This course introduces students to the foundational issues in the study of ethical leadership. The first part of the course will examine key theoretical problems that have occupied moral and political thinkers from Plato and Aristotle to St Thomas Aquinas and the American Founders: What makes a leader successful? What sort of characteristics and virtues are necessary for leadership? What kind of education and formation do leaders need? Is there a distinctly practical form of wisdom and how can it be acquired? Who are moral exemplars and how can we identify them? What kinds of societies and political regimes best serve to encourage good leaders and to constrain bad ones? How might power tempt and corrupt leaders? How might this be resisted? What is the relationship between leadership and morality? What functions does leadership fill, and what challenges do leaders face, in modern democratic states? How do the various forms of leadership (business, political, military, moral, and spiritual) relate to one another? The second half of the course will look at leaders in action, charting the efforts of politicians, intellectuals, grassroots activists, and moral and spiritual leaders to respond to the challenges of their time and shape the worlds in which they live.
