Charisma Reconsidered

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12 instead, because the ‘combination’ seems to occur between elements that are antithetical and conceptually uncombinable by definition. Nevertheless, ironically, it is precisely in the cases of combinations of this kind that Weber is best able to identify recognizable and compelling examples of actual historical individuals. And this suggests that the conceptual machinery that he has used to specify the concept rather than the human reality and applicability of the concepts themselves is the source of our difficulties with the concept. The problem could be put in a somewhat different way. On the one hand, Weber has a long and impressive series of actual cases, both individual and institutional, among which one can see a variety of affinities, and which can be grouped under the heading ‘charisma’. Jesus, like Napoleon, is a plebiscitarian leader who asks simply to be followed and obeyed unconditionally. Something like this ‘devotional’ aspect appears in many other contexts, including those in which there are high levels of both discipline and instrumental rationality. And there is a sense in which politics is inherently a business in which there can be no complete ‘contract’, but in which there is some element of unconditional obedience or trust. Approaching the phenomenon of charisma through ‘affinities’ in this way yields a large and heterogeneous category of phenomena, but one that is nevertheless recognizable, trans-historical and distinctive. Weber’s own usage fits with this broad sense of the concept. But as soon as we attempt to ‘theorize’ charisma, we are forced either to treat it as a residual category, which does not fit with its best examples, such as the hybrid cases discussed here, or to assimilate it to the case of individual leader charisma, which fails to account for cases with clear affinities, such as the divinization of the Roman Emperors or the deference shown to juries. Shils: <strong>Charisma</strong> as Sacralization Edward Shils’ account of the idea of the primacy of institutional charisma was an attempt to understand institutions and particular patterns of social interaction as acquiring their special properties from their charismatic character, viewed as a product of their connection to the central institutions of society, which themselves had a sacred character (1975: 111–238). The whole notion of central institutions in this sense is obviously alien to Weber, and Shils did not treat him as a source for these ideas, but rather, as he recounts his own intellectual history, at various points he came to recognize the multiform manifestations of the concept of charisma in a variety of settings. His reasoning is perhaps clearest in one of his most impressive papers, ‘Deference’ (1975: 276–303). In that paper, Shils examined a quite ordinary social phenomenon, deference, which in some sense could be easily understood simply as a matter of mindless custom, of unwritten rules, such as the use of familiar forms of address, or the behavior of waiters in restaurants, and so forth, rules and customs that point back to a less democratic social world whose forms are, for no particular JOURNAL OF CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGY VOL 3(1)
eason, other than the convenience of familiarity, preserved in various contexts. But it also appears that these forms of deference, far from being passé, seem continually to be renewed and applied to new categories, such as celebrity, or to take new forms with identifiable affinities to older forms of deference. Deference is itself a kind of residual behavior that is inexplicable within the framework of egalitarian democracy, demanded by no laws, and indeed is contrary to the basic trend of democratic society. Nevertheless it persists. These forms of deference may seem to have little to do with charisma in Weber’s sense. But the point is that they have little to do with instrumental rationality or tradition in his sense either. Traditional authority, for Weber, rests on a doctrine to the effect that the old is deserving of respect; thus the persistence of deference in non-traditional societies, which have abandoned this doctrine, would be a mystery. So there is some sort of residual element here, and if we assemble the cases that make up the residue we can see that they point toward some set of commonalities. It is this set of commonalities that Shils assimilated to the sacred or to the idea of the holy. One attraction of this revision of Weber is that it avoids the problem that he faced in attempting to assimilate all the phenomena in the residual category ‘charisma’ to the positive model of the individual charismatic leader and the routinization of the leader’s charisma. Office charisma and similar phenomena are explained by virtue of their connection to the sacralized central institutions of society. The jurors contain within themselves a sacred spark, so to speak, which derives its sacredness from the fact that as jurors they embody and speak for the sacred core of society, the sacred ideal of justice itself. The problem with this approach, however, mirrors Weber’s problem with extending individual charisma to cover institutions. In the first place, charisma now seems to collapse into culture – the charismatic is that which is culturally predefined as charismatic. There is a sense in which this works very well for Jesus and Osama bin Laden. Such leaders fulfill prior cultural expectations, and in some sense call for the fulfillment of core religious ideas that are part of the pre-existing culture. But the further one pursues this approach, the more one derives the power of the leader from the culture, and thus collapses the category of charisma into culture, or tradition in Weber’s terms. This makes charisma unable to account for cultural creativity or change – precisely the explanatory task that Weber assigns to charisma. In the case of the individual charismatic leader, authority, in the pure case, comes from within and is ‘recognized’ by followers. Cultural expectations and culturally available explanations of the success of the leader – a religious ideology that invokes the concept of the divine spark, for example – account both for recognition and for the power of the leader. The originary creative character of leadership becomes a new ‘residual’ phenomenon. The derivation of charisma from the sacred thus is just as incomplete as the derivation of institutional charisma and other residual charismatic phenomena from individual charisma. TURNER CHARISMA RECONSIDERED 13
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Charisma Reconsidered

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