Charisma Reconsidered

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