Charisma Reconsidered

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which there is authority without rules. But these are all negative characterizations.
Is this all that the concept of charisma, in the end, can amount to? It seems so, for
when we stray from the dramatic paradigm cases of individual leadership to those
cases, such as ‘office charisma’, that involve an institution having a spiritual or
sacralized aspect, the standard formulae that Weber himself uses to make sense of
charisma, such as ‘success’ and ‘extraordinariness’, are rather inadequate. We can
sense that there is some point to characterizing the phenomena in terms of
charisma, but this grasp of the sacralized character of an activity matches
awkwardly with the model of the individual charismatic leader.
Consider a specific case that is a problem for Weber: the English jury
system. The exercise of judicial authority in all legal orders is a highly charged and
problematic moment. Very often it is authority over life and death itself. But in
the jury system, ultimate power to produce justice is granted to a quite ordinary
group of citizens seated in a jurors’ box. Nothing about these citizens is
extraordinary, nor are they in any way ‘expert’. This is indeed a feature of their
qualifications as jurors. Nevertheless their judgments are treated with extraordinary
deference. If we were to say that the jury possesses charisma, a kind of
specialized office charisma, this would solve a problem, that of the mysterious
transformation of ordinary people into the privileged expression of authority over
questions of justice – a transformation no less mysterious than the Eucharist itself.
But Weber cannot and does not say this, and his comments on the jury system
reflect the fact that it is a problem for his account. On the one hand, it is close to
another ideal-type, the case of Kadi-justice, or irrational adjudication, which is
itself the antithesis of rule-bound adjudication of either the modern rational-legal
or the traditional type. Indeed, Weber uses exactly the same formula – ‘it is
written, but I say unto you . . .’ – as a means of epitomizing both the ideal-type of
Kadi-justice and charismatic leadership. However, the present charisma of the jury
does not seem to derive from any past individual manifestation of charisma. It is
not a residue of past charisma, preserved through a process of routinization, as
past charisma is in the case of kingship, or the Eucharist itself, nor does the jury
exercise divine powers, as with the Kadi. Weber in fact suggests that the jury as an
institution derives from folk justice, which does not explain its sacralized ‘charismatic’
features.
This leads one to suspect the idea that individual charisma is fundamental,
meaning that all other charisma is the product of routinization. It cannot possibly
account for all of the residual cases and phenomena that Weber, as a consequence
of the structure of his tripartite scheme of categories of authority, is forced to
accommodate. And if we consider cases other than those Weber discussed, the
problem is more severe. He is conspicuously silent about such phenomena as
the divinization of the Roman Emperors, a clear case of sacralization of power
rather than the routinization of charisma. Nevertheless, there does seem to be an
approach, loosely based on Weber, that allows for a solution to this problem. The
sacralization of power account that works in cases like the jury – the idea that
JOURNAL OF CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGY VOL 3(1)