Abstract
In this essay, we seek to further an understanding of leadership as the evolution of perspectives embedded within a wider historical frame. It is our contention that recovering the historical, economic, and cultural basis for leadership theories since the Second World War reveals three hidden storylines; each one of them tied to the three dominant historical eras. By hidden storylines we refer to the subtexts and the forgotten and lesser known, but no less foundational aspects of the more popularized and codified leadership theories that came to define each of those historical eras. Those three eras are the Cold War, the Post-Cold War and the Post-9/11 era. Understanding the emergence of the `dark side' of leadership in a post-9/11 environment is intricately tied to uncovering and narrating the relationship of ideas about leadership to the dominant material and ideational struggles that defined each of these eras. Recovering the `bright side' of leadership as an oppositional narrative and reversing the trend toward fundamentalism requires a new model of leadership. We offer `pragmatic complexity' as a provisional step toward that new model.
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