to dry
up (due to budget cuts) and by the end of 2012 had grinded to a hold completely. At
the same time, a new far right populist nationalism was rapidly gaining ground, both
across the EU and in the UK, with Nigel Farage as its ‘acceptable’ face in the UK.
Hence, in the autumn of 2012 I began repositioning the School as an independently
funded (non-governmental) organisation and started developing our first two ‘clientindependent’ political leadership programmes: Emerging European Leaders (EEL), in
response to the European crisis, and Emerging British Leaders (EBL), in response to
the rise in right-wing populism in the UK.
Not having to content with a client other than myself has allowed me to develop
from scratch, based on my own experience of working with and observing politicians,
a core curriculum, called the Three Pillars of Political Action, which now forms the
basis of both the EEL and the EBL. The three pillars are our biographical/historical,
our local/communal, and our relational/political pillar – or ‘self’, ‘place’ and ‘the other’
for short. Within the context of these new initiatives, these pillars function both as
descriptive frameworks and as developmental or learning domains. A large part of a
participant’s learning agenda will be about developing the Three Pillars of Political
Action as part of their political ‘praxis’. Having had the freedom to design these
initiatives without the constraints of a client brief also meant that I was able to decide
what kind of ‘model of democracy’ I wanted to use as the basis for this work, or put
differently, what kind of political reality I want to prepare participants for. Since the
two models I had to work with in the past (the aggregative and the deliberative
© 2014 by Nico Andreas Heller. All rights reserved.
2|Page
The Discursive Prince
Political Leadership and Public Sovereignty
A book proposal by
Nico Andreas Heller
Contact email
[email protected]
model), both seemed somewhat inappropriate, or at least insufficient in the face of
this emerging far-right populism, I was keen to explore other options and for now
work with Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic model which calls for a radicalisation, and
indeed a re-politicisation of democracy.
When I first started out in 2006 my work was basically informed by two general
questions: how political leadership can be learned and how learning can be integral
to political practice. These questions are obviously still relevant; but since our shift
from a client-led to an independent organisation, a number of additional questions,
linked to our ambition to foster a new generation of citizen-politicians, have gained in
importance. These include contextual questions about the relevance of and scope for
‘political’ leadership in a ‘post-political’ world, as well as strategic questions about
where, in a Machiavellian sense, political power resides today (civil society, political
parties or the state), how it can be sized by whom, and why it may be lost.
My early experiences of working with local councils to improve the quality of local
leadership around issues of public concern, the onset of austerity, the shift in the
School’s focus – driven as much by economic necessity, as by a desire to engage
with wider political currents – the new questions this has raised and the perspectives
this has opened up, have all in various ways fed into the formulation of this proposal.
Aims
The proposed book project aims to help readers understand the unique challenges
political leaders face in today’s post-political multi-polar world and explores how they
might be overcome. It draws on my experience of working with politicians over many
years and is divided into three parts.
The first part, entitled Political Leadership in a Post-political World, starts from the
premise that in a post-political world political leadership has become obsolete. By a
post-political world I mean a world where there are no legitimate political alternatives
for the electorate to choose from, where the political distinction between ‘left’ and
‘right’ has been replaced by a moral distinction between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ (Mouffe,
2005). Under such conditions, arguably the first challenge any political leader will
face is to re-introduce the element of ‘the political’ into public discourse. For
example, across the EU, there exists for some years now a hegemonic consensus
amongst centrist parties (conservatives, social democrats, liberals etc) that ‘there is
© 2014 by Nico Andreas Heller. All rights reserved.
3|Page
The Discursive Prince
Political Leadership and Public Sovereignty
A book proposal by
Nico Andreas Heller
Contact email
[email protected]
no alternative to neo-liberal globalisation’. This has made it nigh impossible for the
leaders of these ‘moderate’ parties to differentiate themselves meaningfully and has
opened up new radical spaces, especially, but not only, on the far-right, which a new
generation of political leaders, such as Nigel Farage and Marie Le Pen exploits.
Hence, in the first part of this book I will be exploring these new phenomena, both
at a level of theory and empirically, with a view to establishing what mainstream
political leaders, those at the centre of the political spectrum, might learn from the
popular success of these new radical (left- and right-wing) leaders. Key themes will
include hegemony, the political, anti- or post-politics, radicalisation and democracy.
If the first part of this book is concerned with the context of political leadership, and
the strategies political leaders deploy to shape that context to their advantage, the
‘platforms’ in other words they are able to create for themselves, the second part,
entitled The Discursive Prince, focuses on the purpose of political leadership – the
legitimate exercise of political power – and the means by which that purpose is
realised. Using Machiavelli’s Prince as a starting point, the idea is to explore what a
democratic ‘prince’ might look like in today’s neo-liberal, crisis-ridden Europe (would
she be a populist, a technocrat or an activist?), what routes to power she might
identify and pursue (would she come up through an Oxbridge-type system like
Cameron, ride the wave of populism like Le Pen, or be parachuted in like Monti?) and
what means for exercising power she might have at her disposal. Using the Prince as
a catalyst generates an interesting schema for the construction of case studies and
allows me to develop further the themes introduced previously (hegemony etc).
