Charisma Reconsidered

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