ACADEMIA Letters An Archaeology of Leadership Nathan Harter Giorgio Agamben composed a little essay on philosophical archaeology (2009) in which he explains that the history of anything begins at the moment of its emergence. Prior to that in time is its pre-history. The history of a human being, for example, begins at birth. The history of a nation begins at its founding. The history of a book begins at publication. We would not say that these things appear ex nihilo (out of nothing). They are not uncaused, appearing spontaneously. So the question arises: what comes before the emergence? If there was no human being before birth, no nation before founding, and no book before publication, what in fact was there? Part of a science of any phenomenon, including leadership, is an investigation into the conditions for its emergence. How is this thing that we are studying made possible? Agamben insists that archaeology is not a record of what happened at the moment of its emergence. That much is part of its history. Neither does a pre-history ask what happened immediately beforehand. Taking this one step further back in time in this way, archaeology does not simply look at what happened preceding the emergence either, because we would not know what to look at. Pre-history is literally before there is a history to consult. A lot of things were happening at the moment of emergence – not all of which turn out to have been relevant (a logical mistake at the root of astrology). One must have some sense what to look for. But to have a sense of what to look for is not always possible. And in some instances, to know in advance what to look for is to pre-judge the investigation, almost as though one has already secretly answered the question and simply needed evidence to validate a hypothesis. To be sure, the scientifc method often proceeds in this fashion, in a process labeled by Charles Sanders Peirce as abduction. Even then, it is a process grounded in a comprehending architecture. Archaeology of the kind described by Agamben tries to isolate what the Greeks called the archē, something that “assures the synchronic comprehensibility and coherence of the Academia Letters, April 2021 Corresponding Author: Nathan Harter, nathan.harter@cnu.edu Citation: Harter, N. (2021). An Archaeology of Leadership. Academia Letters, Article 497. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL497. 1 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0