Political theorists seldom have direct experience of power. Bringing
together two decades of experience in educational leadership and my
vocation as a political theorist, I offer advice to prospective leaders.
This essay takes Machiavelli's Prince as a model in terms of
format, and occasionally draws on his prose, either in agreement or to
offer a different opinion. I emphasize the importance of context and
organizational type in thinking about leadership, and of paying attention
to what leaders actually do. I describe some of the qualities that often
prove helpful to leaders, and discuss the distinctive attractions and
pitfalls of power-holding.Nannerl O.
Keohane is Laurance Rockefeller Distinguished Visiting Professor at the
Woodrow Wilson School and the Center for Human Values, Princeton
University (nkeohane@princeton.edu). From 1981 until 2004, she served as
President of Wellesley College and then of Duke University. She is the
author of Philosophy and the State in France and essays on
political philosophy, education and feminism. An earlier version of this
essay was delivered as the Godkin Lecture at the John F. Kennedy School of
Government, Harvard University, in February 2005. I acknowledge with
gratitude comments on earlier drafts from colleagues at Harvard, Stanford,
and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, especially
from Charles Griswold, Robert O. Keohane, James G. March, Norman Naimark,
Joseph S. Nye Jr., Josiah Ober, and Samuel Popkin. I am also grateful to
the assistant to the editor at Perspectives on Politics who
suggested that I recast the lecture in the spirit of Machiavelli's
The Prince. The reader who is familiar with this work will note
multiple occasions where I have used his tone and even occasionally his
prose, with minimal emendations, to make my own points, sometimes in
agreement and sometimes in dissent, but without direct citation. After the
essay was submitted for review, Harvey Mansfield made a number of helpful
suggestions and drew my attention to Carnes Lord's The Modern
Prince, which also uses Machiavelli's treatise as a
“literary model of sorts.”