Charisma Reconsidered

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24 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)
ecomes a subject for personal expression rather than a constitutive part of deeply felt and highly structured worldview. In this respect our situation is not unlike that of the Polynesians. The highly structured worldviews of Christian ethics and its intellectual progeny no longer provide us with the certainties and reassurances that they once did. The interdicts that have force for us are those that can be understood in the face of the uncertainties and fears that we face – and we use them experimentally, so to speak, and by learning from the examples of those whose successes baffle us. Notes 1. A formulation of the ‘cultural’ meaning of the term is to be found at http://www.nafe.com/ charisma.html, located in the website of the National Association for Female Executives. Here the term comes simply to mean the appearance of successfulness as conventionally defined, something that can be imitated and acquired by disciplined effort. 2. Lorraine Daston (2001), writing on the events of 11 September, comments that we were taught that the concepts of charisma and rationality were ‘immiscible’. But this is true only formally, for, as Weber says, they are everywhere found intertwined. 3. This process was most advanced in the United States, for simple constitutional reasons: the sheer number of elective offices was far higher than was the case in other Western countries, with the consequence that political selection on the basis of personal appeal was relentless and parties largely powerless. The omnipresence of electoral politics in the United States, however, led to the paradoxical consequence that it was only by accident that a particular charismatic leader would make it as far as the presidency. <strong>Charisma</strong>tic appeal, because it typically needed to be tested first in local or state politics, tended to become limited to particular constituencies. Only in rare circumstances, such as Clinton, were politicians able to project a new and broader appeal to novel kinds of constituencies, on a national level. But even Clinton was in his first election unable to reach a high proportion of the votes and in his second barely achieved a majority. References Adams, David (2001) ‘Venezuelan Leader’s Sanity in Question’, St Petersburg Times, 17 December: 4A. Beetham, David (1977) ‘From Socialism to Fascism: The Relation between Theory and Practice in the Work of Robert Michels’, Political Studies 25: 161–81. Buchanan, James N. (2001) Choice, Contract and Constitutions. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Conger, Jay (1993) ‘Max Weber’s Conceptualization of <strong>Charisma</strong>tic Authority: Its Influence on Organizational Research’, The Leadership Quarterly 4(3/4): 277–88. Daston, Lorraine (2001) ‘11 September: Some LRB Writers Reflect on the Reasons and Consequences’, London Review of Books 23(19): 21. TURNER CHARISMA RECONSIDERED 25
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Charisma Reconsidered

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