Charisma Reconsidered - Catedras

Journal of Classical Sociology Copyright © 2003 SAGE Publications London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi Vol 3(1): 5–26 [1468–795X(200303)3:1;5–26;031692] www.sagepublications.com

Charisma Reconsidered STEPHEN TURNER University of South Florida

ABSTRACT Charisma is a concept with a peculiar history. It arose from theo-

logical obscurity through social science, from which it passed into popular culture. As a social science concept, its significance derives in large part from the fact that it captures a particular type of leadership. But it fits poorly with other concepts in social science, and is problematic as an explanatory concept. Even Weber himself was torn in his use of the concept between the individual type-concept and a broader use of it to characterize the sacral character of culture and institutions. Which use is fundamental? Neither use seems to be able to be extended to account for the other, and in practice the term serves as a heterogenous residual category. Shils’ argument that the charisma of central institutions was fundamental was an attempt to make sense of the examples of institutional charisma that fell into this residual category, such as the jury, and assimilated charisma to the idea of the holy. But this conflicts with Weber’s idea of the originary or creative character of individual charisma, which by definition cannot derive from preexisting sacral qualities. Weber’s account of individual charisma focuses on success, and this suggests the idea that the power of the charismatic leader arises from the ability to confound and surpass expectations – to be extraordinary. This allows us to reconsider ‘originary’ charisma, and assimilate it both to rational choice and to Steiner’s account of taboo. A leader who produces a change in our risk perceptions by proving our previous perceptions wrong by the success of the leader’s actions is providing a novel rational choice for us: a new option together with new estimates of the risk in a course of action. Weber explained the situation of primitive or magical morality in terms of magical charisma producing taboos that were then rationalized, leading to permanent norms – which relies on the notion of charisma without explaining it. But Steiner goes further, by suggesting that taboo represents the intellectual organization of danger through the act of interdiction. The power to interdict is not based on some other power, but rather the power to organize danger through interdiction is originary. Is there originary charisma today? Or is the commonplace use of the term ‘charisma’ a transformation of the concept into something else? In popular culture, the term refers to

role-models who break new ground, and if we consider the ‘dangers’ that they appear to their audiences to overcome, the phenomenon is not so different. Charisma seems to collapse into personal style, but in a world in which the old interdicts have lost their power, style itself becomes a matter of experimental success in the face of social danger. KEYWORDS charisma, leadership, norms, sacred, taboo, Weber

If, at the time of Kant, someone had posed the question of which theological and moral concepts would survive in public discourse after the passage of two centuries, a few philosophes might have predicted that the concept of sin would have disappeared, but few thinkers of any kind, and certainly not Kant, could have imagined that the concept of duty would have virtually disappeared. No one would have guessed that the concept of charisma would have revived from its deep theological obscurity (the term had barely been mentioned for centuries), been generalized, and become a commonplace description, applied to political leaders, businessmen, actors, celebrities, and so forth. Yet this is precisely what did happen. After, and probably influenced by, the assassination of Kennedy and the use of the term by his house intellectual, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, to describe his appeal, ‘charisma’ became part of the culture, a term of ordinary discourse, meaning a property of a person who is exceptional and influential or magnetic, and whose influence and magnetism has, so to speak, an inner source.1 The term has been widely appropriated. ‘Charisma’ is the name of a line of yachts, the stage name of a female movie star (Charisma Carpenter), the name of a German modeling agency, a Colorado on-line game developer, an Antiguan web-hosting company, a British record company, a Swiss rock band, a southern California company that designs floats for parades, and an exotic car rental establishment in Yorkshire, among many other uses. In my own small community, ‘New Charisma’ is the name of a hairdressing establishment. It now occurs with some frequency in the United States as a woman’s given name. Even the religious movement known by the name ‘charismatic’ was inspired more by the cultural usage that began with Max Weber’s appropriation of the term than its original theological sense, which has now, under the influence of the wider use of the term, been rediscovered. In assessing the contemporary relevance of charisma, the strange journey of this concept needs to be kept in mind: talking about charisma is not a matter of simply looking at the reception-history of Weber’s use of the term, or its application to empirical sociological research. One must understand the background tectonic shift in the conditions of social and political life, however obscure, that produced this reversal of fortune, a reversal that is, if not unique in the history of concepts, unusual enough to inspire reflection.

