Charisma Reconsidered

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6 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)
Charisma as a Social Science Concept Strangely, the reception-history of the concept within the social sciences themselves presents an entirely different picture. Weber’s portrayal of the charismatic leader is doubtless the most perfect and well-realized typification in the social sciences. When Weber says that the charismatic leader is responsible to the ruled in one thing only, that he personally and actually is the God-willed master, and that charisma knows only inner determination and inner constraint, that it rests on no legitimacy other than personal strength that is constantly being proven, he describes a very precise and unusual phenomenon. His friend and follower Robert Michels soon found an example – the capo carismatico Mussolini – and commented: It is useless, anti-historical and anti-scientific to hope that dictators, having happily initiated their political work, will abdicate at the height of their power, since abdication is an act of weakness. . . . The charismatic leader does not abdicate, not even when the water reaches to his throat. Precisely in his readiness to die lies one element of his force and his triumph. (quoted in Beetham, 1977: 176) When the current Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez speaks, and is described by his friends, it is as though they have taken these texts as a script. Chávez speaks to the spirit of the 19th-century hero Simón Bolívar in his private rooms, claims that God is a Venezuelan and is ‘with us’, and constantly refers to revolutionary images of suffering and death – Christ on the Cross and Allende. ‘I swear by God and the Holy Mother,’ he said in a recent speech, ‘I will never give up this path. You could put me in front of a firing squad and demand that I change and wouldn’t do it.’ His critics describe his almost fatalistic sense of his own destiny. A friend who is a psychiatrist says, ‘He is willing to fight to the death. That’s the axis of his life’ (Adams, 2001). No concept that is such a precise depiction of a continually recurring social phenomenon will go out of currency. Yet the story of charisma within the social sciences is not a success story. With a small range of important exceptions, to be taken up later, the term has had a quite limited role in social science and social theory. It never fit very well with the standard usages of social psychology, for example with the concept of attitude, during the middle part of the 20th century, so it did not become a subject for empirical research based on measurement until much later, and when it did it was in an esoteric applied field – management studies of leadership – and consequently did not have much impact on the core fields of the social sciences (Conger, 1993). One might give many reasons for this non-reception in the social sciences, but among them are these: the later attempts to quantify the concept did not rely on Weber’s formulations directly, but on what we might call the popular or TURNER CHARISMA RECONSIDERED 7
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