Charisma Reconsidered

Journal of Classical Sociology
Copyright © 2003 SAGE Publications London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi Vol 3(1): 5–26 [1468–795X(200303)3:1;5–26;031692]
www.sagepublications.com
Charisma Reconsidered
STEPHEN TURNER University of South Florida
ABSTRACT Charisma is a concept with a peculiar history. It arose from theological
obscurity through social science, from which it passed into popular culture.
As a social science concept, its significance derives in large part from the fact that
it captures a particular type of leadership. But it fits poorly with other concepts in
social science, and is problematic as an explanatory concept. Even Weber himself
was torn in his use of the concept between the individual type-concept and a
broader use of it to characterize the sacral character of culture and institutions.
Which use is fundamental? Neither use seems to be able to be extended to
account for the other, and in practice the term serves as a heterogenous residual
category. Shils’ argument that the charisma of central institutions was fundamental
was an attempt to make sense of the examples of institutional charisma that
fell into this residual category, such as the jury, and assimilated charisma to the
idea of the holy. But this conflicts with Weber’s idea of the originary or creative
character of individual charisma, which by definition cannot derive from preexisting
sacral qualities. Weber’s account of individual charisma focuses on success,
and this suggests the idea that the power of the charismatic leader arises from the
ability to confound and surpass expectations – to be extraordinary. This allows us
to reconsider ‘originary’ charisma, and assimilate it both to rational choice and to
Steiner’s account of taboo. A leader who produces a change in our risk perceptions
by proving our previous perceptions wrong by the success of the leader’s
actions is providing a novel rational choice for us: a new option together with new
estimates of the risk in a course of action. Weber explained the situation of
primitive or magical morality in terms of magical charisma producing taboos that
were then rationalized, leading to permanent norms – which relies on the notion
of charisma without explaining it. But Steiner goes further, by suggesting that
taboo represents the intellectual organization of danger through the act of
interdiction. The power to interdict is not based on some other power, but rather
the power to organize danger through interdiction is originary. Is there originary
charisma today? Or is the commonplace use of the term ‘charisma’ a transformation
of the concept into something else? In popular culture, the term refers to

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role-models who break new ground, and if we consider the ‘dangers’ that they
appear to their audiences to overcome, the phenomenon is not so different.
Charisma seems to collapse into personal style, but in a world in which the old
interdicts have lost their power, style itself becomes a matter of experimental
success in the face of social danger.
KEYWORDS charisma, leadership, norms, sacred, taboo, Weber
If, at the time of Kant, someone had posed the question of which theological and
moral concepts would survive in public discourse after the passage of two
centuries, a few philosophes might have predicted that the concept of sin would
have disappeared, but few thinkers of any kind, and certainly not Kant, could have
imagined that the concept of duty would have virtually disappeared. No one
would have guessed that the concept of charisma would have revived from its deep
theological obscurity (the term had barely been mentioned for centuries), been
generalized, and become a commonplace description, applied to political leaders,
businessmen, actors, celebrities, and so forth. Yet this is precisely what did happen.
After, and probably influenced by, the assassination of Kennedy and the use of the
term by his house intellectual, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, to describe his appeal,
‘charisma’ became part of the culture, a term of ordinary discourse, meaning a
property of a person who is exceptional and influential or magnetic, and whose
influence and magnetism has, so to speak, an inner source. 1
The term has been widely appropriated. ‘Charisma’ is the name of a line of
yachts, the stage name of a female movie star (Charisma Carpenter), the name
of a German modeling agency, a Colorado on-line game developer, an Antiguan
web-hosting company, a British record company, a Swiss rock band, a southern
California company that designs floats for parades, and an exotic car rental
establishment in Yorkshire, among many other uses. In my own small community,
‘New Charisma’ is the name of a hairdressing establishment. It now occurs with
some frequency in the United States as a woman’s given name. Even the religious
movement known by the name ‘charismatic’ was inspired more by the cultural
usage that began with Max Weber’s appropriation of the term than its original
theological sense, which has now, under the influence of the wider use of the
term, been rediscovered. In assessing the contemporary relevance of charisma,
the strange journey of this concept needs to be kept in mind: talking about
charisma is not a matter of simply looking at the reception-history of Weber’s use
of the term, or its application to empirical sociological research. One must
understand the background tectonic shift in the conditions of social and political
life, however obscure, that produced this reversal of fortune, a reversal that is, if
not unique in the history of concepts, unusual enough to inspire reflection.
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Charisma as a Social Science Concept
Strangely, the reception-history of the concept within the social sciences themselves
presents an entirely different picture. Weber’s portrayal of the charismatic
leader is doubtless the most perfect and well-realized typification in the social
sciences. When Weber says that the charismatic leader is responsible to the ruled in
one thing only, that he personally and actually is the God-willed master, and that
charisma knows only inner determination and inner constraint, that it rests on no
legitimacy other than personal strength that is constantly being proven, he
describes a very precise and unusual phenomenon. His friend and follower Robert
Michels soon found an example – the capo carismatico Mussolini – and
commented:
It is useless, anti-historical and anti-scientific to hope that dictators, having
happily initiated their political work, will abdicate at the height of their
power, since abdication is an act of weakness. . . . The charismatic leader
does not abdicate, not even when the water reaches to his throat. Precisely
in his readiness to die lies one element of his force and his triumph.
(quoted in Beetham, 1977: 176)
When the current Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez speaks, and is described by
his friends, it is as though they have taken these texts as a script. Chávez speaks to
the spirit of the 19th-century hero Simón Bolívar in his private rooms, claims that
God is a Venezuelan and is ‘with us’, and constantly refers to revolutionary images
of suffering and death – Christ on the Cross and Allende. ‘I swear by God and the
Holy Mother,’ he said in a recent speech, ‘I will never give up this path. You could
put me in front of a firing squad and demand that I change and wouldn’t do it.’
His critics describe his almost fatalistic sense of his own destiny. A friend who is a
psychiatrist says, ‘He is willing to fight to the death. That’s the axis of his life’
(Adams, 2001).
No concept that is such a precise depiction of a continually recurring social
phenomenon will go out of currency. Yet the story of charisma within the
social sciences is not a success story. With a small range of important exceptions,
to be taken up later, the term has had a quite limited role in social science and
social theory. It never fit very well with the standard usages of social psychology,
for example with the concept of attitude, during the middle part of the 20th
century, so it did not become a subject for empirical research based on measurement
until much later, and when it did it was in an esoteric applied field –
management studies of leadership – and consequently did not have much impact
on the core fields of the social sciences (Conger, 1993).
