Charisma Reconsidered

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8 ‘cultural’ concept of charisma. Researchers tried to find measurable correlates of charisma, and reinterpreted it as a personality trait. The fact that the term depended on ideal-types, as Weber originally formulated it, doubtless explains other features of its reception. The literatures in which it was used were fields in which ideal-type concepts were more acceptable, such as history. But these fields had little use for conceptual elaborations of the term, including Weber’s. Their uses of the term, as with the behavioral scientists’, came from the concept that had been absorbed into the culture. The concept itself, moreover, has its own difficulties. In the first place, it is unclear how it fits in with the other dominant concepts of the social sciences, and especially with the explanatory models of various disciplines. Indeed it is unclear that it is an explanatory concept at all. It is a compelling description of a recognizable social phenomenon. But this is not the same as saying that it explains the phenomenon. And there are internal problems in Weber’s own account of the subject that doubtless contributed to the sense that, rather than explaining a mystery, Weber had only compounded it. In what follows I will examine the various aspects of the ‘charisma problem’; its status as a concept; the problem of the relation between the ‘institutional’ and the ‘individual’ form of charisma; the problem of identifying the core concept; its relation to other social science concepts; the problem of its association with the related concepts of taboo and magic; and its cultural role. In the course of doing this I will consider the problem of the historical trajectory of charisma as a phenomenon. The question of whether and how the concept itself needs to be revised or respecified is a matter that is tangled up with the present cultural significance of the concept, and requires a revised understanding of this trajectory. The most fundamental question, however, is this: is charisma, in the end, essentially a mystical notion with no explanatory value, or merely a residual category into which we place the inexplicable? Or if it is explicable, is it explicable in other terms – biology, culture or rationality? Do we have to take charisma on Weber’s terms or leave it? Or are there some revisions of the concept that may serve to reduce the mystery element and connect it to other concepts, and perhaps also to explain the tectonic shifts that gave it its present cultural significance? The Two Dimensions of ‘<strong>Charisma</strong>’ as a Concept Weber himself was uncomfortably torn along two dimensions in his uses of charisma. One was the dimension of the local and the universal. Formally, he was committed to treating the idea of charisma as an ideal-typical category in his general trans-historical scheme of concepts and, thus, committed to the claim that the emergence of charismatic phenomena was, in a formal sense at least, eternally possible, not bound either to a particular cultural background or to a particular type of historical situation. On the other hand, as an historical matter, he saw charisma, as the Christians themselves did, as a phenomenon bound for the most part to particular historical moments and circumstances. The examples Weber JOURNAL OF CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGY VOL 3(1)
himself gave typically involved times of crisis, particular (culturally bound) institutions, such as Kadis, Herzogs and Bhagwans, demagogues, ancient and modern, whose role was a product of particular forms of democracy, and, finally, the origins of law in law-prophecy, which he himself understood was a special case of crisis leadership. But he also identified the charismatic elements of particular cultural practices, particularly those of primitive varieties, and of official statuses, as in the case of office charisma, as well as the role of charismatic ideology in certain educational practices – such as classical Chinese aristocratic education, which he characterized as a process of awakening the charisma within the student. With regard to the second dimension, Weber sometimes thought of charisma narrowly as a feature of Herrschaft: specifically of the individual possession of the ability to ‘command’ followers in the absence of a basis for these powers of command in law or tradition. Sometimes, however, he spoke of it as a kind of tincture, a special element or quality that diffused through and transformed, by lending a spiritual aspect to, institutions or practices. The ‘command’ aspect of charisma, in its ‘pure’ form, was closely associated with ‘baffling success’; the other trans-historical aspect was more closely associated with magic and taboo, and in more modern contexts with ‘the sacred’. A methodological issue is entwined with the problem of the relationship between these dimensions of the concept of charisma. Weber repeatedly remarks on the differences between the pure concept of charisma and its important actual examples, in which it is emphasized that the formal concept is merely a way of understanding the compound or hybrid character of the actual cases. These remarks shed some interesting light on the empirical character of charisma: the purest form of charisma is so unstable that it is likely to be negligible in its historical effects; it is only in its compound forms – combined with the rational strategy of Napoleon, for example – that it lasts long enough to produce historically noticeable consequences. But at the same time this reasoning served to bind the concept of charisma very closely to the methodological strategy of idealtypes, for it made it clear that one could only use charisma as a way of understanding something that naturally occurs solely in combination, as a tincture, or as a hybrid. But this in turn produces another problem: charisma seems to figure primarily as a concept with little positive content, as a residual category that provides an explanation where other explanations do not suffice. Weber’s own writings are unhelpful in providing the concept with positive content in part because of the structural role it plays in his formal scheme, which itself tends to make charisma into a highly heterogenous residual category. If we think of traditional and rational-legal authority as essentially regimes of rules, in which the rules in question in the rational-legal case are written and interpreted in the last instance by trained professionals, such as bureaucrats and lawyers, and in the case of traditional authority are unwritten and ultimately interpreted by the memories of elders, we can see the category of charismatic authority as one in TURNER CHARISMA RECONSIDERED 9
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