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Charisma as a Social Science Concept Strangely, the reception-history of the concept within the social sciences themselves presents an entirely different picture. Weber’s portrayal of the charismatic leader is doubtless the most perfect and well-realized typification in the social sciences. When Weber says that the charismatic leader is responsible to the ruled in one thing only, that he personally and actually is the God-willed master, and that charisma knows only inner determination and inner constraint, that it rests on no legitimacy other than personal strength that is constantly being proven, he describes a very precise and unusual phenomenon. His friend and follower Robert Michels soon found an example – the capo carismatico Mussolini – and commented: It is useless, anti-historical and anti-scientific to hope that dictators, having happily initiated their political work, will abdicate at the height of their power, since abdication is an act of weakness. . . . The charismatic leader does not abdicate, not even when the water reaches to his throat. Precisely in his readiness to die lies one element of his force and his triumph. (quoted in Beetham, 1977: 176) When the current Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez speaks, and is described by his friends, it is as though they have taken these texts as a script. Chávez speaks to the spirit of the 19th-century hero Simon ´ Bol´ıvar in his private rooms, claims that God is a Venezuelan and is ‘with us’, and constantly refers to revolutionary images of suffering and death – Christ on the Cross and Allende. ‘I swear by God and the Holy Mother,’ he said in a recent speech, ‘I will never give up this path. You could put me in front of a firing squad and demand that I change and wouldn’t do it.’ His critics describe his almost fatalistic sense of his own destiny. A friend who is a psychiatrist says, ‘He is willing to fight to the death. That’s the axis of his life’ (Adams, 2001). No concept that is such a precise depiction of a continually recurring social phenomenon will go out of currency. Yet the story of charisma within the social sciences is not a success story. With a small range of important exceptions, to be taken up later, the term has had a quite limited role in social science and social theory. It never fit very well with the standard usages of social psychology, for example with the concept of attitude, during the middle part of the 20th century, so it did not become a subject for empirical research based on measurement until much later, and when it did it was in an esoteric applied field – management studies of leadership – and consequently did not have much impact on the core fields of the social sciences (Conger, 1993). One might give many reasons for this non-reception in the social sciences, but among them are these: the later attempts to quantify the concept did not rely on Weber’s formulations directly, but on what we might call the popular or

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‘cultural’ concept of charisma. Researchers tried to find measurable correlates of charisma, and reinterpreted it as a personality trait. The fact that the term depended on ideal-types, as Weber originally formulated it, doubtless explains other features of its reception. The literatures in which it was used were fields in which ideal-type concepts were more acceptable, such as history. But these fields had little use for conceptual elaborations of the term, including Weber’s. Their uses of the term, as with the behavioral scientists’, came from the concept that had been absorbed into the culture. The concept itself, moreover, has its own difficulties. In the first place, it is unclear how it fits in with the other dominant concepts of the social sciences, and especially with the explanatory models of various disciplines. Indeed it is unclear that it is an explanatory concept at all. It is a compelling description of a recognizable social phenomenon. But this is not the same as saying that it explains the phenomenon. And there are internal problems in Weber’s own account of the subject that doubtless contributed to the sense that, rather than explaining a mystery, Weber had only compounded it. In what follows I will examine the various aspects of the ‘charisma problem’; its status as a concept; the problem of the relation between the ‘institutional’ and the ‘individual’ form of charisma; the problem of identifying the core concept; its relation to other social science concepts; the problem of its association with the related concepts of taboo and magic; and its cultural role. In the course of doing this I will consider the problem of the historical trajectory of charisma as a phenomenon. The question of whether and how the concept itself needs to be revised or respecified is a matter that is tangled up with the present cultural significance of the concept, and requires a revised understanding of this trajectory. The most fundamental question, however, is this: is charisma, in the end, essentially a mystical notion with no explanatory value, or merely a residual category into which we place the inexplicable? Or if it is explicable, is it explicable in other terms – biology, culture or rationality? Do we have to take charisma on Weber’s terms or leave it? Or are there some revisions of the concept that may serve to reduce the mystery element and connect it to other concepts, and perhaps also to explain the tectonic shifts that gave it its present cultural significance?