One might give many reasons for this non-reception in the social sciences,
but among them are these: the later attempts to quantify the concept did not rely
on Weber’s formulations directly, but on what we might call the popular or
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‘cultural’ concept of charisma. Researchers tried to find measurable correlates of
charisma, and reinterpreted it as a personality trait. The fact that the term
depended on ideal-types, as Weber originally formulated it, doubtless explains
other features of its reception. The literatures in which it was used were fields in
which ideal-type concepts were more acceptable, such as history. But these fields
had little use for conceptual elaborations of the term, including Weber’s. Their
uses of the term, as with the behavioral scientists’, came from the concept that had
been absorbed into the culture. The concept itself, moreover, has its own
difficulties. In the first place, it is unclear how it fits in with the other dominant
concepts of the social sciences, and especially with the explanatory models of
various disciplines. Indeed it is unclear that it is an explanatory concept at all. It is
a compelling description of a recognizable social phenomenon. But this is not the
same as saying that it explains the phenomenon. And there are internal problems
in Weber’s own account of the subject that doubtless contributed to the sense
that, rather than explaining a mystery, Weber had only compounded it.
In what follows I will examine the various aspects of the ‘charisma
problem’; its status as a concept; the problem of the relation between the
‘institutional’ and the ‘individual’ form of charisma; the problem of identifying
the core concept; its relation to other social science concepts; the problem of its
association with the related concepts of taboo and magic; and its cultural role. In
the course of doing this I will consider the problem of the historical trajectory of
charisma as a phenomenon. The question of whether and how the concept itself
needs to be revised or respecified is a matter that is tangled up with the present
cultural significance of the concept, and requires a revised understanding of this
trajectory. The most fundamental question, however, is this: is charisma, in the
end, essentially a mystical notion with no explanatory value, or merely a residual
category into which we place the inexplicable? Or if it is explicable, is it explicable
in other terms – biology, culture or rationality? Do we have to take charisma on
Weber’s terms or leave it? Or are there some revisions of the concept that may
serve to reduce the mystery element and connect it to other concepts, and perhaps
also to explain the tectonic shifts that gave it its present cultural significance?
The Two Dimensions of ‘Charisma’ as a Concept
Weber himself was uncomfortably torn along two dimensions in his uses of
charisma. One was the dimension of the local and the universal. Formally, he was
committed to treating the idea of charisma as an ideal-typical category in his
general trans-historical scheme of concepts and, thus, committed to the claim that
the emergence of charismatic phenomena was, in a formal sense at least, eternally
possible, not bound either to a particular cultural background or to a particular
type of historical situation. On the other hand, as an historical matter, he saw
charisma, as the Christians themselves did, as a phenomenon bound for the most
part to particular historical moments and circumstances. The examples Weber
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himself gave typically involved times of crisis, particular (culturally bound)
institutions, such as Kadis, Herzogs and Bhagwans, demagogues, ancient and
modern, whose role was a product of particular forms of democracy, and, finally,
the origins of law in law-prophecy, which he himself understood was a special case
of crisis leadership. But he also identified the charismatic elements of particular
cultural practices, particularly those of primitive varieties, and of official statuses,
as in the case of office charisma, as well as the role of charismatic ideology in
certain educational practices – such as classical Chinese aristocratic education,
which he characterized as a process of awakening the charisma within the
student.
With regard to the second dimension, Weber sometimes thought of
charisma narrowly as a feature of Herrschaft: specifically of the individual possession
of the ability to ‘command’ followers in the absence of a basis for these
powers of command in law or tradition. Sometimes, however, he spoke of it as a
kind of tincture, a special element or quality that diffused through and transformed,
by lending a spiritual aspect to, institutions or practices. The ‘command’
aspect of charisma, in its ‘pure’ form, was closely associated with ‘baffling success’;
the other trans-historical aspect was more closely associated with magic and taboo,
and in more modern contexts with ‘the sacred’.
A methodological issue is entwined with the problem of the relationship
between these dimensions of the concept of charisma. Weber repeatedly remarks
on the differences between the pure concept of charisma and its important actual
examples, in which it is emphasized that the formal concept is merely a way of
understanding the compound or hybrid character of the actual cases. These
remarks shed some interesting light on the empirical character of charisma: the
purest form of charisma is so unstable that it is likely to be negligible in its
historical effects; it is only in its compound forms – combined with the rational
strategy of Napoleon, for example – that it lasts long enough to produce
historically noticeable consequences. But at the same time this reasoning served to
bind the concept of charisma very closely to the methodological strategy of idealtypes,
for it made it clear that one could only use charisma as a way of
understanding something that naturally occurs solely in combination, as a tincture,
or as a hybrid. But this in turn produces another problem: charisma seems to
figure primarily as a concept with little positive content, as a residual category that
provides an explanation where other explanations do not suffice.
Weber’s own writings are unhelpful in providing the concept with positive
content in part because of the structural role it plays in his formal scheme, which
itself tends to make charisma into a highly heterogenous residual category. If we
think of traditional and rational-legal authority as essentially regimes of rules, in
which the rules in question in the rational-legal case are written and interpreted
in the last instance by trained professionals, such as bureaucrats and lawyers,
and in the case of traditional authority are unwritten and ultimately interpreted by
the memories of elders, we can see the category of charismatic authority as one in
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which there is authority without rules. But these are all negative characterizations.
Is this all that the concept of charisma, in the end, can amount to? It seems so, for
when we stray from the dramatic paradigm cases of individual leadership to those
cases, such as ‘office charisma’, that involve an institution having a spiritual or
sacralized aspect, the standard formulae that Weber himself uses to make sense of
charisma, such as ‘success’ and ‘extraordinariness’, are rather inadequate. We can
sense that there is some point to characterizing the phenomena in terms of
charisma, but this grasp of the sacralized character of an activity matches
awkwardly with the model of the individual charismatic leader.
Consider a specific case that is a problem for Weber: the English jury
system. The exercise of judicial authority in all legal orders is a highly charged and
problematic moment. Very often it is authority over life and death itself. But in
the jury system, ultimate power to produce justice is granted to a quite ordinary
group of citizens seated in a jurors’ box. Nothing about these citizens is
extraordinary, nor are they in any way ‘expert’. This is indeed a feature of their
qualifications as jurors. Nevertheless their judgments are treated with extraordinary
deference. If we were to say that the jury possesses charisma, a kind of
specialized office charisma, this would solve a problem, that of the mysterious
transformation of ordinary people into the privileged expression of authority over
questions of justice – a transformation no less mysterious than the Eucharist itself.
