Charisma Reconsidered

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
TURNER CHARISMA RECONSIDERED 17