The Two Dimensions of ‘Charisma’ as a Concept Weber himself was uncomfortably torn along two dimensions in his uses of charisma. One was the dimension of the local and the universal. Formally, he was committed to treating the idea of charisma as an ideal-typical category in his general trans-historical scheme of concepts and, thus, committed to the claim that the emergence of charismatic phenomena was, in a formal sense at least, eternally possible, not bound either to a particular cultural background or to a particular type of historical situation. On the other hand, as an historical matter, he saw charisma, as the Christians themselves did, as a phenomenon bound for the most part to particular historical moments and circumstances. The examples Weber

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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


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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

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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


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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: Charisma 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

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reason, 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.


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Individual Charisma and the Problem of Leadership If partaking in the sacral is not enough to account for individual charisma, what does? Or is this an impossible question to answer because every answer serves to collapse a sui generis phenomenon into something else? The charismatic leader, Weber said, ‘must work miracles, if he wants to be a prophet. He must perform heroic deeds, if he wants to be a warlord’ (1978 [1922]: 1114). He added that . . . most of all, [the leader’s] divine mission must prove itself by bringing well-being to his faithful followers; if they do not fare well, he is obviously not the god-sent master. . . . the genuine charismatic leader is responsible to the ruled – responsible, that is, to prove that he himself is the master willed by God. (1978 [1922]: 1114) The proof comes in the form of baffling success. Weber did not disentangle the various sources of the expectations that the potential leader must meet, nor did he satisfactorily explain the connection of charisma to well-being. The following formulation, however, is consistent with his usages. The expectations of a given target audience, we may say, are not infinitely malleable. But they may be changed or formed by the words and miracles of the charismatic prophet, or by the actions of the hero. Thus, the promise of eternal life may have no role in the pre-existing theology of the target audience, but the audience may become persuaded by prophecy to accept such a promise. In cases where prophecy takes more or less traditional forms, such as shamanism or the prophets of Ancient Judaism, the matter is simpler: prophet and audience share expectations that are grounded in tradition or rationalized religious ideology. A charismatic career may develop in various ways: it may be transformed into a largely economic one, for example, or it may continue to be ‘charismatic’. But to continue to be charismatic, Weber insisted, the leader must continue to pass the tests put before him, or seek out tests that demonstrate his charisma: he ‘gains and retains it solely by proving his powers in practice’ (1978 [1922]: 1114). As Weber himself acknowledges, this is a model that centers on success. In its pure form, he says, charisma exists only in ‘statu nascendi’ (1978 [1922]: 246). When success deserts the charismatic leader, so does his authority. But there is a puzzle here about the relation between the phenomena of success and recognition and the quite distinctive effects that are attributed to charisma. Weber discusses the followers and the metanoia or internal transformation that is produced by the charismatic leader – a completely new orientation of all attitudes to the central problems of the world, as he puts it at one point (1978 [1922]: 245). And this phenomenon seems to be poorly connected to the mechanical facts of ‘success’. To make the point starkly, the success of Napoleon