But Weber cannot and does not say this, and his comments on the jury system
reflect the fact that it is a problem for his account. On the one hand, it is close to
another ideal-type, the case of Kadi-justice, or irrational adjudication, which is
itself the antithesis of rule-bound adjudication of either the modern rational-legal
or the traditional type. Indeed, Weber uses exactly the same formula – ‘it is
written, but I say unto you . . .’ – as a means of epitomizing both the ideal-type of
Kadi-justice and charismatic leadership. However, the present charisma of the jury
does not seem to derive from any past individual manifestation of charisma. It is
not a residue of past charisma, preserved through a process of routinization, as
past charisma is in the case of kingship, or the Eucharist itself, nor does the jury
exercise divine powers, as with the Kadi. Weber in fact suggests that the jury as an
institution derives from folk justice, which does not explain its sacralized ‘charismatic’
features.
This leads one to suspect the idea that individual charisma is fundamental,
meaning that all other charisma is the product of routinization. It cannot possibly
account for all of the residual cases and phenomena that Weber, as a consequence
of the structure of his tripartite scheme of categories of authority, is forced to
accommodate. And if we consider cases other than those Weber discussed, the
problem is more severe. He is conspicuously silent about such phenomena as
the divinization of the Roman Emperors, a clear case of sacralization of power
rather than the routinization of charisma. Nevertheless, there does seem to be an
approach, loosely based on Weber, that allows for a solution to this problem. The
sacralization of power account that works in cases like the jury – the idea that
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particular institutions, offices and practices become sacralized – could be inverted,
and used to explain the charisma of leaders. The fact that leaders are often
believed to be touched by a divine spark now comes to be seen as a result of the
fact that they embody in themselves something greater and more sacred than
themselves. Considerations like these led Edward Shils, whom I will discuss
shortly, to look for a larger alternative conception within which this generalized
residual notion of charisma could be placed. His strategy, which organized the
problem around the concept of the charisma of central institutions, tended to
assimilate the idea of charisma to the idea of the holy and to the sacred–profane
distinction, an assimilation that brings the concept of charisma closer to Weber’s
own ideas about magic and enchantment.
Even more puzzling is the use of charisma in combination with its
apparent opposites. The sections on discipline and charisma and on business
charisma in Economy and Society (1978 [1922]) are particularly interesting
examples of this. In these cases the relationship between the concepts in question
reflects primarily the institutional sense of charisma. It is possible to identify, in the
case of military discipline, ‘leadership’ elements that strongly resemble the type of
pure charisma, but the concept of discipline, in effect, and by definition, excludes
the violation of routines, and might even be understood as the internalization
through habituation, in a particularly powerful way, of written or unwritten rules,
thus making it paradoxical that a ‘combination’ of charisma and discipline could
occur at all.
Similarly for business. If decisions to buy and sell in a marketplace are the
paradigm of rational, instrumental behavior, in which one succeeds through more
closely approximating the pure type of instrumental rationality (meaning to
exclude from consideration all irrational attachments, emotions and sentimental
considerations), then the residual is excluded from the pure type by definition,
and from the empirical approximations to this pure type by the fact that in a
market the inclusion of ‘irrational’ elements typically leads to error and business
failure. 2 But Weber elaborates at some length about a case of business charisma, in
which his own family’s fortunes were apparently directly involved. It was a case in
which a great financier achieved financial success by virtue of his almost Napoleonic
capacity to get investors to throw their lot in with him without any clear
understanding of the strategy he was to employ but entirely out of respect for his
prowess, that is to say, his extraordinary capacity for making money and therefore
for making money for those who invested with him.
The type here is essentially a Herzog of the market. Such types still exist in
financial markets, and advisers on investments are known and indeed revered as
‘gurus’. But what Weber makes of this phenomenon is difficult to grasp and to
square with the notion of ideal-types. Ideal-types, at the formal level, operate
according to the logic of mutual exclusion, in which the notion of combination
makes no sense. In the case of the business leader, the problem arises not because
there is a combination here that represents a new type, a combined type, but
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instead, because the ‘combination’ seems to occur between elements that are
antithetical and conceptually uncombinable by definition. Nevertheless, ironically,
it is precisely in the cases of combinations of this kind that Weber is best able to
identify recognizable and compelling examples of actual historical individuals.
And this suggests that the conceptual machinery that he has used to specify the
concept rather than the human reality and applicability of the concepts themselves
is the source of our difficulties with the concept.
The problem could be put in a somewhat different way. On the one hand,
Weber has a long and impressive series of actual cases, both individual and
institutional, among which one can see a variety of affinities, and which can be
grouped under the heading ‘charisma’. Jesus, like Napoleon, is a plebiscitarian
leader who asks simply to be followed and obeyed unconditionally. Something like
this ‘devotional’ aspect appears in many other contexts, including those in which
there are high levels of both discipline and instrumental rationality. And there is a
sense in which politics is inherently a business in which there can be no complete
‘contract’, but in which there is some element of unconditional obedience or
trust. Approaching the phenomenon of charisma through ‘affinities’ in this way
yields a large and heterogeneous category of phenomena, but one that is
nevertheless recognizable, trans-historical and distinctive. Weber’s own usage fits
with this broad sense of the concept. But as soon as we attempt to ‘theorize’
charisma, we are forced either to treat it as a residual category, which does not fit
with its best examples, such as the hybrid cases discussed here, or to assimilate it to
the case of individual leader charisma, which fails to account for cases with clear
affinities, such as the divinization of the Roman Emperors or the deference shown
to juries.
Shils: Charisma as Sacralization
Edward Shils’ account of the idea of the primacy of institutional charisma was an
attempt to understand institutions and particular patterns of social interaction as
acquiring their special properties from their charismatic character, viewed as a
product of their connection to the central institutions of society, which themselves
had a sacred character (1975: 111–238). The whole notion of central institutions
in this sense is obviously alien to Weber, and Shils did not treat him as a source for
these ideas, but rather, as he recounts his own intellectual history, at various points
he came to recognize the multiform manifestations of the concept of charisma in
a variety of settings. His reasoning is perhaps clearest in one of his most impressive
papers, ‘Deference’ (1975: 276–303).
In that paper, Shils examined a quite ordinary social phenomenon,
deference, which in some sense could be easily understood simply as a matter of
mindless custom, of unwritten rules, such as the use of familiar forms of address,
or the behavior of waiters in restaurants, and so forth, rules and customs that
point back to a less democratic social world whose forms are, for no particular
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eason, other than the convenience of familiarity, preserved in various contexts.
