Charisma Reconsidered

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role-models who break new ground, and if we consider the ‘dangers’ that they
appear to their audiences to overcome, the phenomenon is not so different.
Charisma seems to collapse into personal style, but in a world in which the old
interdicts have lost their power, style itself becomes a matter of experimental
success in the face of social danger.
KEYWORDS charisma, leadership, norms, sacred, taboo, Weber
If, at the time of Kant, someone had posed the question of which theological and
moral concepts would survive in public discourse after the passage of two
centuries, a few philosophes might have predicted that the concept of sin would
have disappeared, but few thinkers of any kind, and certainly not Kant, could have
imagined that the concept of duty would have virtually disappeared. No one
would have guessed that the concept of charisma would have revived from its deep
theological obscurity (the term had barely been mentioned for centuries), been
generalized, and become a commonplace description, applied to political leaders,
businessmen, actors, celebrities, and so forth. Yet this is precisely what did happen.
After, and probably influenced by, the assassination of Kennedy and the use of the
term by his house intellectual, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, to describe his appeal,
‘charisma’ became part of the culture, a term of ordinary discourse, meaning a
property of a person who is exceptional and influential or magnetic, and whose
influence and magnetism has, so to speak, an inner source. 1
The term has been widely appropriated. ‘Charisma’ is the name of a line of
yachts, the stage name of a female movie star (Charisma Carpenter), the name
of a German modeling agency, a Colorado on-line game developer, an Antiguan
web-hosting company, a British record company, a Swiss rock band, a southern
California company that designs floats for parades, and an exotic car rental
establishment in Yorkshire, among many other uses. In my own small community,
‘New Charisma’ is the name of a hairdressing establishment. It now occurs with
some frequency in the United States as a woman’s given name. Even the religious
movement known by the name ‘charismatic’ was inspired more by the cultural
usage that began with Max Weber’s appropriation of the term than its original
theological sense, which has now, under the influence of the wider use of the
term, been rediscovered. In assessing the contemporary relevance of charisma,
the strange journey of this concept needs to be kept in mind: talking about
charisma is not a matter of simply looking at the reception-history of Weber’s use
of the term, or its application to empirical sociological research. One must
understand the background tectonic shift in the conditions of social and political
life, however obscure, that produced this reversal of fortune, a reversal that is, if
not unique in the history of concepts, unusual enough to inspire reflection.
JOURNAL OF CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGY VOL 3(1)