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or Hitler may lead one to recognize their extraordinary character and even to attribute a divine spark to them, but this mere fact of success and recognition by itself would not induce one to obey their commands or completely reorient one’s attitude toward life. Something seems to be missing in this account – some connecting link between success and metanoia. Weber is inclined to supply this link through the notions of command and obligation, reflecting the origins of the problem of charisma in the context of law, but also reflecting the large role that the concept of duty still held in his moral world. The content of the commands made by the leader, or the demands of duty imposed by the teachings of the leader, are thus the link. Success and its recognition give charismatic force to these demands, one might say, just as state coercion gives force to ordinary legal commands and obligations. Doubtless there are many cases that this fits. But if we ask the question ‘What does the charismatic power of the singer Madonna consist in?,’ we seem to find cultural originality, success, adulation, and in this sense a kind of devotion, as well as metanoia among her devotees, but without any trace of obligation or command. They are, as the expression coined for them had it, ‘wannabees’. And this hints that rather than directing us to an explanation of cultural change, we are directed away from it by the notion of obligation. The problem here may be stated in various ways, but in its simplest form it is this: Weber needs an analogue to traditional and rational-legal authority, each of which is ‘recognized’ as legitimate authority. In the case of charisma, what must be recognized is not a set of rules, by definition, because charisma does not consist of rules. To be analogous to the recognition of the legal system of rules, there must be something to recognize, and if it is not a set of rules, it must be something else that is intrinsically authoritative – the charismatic leader whose commandments are received as law. This means that Weber is condemned to a quest for the intrinsic authority-granting property that is ‘recognized’ in the charismatic leader. Naming this property ‘charisma’, however, is a dead end if the external manifestations of charisma that can be discussed trans-historically, that is to say, without the analyst accepting the cultural ideas (e.g. the ‘divine spark’ of sacredness) of those who recognize charisma, do not connect to the fact to be explained, namely its authority-producing character. Weber described patterns, notably the cycle of tests of charisma, without solving this problem. One solution to this problem, which I have discussed at greater length elsewhere (Turner, 1993), is to begin by explaining the connection between the exceptionality of the leader and the power to transform the follower, and then to account for the authority of the leader by derivation. The argument is easily understood in its application to such cases as the singer Madonna. Madonna has influenced followers whose inner transformation of attitudes, mode of dress, and so forth, consists in their imitation of various features of her own publicly exhibited attitudes and mode of dress. Her success was originary – the style and attitudes were not only unconventional but self-consciously anti-conventional.


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She did not succeed by fulfilling the contemporary conventions of stardom, though her path to celebrity included succeeding in the face of various tests of her artistic prowess, which built a traditional ‘fan’ base. When Madonna wore jewelry that said ‘boy toy’ or wore underwear as a top layer of clothing, her fans imitated her actions, as well as her attitude. What was going on here? A simple explanation would be that Madonna had shown that one could ‘get away’ with doing those things and at the same time succeed – in this case in drawing attention. The ‘change’ in the followers can be understood thus: behavior that formerly would have been thought to be highly risky, and for this group of people to risk incurring the ridicule of peers would be the worst sort of risk, was changed by Madonna’s actions – shown to be something that one could do successfully. The change was in the fans’ perceptions of risk, and it was a result of nothing more mysterious than the fact that Madonna did as she did and survived, prospered, and had a powerful effect on those around her. A mode of behavior that had formerly been perceived as risky was no longer perceived as such, but rather as an opportunity to live in a different way, and to achieve previously unachievable results. In this case the shift in perceptions of risk and the creation of the possibility of a different mode of life is a matter of someone acting in a way that demonstrates the possibility by their own actions. Traditional charismatic leaders, in Weber’s own account, do something similar by passing tests, and by seeking new tests to demonstrate their charisma. For ‘conventional’ charismatic leaders, these tests are conventional; what is exceptional about such leaders is their prowess in the face of them. But at the same time their potential authority is restricted by conventional expectations about the behavior of leaders and the scope of their authority. In contrast, ‘originary’ charismatic leaders, that is to say, those who represent novel possibilities, do unexpected things, things that change ideas of what is possible, which is at the same time to change ideas about the risks that go along with possibilities. The difference between a Madonna and a Mandela is that the message of a political leader, like Mandela, is that a political possibility that has seemed impossible to achieve comes to be seen as possible only through commitment to his leadership – through obedience. Political leaders who are ‘originary’ charismatic leaders, leaders with a vision of new possibilities, must also produce a cognitive change in their followers: the evidence of their successful actions ‘proves’ that they are leaders who can achieve these novel possibilities, which amounts to proving that what was thought impossibly risky is, through the leader, at hand.