But it also appears that these forms of deference, far from being passé, seem
continually to be renewed and applied to new categories, such as celebrity, or to
take new forms with identifiable affinities to older forms of deference. Deference
is itself a kind of residual behavior that is inexplicable within the framework of
egalitarian democracy, demanded by no laws, and indeed is contrary to the basic
trend of democratic society. Nevertheless it persists.
These forms of deference may seem to have little to do with charisma in
Weber’s sense. But the point is that they have little to do with instrumental
rationality or tradition in his sense either. Traditional authority, for Weber, rests on
a doctrine to the effect that the old is deserving of respect; thus the persistence of
deference in non-traditional societies, which have abandoned this doctrine, would
be a mystery. So there is some sort of residual element here, and if we assemble
the cases that make up the residue we can see that they point toward some set of
commonalities. It is this set of commonalities that Shils assimilated to the sacred
or to the idea of the holy.
One attraction of this revision of Weber is that it avoids the problem that
he faced in attempting to assimilate all the phenomena in the residual category
‘charisma’ to the positive model of the individual charismatic leader and the
routinization of the leader’s charisma. Office charisma and similar phenomena are
explained by virtue of their connection to the sacralized central institutions of
society. The jurors contain within themselves a sacred spark, so to speak, which
derives its sacredness from the fact that as jurors they embody and speak for the
sacred core of society, the sacred ideal of justice itself.
The problem with this approach, however, mirrors Weber’s problem with
extending individual charisma to cover institutions. In the first place, charisma
now seems to collapse into culture – the charismatic is that which is culturally
predefined as charismatic. There is a sense in which this works very well for Jesus
and Osama bin Laden. Such leaders fulfill prior cultural expectations, and in some
sense call for the fulfillment of core religious ideas that are part of the pre-existing
culture. But the further one pursues this approach, the more one derives the
power of the leader from the culture, and thus collapses the category of charisma
into culture, or tradition in Weber’s terms. This makes charisma unable to account
for cultural creativity or change – precisely the explanatory task that Weber assigns
to charisma. In the case of the individual charismatic leader, authority, in the pure
case, comes from within and is ‘recognized’ by followers. Cultural expectations
and culturally available explanations of the success of the leader – a religious
ideology that invokes the concept of the divine spark, for example – account both
for recognition and for the power of the leader. The originary creative character of
leadership becomes a new ‘residual’ phenomenon. The derivation of charisma
from the sacred thus is just as incomplete as the derivation of institutional
charisma and other residual charismatic phenomena from individual charisma.
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Individual Charisma and the Problem of
Leadership
If partaking in the sacral is not enough to account for individual charisma, what
does? Or is this an impossible question to answer because every answer serves to
collapse a sui generis phenomenon into something else? The charismatic leader,
Weber said, ‘must work miracles, if he wants to be a prophet. He must perform
heroic deeds, if he wants to be a warlord’ (1978 [1922]: 1114). He added that
. . . most of all, [the leader’s] divine mission must prove itself by bringing
well-being to his faithful followers; if they do not fare well, he is obviously
not the god-sent master. . . . the genuine charismatic leader is responsible
to the ruled – responsible, that is, to prove that he himself is the master
willed by God.
(1978 [1922]: 1114)
The proof comes in the form of baffling success.
Weber did not disentangle the various sources of the expectations that the
potential leader must meet, nor did he satisfactorily explain the connection of
charisma to well-being. The following formulation, however, is consistent with his
usages. The expectations of a given target audience, we may say, are not infinitely
malleable. But they may be changed or formed by the words and miracles of the
charismatic prophet, or by the actions of the hero. Thus, the promise of eternal
life may have no role in the pre-existing theology of the target audience, but the
audience may become persuaded by prophecy to accept such a promise. In cases
where prophecy takes more or less traditional forms, such as shamanism or the
prophets of Ancient Judaism, the matter is simpler: prophet and audience share
expectations that are grounded in tradition or rationalized religious ideology. A
charismatic career may develop in various ways: it may be transformed into a
largely economic one, for example, or it may continue to be ‘charismatic’. But to
continue to be charismatic, Weber insisted, the leader must continue to pass the
tests put before him, or seek out tests that demonstrate his charisma: he ‘gains and
retains it solely by proving his powers in practice’ (1978 [1922]: 1114). As Weber
himself acknowledges, this is a model that centers on success. In its pure form, he
says, charisma exists only in ‘statu nascendi’ (1978 [1922]: 246). When success
deserts the charismatic leader, so does his authority.
But there is a puzzle here about the relation between the phenomena of
success and recognition and the quite distinctive effects that are attributed to
charisma. Weber discusses the followers and the metanoia or internal transformation
that is produced by the charismatic leader – a completely new orientation of
all attitudes to the central problems of the world, as he puts it at one point (1978
[1922]: 245). And this phenomenon seems to be poorly connected to the
mechanical facts of ‘success’. To make the point starkly, the success of Napoleon
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or Hitler may lead one to recognize their extraordinary character and even to
attribute a divine spark to them, but this mere fact of success and recognition by
itself would not induce one to obey their commands or completely reorient one’s
attitude toward life. Something seems to be missing in this account – some
connecting link between success and metanoia.
Weber is inclined to supply this link through the notions of command and
obligation, reflecting the origins of the problem of charisma in the context of law,
but also reflecting the large role that the concept of duty still held in his moral
world. The content of the commands made by the leader, or the demands of duty
imposed by the teachings of the leader, are thus the link. Success and its
recognition give charismatic force to these demands, one might say, just as state
coercion gives force to ordinary legal commands and obligations.
Doubtless there are many cases that this fits. But if we ask the question
‘What does the charismatic power of the singer Madonna consist in?,’ we seem to
find cultural originality, success, adulation, and in this sense a kind of devotion, as
well as metanoia among her devotees, but without any trace of obligation or
command. They are, as the expression coined for them had it, ‘wannabees’. And
this hints that rather than directing us to an explanation of cultural change, we are
directed away from it by the notion of obligation.
The problem here may be stated in various ways, but in its simplest form it
is this: Weber needs an analogue to traditional and rational-legal authority, each of
which is ‘recognized’ as legitimate authority. In the case of charisma, what must
be recognized is not a set of rules, by definition, because charisma does not consist
of rules. To be analogous to the recognition of the legal system of rules, there
must be something to recognize, and if it is not a set of rules, it must be
something else that is intrinsically authoritative – the charismatic leader whose
commandments are received as law. This means that Weber is condemned to a
quest for the intrinsic authority-granting property that is ‘recognized’ in the
charismatic leader. Naming this property ‘charisma’, however, is a dead end if the
external manifestations of charisma that can be discussed trans-historically, that is
to say, without the analyst accepting the cultural ideas (e.g. the ‘divine spark’ of
sacredness) of those who recognize charisma, do not connect to the fact to be
explained, namely its authority-producing character. Weber described patterns,
notably the cycle of tests of charisma, without solving this problem.
