Charisma Reconsidered

14
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
JOURNAL OF CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGY VOL 3(1)