Charisma Reconsidered

More documents

Recommendations

Info

10 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)
particular institutions, offices and practices become sacralized – could be inverted, and used to explain the charisma of leaders. The fact that leaders are often believed to be touched by a divine spark now comes to be seen as a result of the fact that they embody in themselves something greater and more sacred than themselves. Considerations like these led Edward Shils, whom I will discuss shortly, to look for a larger alternative conception within which this generalized residual notion of charisma could be placed. His strategy, which organized the problem around the concept of the charisma of central institutions, tended to assimilate the idea of charisma to the idea of the holy and to the sacred–profane distinction, an assimilation that brings the concept of charisma closer to Weber’s own ideas about magic and enchantment. Even more puzzling is the use of charisma in combination with its apparent opposites. The sections on discipline and charisma and on business charisma in Economy and Society (1978 [1922]) are particularly interesting examples of this. In these cases the relationship between the concepts in question reflects primarily the institutional sense of charisma. It is possible to identify, in the case of military discipline, ‘leadership’ elements that strongly resemble the type of pure charisma, but the concept of discipline, in effect, and by definition, excludes the violation of routines, and might even be understood as the internalization through habituation, in a particularly powerful way, of written or unwritten rules, thus making it paradoxical that a ‘combination’ of charisma and discipline could occur at all. Similarly for business. If decisions to buy and sell in a marketplace are the paradigm of rational, instrumental behavior, in which one succeeds through more closely approximating the pure type of instrumental rationality (meaning to exclude from consideration all irrational attachments, emotions and sentimental considerations), then the residual is excluded from the pure type by definition, and from the empirical approximations to this pure type by the fact that in a market the inclusion of ‘irrational’ elements typically leads to error and business failure. 2 But Weber elaborates at some length about a case of business charisma, in which his own family’s fortunes were apparently directly involved. It was a case in which a great financier achieved financial success by virtue of his almost Napoleonic capacity to get investors to throw their lot in with him without any clear understanding of the strategy he was to employ but entirely out of respect for his prowess, that is to say, his extraordinary capacity for making money and therefore for making money for those who invested with him. The type here is essentially a Herzog of the market. Such types still exist in financial markets, and advisers on investments are known and indeed revered as ‘gurus’. But what Weber makes of this phenomenon is difficult to grasp and to square with the notion of ideal-types. Ideal-types, at the formal level, operate according to the logic of mutual exclusion, in which the notion of combination makes no sense. In the case of the business leader, the problem arises not because there is a combination here that represents a new type, a combined type, but TURNER CHARISMA RECONSIDERED 11
Page 1 and 2: Journal of Classical Sociology Copy
Page 3 and 4: Charisma as a Social Science Concep
Page 5: himself gave typically involved tim
Page 9 and 10: eason, other than the convenience o
Page 11 and 12: or Hitler may lead one to recognize
Page 13 and 14: seen to be a ‘rational’ one, bu
Page 15 and 16: nothing prior to itself other than
Page 17 and 18: admirers as charismatic. Why should
Page 19 and 20: the idea that a charismatic leader
Page 21 and 22: ecomes a subject for personal expre

Charisma Reconsidered

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?