One solution to this problem, which I have discussed at greater length
elsewhere (Turner, 1993), is to begin by explaining the connection between the
exceptionality of the leader and the power to transform the follower, and then to
account for the authority of the leader by derivation. The argument is easily
understood in its application to such cases as the singer Madonna. Madonna has
influenced followers whose inner transformation of attitudes, mode of dress, and
so forth, consists in their imitation of various features of her own publicly
exhibited attitudes and mode of dress. Her success was originary – the style and
attitudes were not only unconventional but self-consciously anti-conventional.
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She did not succeed by fulfilling the contemporary conventions of stardom,
though her path to celebrity included succeeding in the face of various tests of her
artistic prowess, which built a traditional ‘fan’ base.
When Madonna wore jewelry that said ‘boy toy’ or wore underwear as a
top layer of clothing, her fans imitated her actions, as well as her attitude. What
was going on here? A simple explanation would be that Madonna had shown that
one could ‘get away’ with doing those things and at the same time succeed – in
this case in drawing attention. The ‘change’ in the followers can be understood
thus: behavior that formerly would have been thought to be highly risky, and for
this group of people to risk incurring the ridicule of peers would be the worst sort
of risk, was changed by Madonna’s actions – shown to be something that one
could do successfully. The change was in the fans’ perceptions of risk, and it was a
result of nothing more mysterious than the fact that Madonna did as she did and
survived, prospered, and had a powerful effect on those around her. A mode of
behavior that had formerly been perceived as risky was no longer perceived as
such, but rather as an opportunity to live in a different way, and to achieve
previously unachievable results.
In this case the shift in perceptions of risk and the creation of the
possibility of a different mode of life is a matter of someone acting in a way that
demonstrates the possibility by their own actions. Traditional charismatic leaders,
in Weber’s own account, do something similar by passing tests, and by seeking
new tests to demonstrate their charisma. For ‘conventional’ charismatic leaders,
these tests are conventional; what is exceptional about such leaders is their
prowess in the face of them. But at the same time their potential authority is
restricted by conventional expectations about the behavior of leaders and the
scope of their authority. In contrast, ‘originary’ charismatic leaders, that is to say,
those who represent novel possibilities, do unexpected things, things that change
ideas of what is possible, which is at the same time to change ideas about the risks
that go along with possibilities. The difference between a Madonna and a
Mandela is that the message of a political leader, like Mandela, is that a political
possibility that has seemed impossible to achieve comes to be seen as possible only
through commitment to his leadership – through obedience. Political leaders who
are ‘originary’ charismatic leaders, leaders with a vision of new possibilities, must
also produce a cognitive change in their followers: the evidence of their successful
actions ‘proves’ that they are leaders who can achieve these novel possibilities,
which amounts to proving that what was thought impossibly risky is, through the
leader, at hand.
Primitive Charisma
Connecting charisma to risk in this way solves a series of problems. First, it
assimilates the explanation of charisma to a recognizable explanatory model:
rational choice. The choice to follow a charismatic leader or model can now be
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seen to be a ‘rational’ one, but a rational one in a special sense. One might
compare it in some respects to Buchanan’s (2001) notion of ‘constitutional
choice’, the choice to live under a particular kind of constitutional order. Like
these choices, the choice to follow a charismatic leader is a drastic, all-or-nothing
choice in which many elements of the alternatives are bound up with one another.
But ‘charismatic choice’ is a life-style and belief-system choice in which beliefs
about risk, about what is dangerous, are changed.
To put this in more general terms, there are actions that ‘prove’ that one’s
assessments of risk need revision. The choice to submit to a leader is a subcategory
of this larger category: the path represented by the leader corresponds to
a new line in a decision matrix, in terms of which submission is a rational means to
an end with a new risk term. The same kind of inner transformation, a transformation
in beliefs about what is possible (meaning what can be done without
incurring overwhelming danger), is made, but in the case of choice of a leader, the
belief is that what is possible is possible only though submission to the leader. Not
surprisingly, there are situations in which this kind of choice becomes more
rational, in the sense of relatively less risky. Times of trouble or hopelessness are
times in which taking chances becomes a rational strategy because there is less to
lose.
Risk is a part of rational calculation, but it is a curiously irrational part.
Writers like Mary Douglas (1992) argue that risk should be understood as a
cultural concept, because risk perceptions vary culturally. But one need not invoke
some sort of notion of culture as a system of shared beliefs to see that risk is
necessarily ‘social’. Most risks cannot be learned about by trial and error, simply
because the trial itself is dangerous. One cannot tell a child: ‘Play in the street, and
learn for yourself that a car will run you over.’ Thus much of our understanding of
risk necessarily comes from others, and, similarly, even those who tell us about
risks typically have not tested the risk themselves.
These simple considerations point to a solution to another problem, the
relationships between risk and magic, magic and taboo, and charisma and magic.
Weber discussed these topics in Economy and Society (1978 [1922] ) in a section
on magic and religion, in which he applies these ideas to the Polynesian case, an
application that is made more interesting by the fact that it has close parallels to
the highly influential discussion of taboo by Steiner, which influenced Mary
Douglas’s account of purity and danger (Douglas, 1999: 11). Weber comments
that the idea of obedience to religious law is preceded by a form of religious ethics
that is magical, and in which violation of norms is a religious abomination. Thus
where there exists a belief in spirits, the idea develops that spirits enter into a
person, that one must not irritate the spirit, and that persons who are inhabited by
a spirit must be isolated out of fear of contamination. Out of this reasoning,
Weber suggests, arose the notion of taboo, of objects or persons endowed with
the quality of taboo, which in turn could be transmitted by magical means by
persons possessing, as he calls it, magical charisma. The rationalization of taboos
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leads to the creation of a system of norms according to which certain actions are
permanently taboo. Totemism arose through the association of particular taboos
and particular animals in which spirits were believed to reside.
We may leave aside the question of the truth of this reconstruction, other
than to say that it has the same problems as charisma – what one needs is an
explanation of culturally specific ideas of spirit, contagion, and so forth, in terms
of something more basic – to consider Steiner’s version of the same facts. He
begins with danger:
. . . all situations of danger, not merely those created by taboo-breaking,
are socially or culturally defined, and it is precisely this relation between
the defined danger and the restrictive pattern [i.e. of taboo] which we
should study in each case. For until taboos are involved, a danger is not
defined and cannot be coped with by institutionalized behavior.
