ABSTRACT
In the previous pages, we have already begun to raise and initially explore questions regarding followership. Further exploration, hopefully leading to understanding, is required if we are to rigorously apply Cicero’s injunction to “follow reason as leader as though it were a god.” Indeed, “follow” is the injunction’s first word. Straightaway we note that Cicero is instructing us to undertake a certain action: following. But what occurs, “exactly,” when one follows? What’s involved in the act of following? Who or what does one follow, and what does it mean to be a follower? And what does a follower do when a follower follows a leader? After all, leaders aren’t the only entities that followers follow. Followers also follow other things, such as football teams and singers; indeed, nowadays we even employ the term “follower” to describe those who take some kind of interest in social media figures (e.g., Twitter “followers” follow Tweeters). Now, like questions about “love” and “Reason” and “beauty” – and perhaps to a lesser extent, “leadership” – such inquiries initially appear deceptively easy to answer. However, as is the case with these other much-used but little-understood terms, when we begin to contemplate these kinds of questions, they’re more difficult to broach than they first appear. Indeed, I think followership is an even more observed and even less understood phenomenon than leadership. Now, due to the scope of this book and its already-ambitious aims, I won’t be theorizing following in general (i.e., the following of leaders, football teams, celebrities, etc.), and I’ll only be theorizing leaderly following according to some dimensions of it – especially following’s relation to leading. This theorization is the principal task of the present chapter. (Chapter 4 is devoted to a theorization of the notion of “Reason-as-leader,” followed by a chapter on “quasi-religiously” following this leader.)
