Bypassing binary, “agent-structure” oppositions that confound orthodox leadership studies, I draw widely from Weber and Tarde to Foucault to present leadership as the presubjective provocation and direction of others in truth-telling. My central claim, developed from Deleuze’s overturning of Platonism, is that leadership can individuate collective, counter-sovereign movements but also sovereignty itself, making leadership both a contingent practice of freedom and a means of subjection. I support my conception of sovereignty’s constitution through leadership with a genealogical interrogation of the relationship between leadership, sovereignty and biopolitics through its materialization in management during Britain’s transformation into a liberal state. I argue that whereas early modern monarchic sovereignty saw all other leaderships as threatening for their capacity to themselves produce a rival sovereignty, the biopolitical sovereignty in emergence today is an effect of the art of managing – strategically producing and consuming – leadership. This development of leadership’s relation to sovereignty contributes to discourses on how decisional sovereignty relates to biopolitics by presenting leadership as the means by which sovereign decision has not only come to be “democratized” and dispersed but also managed by a now global governmentality.
