The Systemic Challenge and Practice of Leadership in a Post-centaurian Society

For thousands of years, humans and horse have co-habitated on the earth. From the steppes of Mongolia to the shores of Ireland and Iceland, horses gradually became an increasingly integral part of the social fabric, as they offered their services to humans in exchange for domesticated survival. In this article, we trace the equestrian iconography of power and leadership from its origins in ancient times through to modern times and identify the transitory position of contemporary management, moving into a post-centaurian age in which the complex iconographic reservoir of meanings and figures is supplanted by new forms of managerial reasoning, founded in the long legacy of the anthropocentrism of the Enlightenment. Through an explorative approach, the systems theoretical approach of Niklas Luhmann is extended to include the modus operandi of pre-modern societies with its abundance of non-human actors such as demons, gods, angels and horses. In conclusion, the article demonstrates how the widely used idea of post-heroic leadership is a severe misconception of historical concepts of heroes; rather, post-heroic deeds are in adherence with equestrian treatises of heroic leadership which promoted the demonstration of heroic excellence in the equestrian manège. As the horses and the heroes of modernity are seemingly relegated to the confinements of history books, the reservoir of equine-heroic semantics and concepts is still with us today and continues to resonate in semantic figures of power, framing the life of the post-centaurian manager, politicians, Ukranian soldiers and the plethora of societal realms still using the language connected to equestrian semantics.