Primitive Charisma Connecting charisma to risk in this way solves a series of problems. First, it assimilates the explanation of charisma to a recognizable explanatory model: rational choice. The choice to follow a charismatic leader or model can now be

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seen to be a ‘rational’ one, but a rational one in a special sense. One might compare it in some respects to Buchanan’s (2001) notion of ‘constitutional choice’, the choice to live under a particular kind of constitutional order. Like these choices, the choice to follow a charismatic leader is a drastic, all-or-nothing choice in which many elements of the alternatives are bound up with one another. But ‘charismatic choice’ is a life-style and belief-system choice in which beliefs about risk, about what is dangerous, are changed. To put this in more general terms, there are actions that ‘prove’ that one’s assessments of risk need revision. The choice to submit to a leader is a subcategory of this larger category: the path represented by the leader corresponds to a new line in a decision matrix, in terms of which submission is a rational means to an end with a new risk term. The same kind of inner transformation, a transformation in beliefs about what is possible (meaning what can be done without incurring overwhelming danger), is made, but in the case of choice of a leader, the belief is that what is possible is possible only though submission to the leader. Not surprisingly, there are situations in which this kind of choice becomes more rational, in the sense of relatively less risky. Times of trouble or hopelessness are times in which taking chances becomes a rational strategy because there is less to lose. Risk is a part of rational calculation, but it is a curiously irrational part. Writers like Mary Douglas (1992) argue that risk should be understood as a cultural concept, because risk perceptions vary culturally. But one need not invoke some sort of notion of culture as a system of shared beliefs to see that risk is necessarily ‘social’. Most risks cannot be learned about by trial and error, simply because the trial itself is dangerous. One cannot tell a child: ‘Play in the street, and learn for yourself that a car will run you over.’ Thus much of our understanding of risk necessarily comes from others, and, similarly, even those who tell us about risks typically have not tested the risk themselves. These simple considerations point to a solution to another problem, the relationships between risk and magic, magic and taboo, and charisma and magic. Weber discussed these topics in Economy and Society (1978 [1922] ) in a section on magic and religion, in which he applies these ideas to the Polynesian case, an application that is made more interesting by the fact that it has close parallels to the highly influential discussion of taboo by Steiner, which influenced Mary Douglas’s account of purity and danger (Douglas, 1999: 11). Weber comments that the idea of obedience to religious law is preceded by a form of religious ethics that is magical, and in which violation of norms is a religious abomination. Thus where there exists a belief in spirits, the idea develops that spirits enter into a person, that one must not irritate the spirit, and that persons who are inhabited by a spirit must be isolated out of fear of contamination. Out of this reasoning, Weber suggests, arose the notion of taboo, of objects or persons endowed with the quality of taboo, which in turn could be transmitted by magical means by persons possessing, as he calls it, magical charisma. The rationalization of taboos


