Charisma Reconsidered

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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,
JOURNAL OF CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGY VOL 3(1)