Charisma Reconsidered

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
TURNER CHARISMA RECONSIDERED 21