Finally, in part three I will be looking at the praxis of political leadership, utilising my
Three Pillars of Political Action (see Introduction above and Methodology below), first
as a descriptive framework to explore particular aspects (biographical, relational etc)
of political leadership praxis, and then as a conceptual tool to help me translate and
integrate the key themes developed thus far – namely the context/platform of political
leadership, its purpose and praxis – into a learning (praxis development) agenda for
emerging and established political leaders.
I propose approaching this topic thematically this way (platform > purpose > praxis),
because it allows me to systematically explore the wider ‘Machiavellian question’ of
how someone, without a political background to start with but intend on ‘changing the
world for the better’, might go about doing that effectively and legitimately through
the pursuit of political goals and the practice of political leadership in a ‘democratically
© 2014 by Nico Andreas Heller. All rights reserved.
4|Page
The Discursive Prince
Political Leadership and Public Sovereignty
A book proposal by
Nico Andreas Heller
Contact email
[email protected]
governed’ country such as the UK, France or Germany today. I currently imagine that
each of these three parts consists of two chapters and breaks down as follows:
Introduction: [to follow]
Part 1: Political Leadership in a Post-political World
Chapter 1: The Reinsertion of the Political into Public Discourse
Chapter 2: Building a Political Leadership Platform
Part 2: The Discursive Prince
Chapter 3: The Emperor's New Clothes – Machiavelli’s Prince Today
Chapter 4: All Political Lives End in Failure – or Do They?
Part 3: The Three Pillars of Political Action
Chapter 5: Self, Place and the Other
Chapter 6: Towards A Generative Political Praxis
Conclusion: [to follow]
Conceptual Framework
The project is grounded in the conviction that ‘the political’ always generates conflict
(see also Carl Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction) and eventually leads to violence,
whether in the form of war, civil war or terrorism, unless political platforms are
created that allow, (as I will argue) through the exercise of political leadership, for
the antagonism inherent in the political to be transformed into what Chantal Mouffe
calls agonism, a form of constructive conflict, characteristic of democratic politics.
To develop this idea, I will initially follow in the footsteps of Chantal Mouffe, building
on her critique of reflexive modernisation (Beck) and third way politics (Giddens),
and adopting a discursive post-Marxist position that allows me, not only to critique
both the aggregative and the deliberate/consensual models of democracy, but also
to develop a conception of leadership that is both political and radical.
Having established my theoretical base in this way, I will then turn to Machiavelli’s
Prince (alongside his Discourses), to attempt a critical contemporary ‘reworking’ of
© 2014 by Nico Andreas Heller. All rights reserved.
5|Page
The Discursive Prince
Political Leadership and Public Sovereignty
A book proposal by
Nico Andreas Heller
Contact email
[email protected]
his principal ideas and concepts in relation to political leadership, utilising empirical
evidence throughout (examples and case studies), just as he would have done,
before attempting in the final part of the book to formulate a new approach to the
practice of leadership which I currently tentatively call ‘generative political praxis’.
Methodology
The proposed project, at its core, combines a thematically structured, three part
scholarly enquiry with three ‘Machiavellian case studies’ – say Merkel, Cameron and
Farage for instance – that trace the rise, ‘reign’ and, where applicable, fall of
contemporary political leaders (UK/EU) to provide practical insights and an empirical
backdrop (illustrations etc) for the book. This will be supplemented with short case
examples, drawn mainly from media/public sources, which will be used throughout to
support my argument. Depending on when the Democracy School is able to launch
the EEL and EBL programmes, I may also be able to include additional case material
from these initiatives to support the praxis element of the book – although this would
be more of a welcome bonus rather than an essential part. To construct the three
main case studies, I will draw primarily on secondary sources (publications, media
reports, promotional materials and spokespeople) but will also make an effort to
conduct interviews with my subjects directly. As a precautionary measure though,
given the elite nature of my subjects and the access issues this causes, I will structure
my cases in such a way that direct access will not be essential.
Although the primary purpose of these cases is a descriptive one, I may, if it looks
like it could be of benefit, also conduct a rhetorical analysis of some of the texts
(narrative accounts) included, utilising Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic method (pentad),
which considers human communication as a form of action and generates useful
insights about people’s motivations – e.g. what motivates a particular ‘action’.
Target audience
Given the practice-driven approach adopted, the people most likely to be interested in
this work will be practitioners: activists, entrepreneurs, politicians and academics.
© 2014 by Nico Andreas Heller. All rights reserved.
6|Page