(1967 [1956]: 146)
So taboo is itself a means of, or a preliminary to, coping, which works like a theory
about the risks in the world. Interdictions state the theory.
Danger is narrowed down by taboo. A situation is regarded as dangerous:
very well, but the danger may be a socially unformulated threat. Taboo
gives notice that the danger lies not in the whole situation, but only in
certain specified action concerning it. These actions, the danger spots, are
more challenging and deadly than the danger of the situation as a whole.
(1967 [1956]: 147)
Taboo, in short, does not come from a prior belief in a danger: danger is already
there as part of an undifferentiated reality. Rather it is a combination of two
things: a localization or specification of danger (including dangerous persons), a
notion that is meaningless without abstentive behavior. So localization and
specification and then abstention and interdiction are responses to danger that are
in turn basic to culture itself, found wherever there is culture, and constitute
culture. Contagion is part of this story too, since the classification of transgressions,
which, through contagion, bring the dangers to others, also amounts to a
theory of unknown risks that employs a device – contact – that is a source of risk
that serves to specify and define danger.
By treating risk-defining interdiction itself as basic, Steiner avoids the
problems Weber creates for himself by identifying charisma with ‘baffling success’
and then being faced with the problem of explaining how ‘authority’ could
possibly be produced out of the fact of success alone. With taboo we reach degree
zero: the fact of undifferentiated danger as the problem that taboo solves. Taboo
is also the origin of authority. The personal power of imposition of taboos is the
basic form of power in the Polynesian societies in question. It is grounded in
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nothing prior to itself other than more taboos, such as the taboo on the body of
the chief. But here we face a familiar trouble. The mana of the imposer is the
source of the power of interdiction. But mana is as unhelpful a concept as
charisma, in the sense that it too is a dead end. In these societies, power is the
power to interdict, and mana is a name for this power, not an explanation
(Steiner, 1967 [1956]: 110). This is a difficult notion to grasp, but the point can
be made with a simple example. As a child I lived in a Catholic neighborhood,
where the Monsignor of the local parish church routinely imposed interdictions –
on forms of behavior and dress, on membership in organizations, even on what
bars to patronize. What was the religious ‘authority’ for this? There was no literal
authority, though there was the notion that he possessed delegated powers from
the Pope, who had them delegated from Jesus through Peter – hardly an active
consideration for those choosing what bar to patronize. Yet the uncertainty
surrounding the dangerous powers of the Monsignor himself meant that to
violate them was to act dangerously. Similarly for the imposition of taboo: what
enables the imposition of taboo is not a power of an imposer, like magic, or
charisma, which is a term like mana, but the effect of the act of interdiction, the
localization of danger itself. It is tempting to say that it is a vaguely felt fear of
the interdictor that enables the interdiction to have force, or that the reason a
given interdiction has force is fear of the imposer. But it is doubtful, in a situation
of generalized danger, that saying this amounts to anything more than the
interdictor is part of ‘the dangerous’ and that any interdiction from this source
serves to localize danger. This in turn is all that Steiner is saying. But it has the
uncomfortable Nietzschean implication that the root of morality is fear of
the other.
When we consider the broader question of the establishment of perceptions
of risk, it is evident that the actions of individuals – whether Madonna or a
political leader – serve to define risks just as the pronouncing of interdictions does.
Indeed, one may wonder whether the alteration of risk perceptions through action
is a more fundamental mechanism than interdiction. The power to interdict may
be the province of those who have mana, and this may be what mana consists in.
But it is also plausible to say that this power is itself rooted in fear – in taboo, as
Steiner says – which is in the end no more than a localization of the non-specific
dangerousness of those who may bring harm to one and thus must be obeyed.
The magical properties we attribute to the powerful (and which Weber takes to be
the concomitant of charisma), on this account, are no more than an aspect of the
localization of danger itself. If this is reasonable, there is no mystery about
primitive charisma: it is a by-product of the localization of danger that individuals
can, through their own actions, influence, and the fact that they can increase the
sense of their dangerousness or sacredness through their own actions.
The case that was puzzling for Weber himself was the idea of charismatic
law-givers who were assigned a particular historical role in the origins of legal
orders. The traditional puzzle of the philosophy of law of which Weber was well
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aware was the problem of the necessarily extra-legal origins of the law itself. Law
could not be founded on law because a defining feature of the law, its own legality,
could not be created by the law but was rather presupposed by it. The hypothesis
of a historical charismatic giver of law, like Moses, speaking not as the representative
of God and divine law but entirely out of their own charisma, was a logically
adequate solution to this problem. By definition the charisma of the law-giver was
personal and not guaranteed by pre-existing law. This problem can be put in
another way. Suppose that the interdictions of the Monsignor discussed earlier are
pronounced not by a church figure, but the local Mafia capo. For Weber, this
would be a source of power, but not of legitimate authority. But perhaps the
problem here can be resolved simply: where there is delegation, or more generally
a claim to ‘represent’, there are questions of legitimacy. I may question whether
the emissaries of the Mafia capo do in fact speak for him. The capo himself makes
no such claim. This suggests the possibility that there is no question of ‘legitimacy’
apart from questions of delegation: for primal authority, whether it is
rooted in the dangerousness of the sacred or dangerousness as such, the distinction
between legitimate and illegitimate does not apply.
The Trajectory of Charisma
Weber himself provided some elements for a perspective on the historical occurrence
of charisma that fit with this ‘anthropological’ reconstruction of the
argument. The premodern world of demons, magic, witchcraft, extraordinary
popular delusions, curses, and so forth, is one in which the occurrence of the
charismatic, or the interpretation of the world in ‘charismatic’ terms, is sociologically
‘normal’ – a part of everyday life. Modern rationality means the end of
the enchantment of the world as a condition of life and of the role of danger
and the sacred from which primitive charisma arises. The disenchantment of the
world reduces the future of charisma to the personal ‘presence’ of an individual
before a small circle of personal followers. Thus in a rationalized world, the
phenomenon of personal magnetism now came to seem to be the core of
charisma, the last residue. Stripped of its support in magical thinking, it cannot
easily develop into anything more. Only when a radical change undermines the
rationalization of the conditions of life might new prophets arise, or old ideals be
reborn.
