Charisma Reconsidered

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20 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 <strong>Charisma</strong> 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 JOURNAL OF CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGY VOL 3(1)
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. <strong>Charisma</strong> 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 TURNER CHARISMA RECONSIDERED 21
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