Democratic infrastructure of agency and leadership

The article criticizes the traditional 'great man' model, in which agency and decision-making capacity are concentrated in the hands of an individual. The author proposes a transition toward generative leadership, understood as a distributed infrastructure of agency. Drawing on the thought of Eddie Glaude Jr. and the concept of Black democratic perfectionism, the text argues that true leadership is not about managing the periphery, but about creating conditions for the development of the potential of all community members. A key element of this shift is 'antagonistic cooperation'—collaboration based on recognizing differences and conflicts as cognitive resources. In this view, leadership becomes a process of democratizing the ability to understand, initiate, and correct collective actions under conditions of uncertainty.