What is peculiar about this trajectory is that it was spectacularly wrong,
both with respect to politics and with respect to celebrity. Each of these errors
needs to be dealt with separately. Hitler and Mussolini rose to influence in the
decade after Weber’s death. Subsequently, there was a long parade of charismatic
leaders, especially on the margins of the developed world. Hugo Chávez, Kwame
Nkrumah, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Miloˇsevic, the Ayatollah Khomenei,
Osama bin Laden, Fidel Castro – each fits this type. Bin Laden, indeed, is a figure
right from the pages of Weber, and has often been described by his Muslim
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admirers as charismatic. Why should such a collection of leaders have emerged
when, and where, they did? A similar question may be raised about celebrity.
One source of Weber’s error about the role of charismatic leaders in
politics had little to do with this trajectory of charisma, but resulted from a
miscalculation about party politics. The arguments of Robert Michels (1959
[1911]) with respect to the bureaucratic selection of leaders – his Iron Law of
Oligarchy – in the SPD during the Kaiserreich impressed Weber, and he generalized
them to the foreseeable future. This was an error based on an overestimation
of the ability of party professionals to win elections without charismatic
candidates, and of their eagerness to participate, as Weber puts it, in the castration
of charisma rather than in the exploitation of charismatic candidates for their own
ends. European politics developed in a particular way as the result of the Second
World War and the Cold War, each of which had consequences that undermined
the harsh interest politics that characterized Weber’s era, as did the post-war
prosperity that resulted in the diminished distinctiveness of the traditional working
class. European politics were no longer governed by the kind of totalizing
party loyalties that had characterized the interwar years. Parties had to appeal to
non-party voters in order actually to hold power. At the same time the emergence
of a class of non-party voters who could switch allegiances depending on the
candidate made it possible for ‘personal’ political leaders to emerge. These leaders
often behaved in a way that conformed to some extent to Weber’s model of the
great 19th-century British political leaders, notably Gladstone, whom Weber saw
as having considerable power over and against the apparatus of the party
organization by virtue of his public demagogic appeal. But the pattern was more
complex. The consequence of the technologies of media and particularly television,
which had the effect of personalizing the relations of voters to candidates,
meant that in politics a certain amount of ‘charisma’ was essential. Party functionaries
were turned into managers whose task it was to develop and care for a stable
of electoral racehorses. A kind of symbiotic relationship developed between
professional election specialists, armed with polls, and leaders who were able to
project themselves successfully to an electorate. Charisma was thus technicized
and professionalized, but not entirely so – the necessary personal qualifications for
constant ‘presence’ in front of television cameras were rare, and could not be
tutored if there was no charisma within, to use Weber’s own phrase. 3
Moreover, in the Third World, charismatic leaders arose with considerable
frequency. Why? If we think of the charisma–fear relationship discussed above, the
pattern makes more sense. The ‘baffling successes’ of these leaders rested on their
ability to exceed expectations, in a situation of danger and uncertainty. The
opponents of these leaders were hegemonic powers, who controlled their empires
or spheres of influence not by the direct application of military force, but by bluff.
The ‘expectations’ that the leader had to overcome were set by the threats made
by the hegemon, threats that a clever leader could see were not likely to be carried
out, so that acting or speaking out against the hegemon, and doing so visibly, and
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doing so without being crushed, would exceed expectations, and indeed produce
a ‘baffling success’ that would persuade potential followers of the special political
prowess of the leader and the validity of his vision. The leader’s bluster and the
hegemon’s empty threats produce a peculiar dynamic, which conforms to Weber’s
model of the career of the charismatic leader – each time the leader raises the
stakes, the hegemon responds with a threat, to which the leader responds by
defiance, thus passing another ‘test’. In this way (and also by attempting to
negotiate with the leader, which the leader permits only in order to be seen to
refuse to give in, thus passing another test), the hegemon inadvertently builds up
the leader’s charisma.
The tests are ‘artificial’ in the sense that the hegemon and the leader both
understand, unlike the audience, that the threats will not be acted upon. And even
if the hegemon becomes less threatening, it is in the interest of the leader to create
an atmosphere of uncertainty and danger that he can then overcome. Castro, for
example, produces propaganda to create the illusion of an imminent threat from
the United States, which serves to continue the dynamic of charismatic testing
and the illusion of ‘baffling success’. But the same effect was produced during the
1990s, when the Clinton administration attempted to negotiate with Miloˇsevic:
giving him an opportunity to face down the hegemon made it appear that he was
powerful. The European dictators of the first half of the 20th century understood
the same dynamic – the fact that their opponents were less likely to act against
them than their audiences believed allowed for them to surpass expectations,
confirming the idea that their self-conceived ‘missions’ and the worldview that
went with them were valid, and that the promises of the new order that they
represented were not only possible but possible only through obedience to
them.
Weber’s miscalculation with respect to political parties was paralleled in his
view of bureaucracy. He supposed that bureaucratic leadership excluded charisma.
Yet even in bureaucratic organizations, an ability to motivate people to use their
bureaucratic discretion to contribute to the goals of the organization turned out
to be not only important, but increasingly so, as the fixed and rigid bureaucratic
structures of the 19th century gave way to more flexible organizations. In
management studies, charisma became an important concept in the wake of the
discovery of ‘corporate cultures’ that got in the way of needed change. Charismatic
‘change agents’ were people who could change culture by modeling the
desired culture. So the problem became one of identifying such people and their
special traits. This application fits very well with the ‘anthropological’ interpretation
of charisma in the previous section. The basis of resistance to organizational
‘cultural’ change is characteristically closely bound up with fear.
There is obviously a significant theoretical tension between the notion of
charisma as a kind of culturally defined and constituted phenomenon of the sort
that behavioral scientists could measure through psychological tests, and the
eruptive, order-establishing or value-establishing notion of charisma. Indeed,
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the idea that a charismatic leader could be measured by a ‘paper and pencil’ test
seems ludicrous. But in practice the origins of cultural tendencies of a novel kind
in contemporary society do seem to cohere reasonably well with this. ‘Originality’
is a feature of the cultural notion of charisma itself, and the ability to get others to
follow one’s ‘original’ cultural contribution, values and attitudes is a defining
feature of the ‘cultural’ notion of charisma.
In the case of organizational culture change, the link between charisma
and fear and uncertainty is clear, and if we generalize, we can begin to make more
sense of the present role of celebrity. In a recent book, the feminist literary critic
Elaine Showalter argues that the women’s movement has needed, and continues
to need icons, role-models, ‘as a way of confronting and reinventing ourselves’
(quoted in Taylor, 2002: 6). The significance of this need becomes more evident
when we consider the places in which celebrity is most effective. I have already
discussed the example of Madonna, and noted that it is the presence of social fear
that gives the fan’s imitation of Madonna its force – imitation is a way of
overcoming this fear. If the need for icons is a sign of social fear, of a situation
of social danger and uncertainty that a charismatic example can serve to dispel by
defining and localizing, one can ask why there is this fear and uncertainty. And
one can give a Weberian answer. Weber was living in what might be thought of as
an early post-Christian period in which the terms that had been put in place by
older religious systems, like sin, had lost the cognitive support they once had. It
was the generation that had eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge. As I have
noted, 19th-century ethical thinking leans very heavily on concepts of obligation
that to our ears seem peculiarly formal and technical and survive mostly in the
context of law and ethical theory rather than ordinary speech. The loss of
the burden of these concepts, however, comes at a price in certainty and security.
