Charisma Reconsidered

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a new era of cultural creativity might emerge as well. But what we see instead is
the ubiquity of originality, a kind of ongoing cultural change in no particular
direction, for example the decline of which Spengler wrote. This amounts to an
age in which the extraordinary is ordinary, in which changes in values and
attitudes led by the example and personal force of publicly acclaimed personalities
is a characteristic feature of the culture. These considerations point to an ironic
conclusion: that charisma has become mundane, or everyday, and has lost its
special force not because it has become rare but because it has become
commonplace.
The conclusion that we now live in a culture of celebrity and that celebrity
is a concept that bears some resemblance to Weber’s notion of charisma is trite.
Nevertheless it points to a larger problem. Much of the conceptual machinery that
social theory employs to talk about the normative – norms, values, obligations,
and the like – is a product of the secularization of Christian ethics, and of the
particular moment in which Christianity ceased to provide the support that
notions like obligation required, a point that Weber himself made in his comment
that these concepts prowl about in our lives like the ghosts of dead religious
beliefs. Kant’s ethical writings are a product of this situation, and represent a
desperate attempt to overcome it. Alasdair MacIntyre has argued that this
situation, in which concepts live on to perplex us, is a normal consequence of
social changes in which the conditions of application for the original concepts
have changed. Notions of faith and commitment that persist in the present do so
in connection with notions like values; yet even notions like values have come to
lose their original significance. Obligation, one might say, is a term from a world
in which the failure to fulfill a social role produced predictable social sanctions;
‘values’ from a world in which life decisions produced predictable results. ‘Virtue’,
as MacIntyre famously argued, was a term from a world in which the fulfillment of
social roles produced predictable collective benefits (1981: 171). Today these
terms have become merely descriptions of our habitual desires and preferences, so
that a statement of values is a statement of style.
Some such denouement is precisely what one might expect from reading
other passages in the last pages of The Protestant Ethic (1958 [1905]), where the
struggle that capitalism represents is reduced to a matter of sport. In the United
States in the 1990s there was a series of mutually referring bumper stickers with
slogans, beginning with ‘the one who dies with the most toys wins’ – a peculiarly
explicit formulation of the idea that the pursuit of wealth, and more broadly the
question of the meaning of life, is reduced to a matter of sport. These were,
interestingly, responded to by Christians with bumper stickers that have most
recently led to the response, ‘Don’t let the car fool you, my treasure is in heaven.’
The bumper stickers amount to a juxtaposition of a very radical kind between two
variations on the basic Christian theme of salvation already identified by Weber.
But each represents a statement of personal style. Even the topic of salvation itself
JOURNAL OF CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGY VOL 3(1)