Today uncertainty surrounds sex roles.
With this we come full circle, to the Polynesians and their taboos.
Charismatic leaders and charismatic exemplars are probes into the uncertainties
and dangers of the world. Their successes and failures tell their audiences
something that reduces that uncertainty and defines it – ‘localizes’ it, in Steiner’s
terms. The process seems mysterious only if we imagine interdictions or charismatic
examples outside of the special situations that give them their force –
situations of diffuse uncertainty or ignorance and fear in which any information
about danger has a powerful defining effect. But diffuse uncertainty and fear, and
bafflement about success, are a matter of degree, and consequently so is the force
of the examples and interdictions that make dangers specific.
The Age of Charisma?
Weber never imagined that what the future held was a new age of charisma, and
indeed he specifically placed the possibility of the old Gods arising from their
graves at the time after the last ton of fossilized coal had been burned, after which
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a new era of cultural creativity might emerge as well. But what we see instead is
the ubiquity of originality, a kind of ongoing cultural change in no particular
direction, for example the decline of which Spengler wrote. This amounts to an
age in which the extraordinary is ordinary, in which changes in values and
attitudes led by the example and personal force of publicly acclaimed personalities
is a characteristic feature of the culture. These considerations point to an ironic
conclusion: that charisma has become mundane, or everyday, and has lost its
special force not because it has become rare but because it has become
commonplace.
The conclusion that we now live in a culture of celebrity and that celebrity
is a concept that bears some resemblance to Weber’s notion of charisma is trite.
Nevertheless it points to a larger problem. Much of the conceptual machinery that
social theory employs to talk about the normative – norms, values, obligations,
and the like – is a product of the secularization of Christian ethics, and of the
particular moment in which Christianity ceased to provide the support that
notions like obligation required, a point that Weber himself made in his comment
that these concepts prowl about in our lives like the ghosts of dead religious
beliefs. Kant’s ethical writings are a product of this situation, and represent a
desperate attempt to overcome it. Alasdair MacIntyre has argued that this
situation, in which concepts live on to perplex us, is a normal consequence of
social changes in which the conditions of application for the original concepts
have changed. Notions of faith and commitment that persist in the present do so
in connection with notions like values; yet even notions like values have come to
lose their original significance. Obligation, one might say, is a term from a world
in which the failure to fulfill a social role produced predictable social sanctions;
‘values’ from a world in which life decisions produced predictable results. ‘Virtue’,
as MacIntyre famously argued, was a term from a world in which the fulfillment of
social roles produced predictable collective benefits (1981: 171). Today these
terms have become merely descriptions of our habitual desires and preferences, so
that a statement of values is a statement of style.
Some such denouement is precisely what one might expect from reading
other passages in the last pages of The Protestant Ethic (1958 [1905]), where the
struggle that capitalism represents is reduced to a matter of sport. In the United
States in the 1990s there was a series of mutually referring bumper stickers with
slogans, beginning with ‘the one who dies with the most toys wins’ – a peculiarly
explicit formulation of the idea that the pursuit of wealth, and more broadly the
question of the meaning of life, is reduced to a matter of sport. These were,
interestingly, responded to by Christians with bumper stickers that have most
recently led to the response, ‘Don’t let the car fool you, my treasure is in heaven.’
The bumper stickers amount to a juxtaposition of a very radical kind between two
variations on the basic Christian theme of salvation already identified by Weber.
But each represents a statement of personal style. Even the topic of salvation itself
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ecomes a subject for personal expression rather than a constitutive part of deeply
felt and highly structured worldview.
In this respect our situation is not unlike that of the Polynesians. The
highly structured worldviews of Christian ethics and its intellectual progeny no
longer provide us with the certainties and reassurances that they once did. The
interdicts that have force for us are those that can be understood in the face of the
uncertainties and fears that we face – and we use them experimentally, so to speak,
and by learning from the examples of those whose successes baffle us.
Notes
1. A formulation of the ‘cultural’ meaning of the term is to be found at http://www.nafe.com/
charisma.html, located in the website of the National Association for Female Executives. Here the
term comes simply to mean the appearance of successfulness as conventionally defined,
something that can be imitated and acquired by disciplined effort.
2. Lorraine Daston (2001), writing on the events of 11 September, comments that we were taught
that the concepts of charisma and rationality were ‘immiscible’. But this is true only formally, for,
as Weber says, they are everywhere found intertwined.
3. This process was most advanced in the United States, for simple constitutional reasons: the sheer
number of elective offices was far higher than was the case in other Western countries, with the
consequence that political selection on the basis of personal appeal was relentless and parties
largely powerless. The omnipresence of electoral politics in the United States, however, led to the
paradoxical consequence that it was only by accident that a particular charismatic leader would
make it as far as the presidency. Charismatic appeal, because it typically needed to be tested first
in local or state politics, tended to become limited to particular constituencies. Only in rare
circumstances, such as Clinton, were politicians able to project a new and broader appeal to novel
kinds of constituencies, on a national level. But even Clinton was in his first election unable to
reach a high proportion of the votes and in his second barely achieved a majority.
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Stephen Turner is Graduate Research Professor and Chair, Department of Philosophy, University of
South Florida, and Director of the Center for Social and Political Thought. His recent books include
Liberal Democracy 3.0: Civil Society in an Age of Experts (2003) and Brains/Practices/Relativism: Social
Theory after Cognitive Science (2002). He was editor of The Cambridge Companion to Weber (2000),
and has written extensively on Weber’s political thought. His other books include The Social Theory of
Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions (1994). One of his thematic concerns has
been the problem of knowledge and power, and most recently he has been considering the failure of
liberalism to acknowledge the problems for ‘government by discussion’ produced by claims to expertise,
and the parallel failure of the Left to resolve its ambivalence toward its past embrace of the ideal of rule
by experts (as the ‘administration of things’), and the inadequacy of its imagined alternatives.
Address: Department of Philosophy FAO 220, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33620, USA. [email:
turner@chuma.cas.usf.edu]
JOURNAL OF CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGY VOL 3(1)