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leads to the creation of a system of norms according to which certain actions are permanently taboo. Totemism arose through the association of particular taboos and particular animals in which spirits were believed to reside. We may leave aside the question of the truth of this reconstruction, other than to say that it has the same problems as charisma – what one needs is an explanation of culturally specific ideas of spirit, contagion, and so forth, in terms of something more basic – to consider Steiner’s version of the same facts. He begins with danger: . . . all situations of danger, not merely those created by taboo-breaking, are socially or culturally defined, and it is precisely this relation between the defined danger and the restrictive pattern [i.e. of taboo] which we should study in each case. For until taboos are involved, a danger is not defined and cannot be coped with by institutionalized behavior. (1967 [1956]: 146) So taboo is itself a means of, or a preliminary to, coping, which works like a theory about the risks in the world. Interdictions state the theory. Danger is narrowed down by taboo. A situation is regarded as dangerous: very well, but the danger may be a socially unformulated threat. Taboo gives notice that the danger lies not in the whole situation, but only in certain specified action concerning it. These actions, the danger spots, are more challenging and deadly than the danger of the situation as a whole. (1967 [1956]: 147) Taboo, in short, does not come from a prior belief in a danger: danger is already there as part of an undifferentiated reality. Rather it is a combination of two things: a localization or specification of danger (including dangerous persons), a notion that is meaningless without abstentive behavior. So localization and specification and then abstention and interdiction are responses to danger that are in turn basic to culture itself, found wherever there is culture, and constitute culture. Contagion is part of this story too, since the classification of transgressions, which, through contagion, bring the dangers to others, also amounts to a theory of unknown risks that employs a device – contact – that is a source of risk that serves to specify and define danger. By treating risk-defining interdiction itself as basic, Steiner avoids the problems Weber creates for himself by identifying charisma with ‘baffling success’ and then being faced with the problem of explaining how ‘authority’ could possibly be produced out of the fact of success alone. With taboo we reach degree zero: the fact of undifferentiated danger as the problem that taboo solves. Taboo is also the origin of authority. The personal power of imposition of taboos is the basic form of power in the Polynesian societies in question. It is grounded in

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nothing prior to itself other than more taboos, such as the taboo on the body of the chief. But here we face a familiar trouble. The mana of the imposer is the source of the power of interdiction. But mana is as unhelpful a concept as charisma, in the sense that it too is a dead end. In these societies, power is the power to interdict, and mana is a name for this power, not an explanation (Steiner, 1967 [1956]: 110). This is a difficult notion to grasp, but the point can be made with a simple example. As a child I lived in a Catholic neighborhood, where the Monsignor of the local parish church routinely imposed interdictions – on forms of behavior and dress, on membership in organizations, even on what bars to patronize. What was the religious ‘authority’ for this? There was no literal authority, though there was the notion that he possessed delegated powers from the Pope, who had them delegated from Jesus through Peter – hardly an active consideration for those choosing what bar to patronize. Yet the uncertainty surrounding the dangerous powers of the Monsignor himself meant that to violate them was to act dangerously. Similarly for the imposition of taboo: what enables the imposition of taboo is not a power of an imposer, like magic, or charisma, which is a term like mana, but the effect of the act of interdiction, the localization of danger itself. It is tempting to say that it is a vaguely felt fear of the interdictor that enables the interdiction to have force, or that the reason a given interdiction has force is fear of the imposer. But it is doubtful, in a situation of generalized danger, that saying this amounts to anything more than the interdictor is part of ‘the dangerous’ and that any interdiction from this source serves to localize danger. This in turn is all that Steiner is saying. But it has the uncomfortable Nietzschean implication that the root of morality is fear of the other. When we consider the broader question of the establishment of perceptions of risk, it is evident that the actions of individuals – whether Madonna or a political leader – serve to define risks just as the pronouncing of interdictions does. Indeed, one may wonder whether the alteration of risk perceptions through action is a more fundamental mechanism than interdiction. The power to interdict may be the province of those who have mana, and this may be what mana consists in. But it is also plausible to say that this power is itself rooted in fear – in taboo, as Steiner says – which is in the end no more than a localization of the non-specific dangerousness of those who may bring harm to one and thus must be obeyed. The magical properties we attribute to the powerful (and which Weber takes to be the concomitant of charisma), on this account, are no more than an aspect of the localization of danger itself. If this is reasonable, there is no mystery about primitive charisma: it is a by-product of the localization of danger that individuals can, through their own actions, influence, and the fact that they can increase the sense of their dangerousness or sacredness through their own actions. The case that was puzzling for Weber himself was the idea of charismatic law-givers who were assigned a particular historical role in the origins of legal orders. The traditional puzzle of the philosophy of law of which Weber was well


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aware was the problem of the necessarily extra-legal origins of the law itself. Law could not be founded on law because a defining feature of the law, its own legality, could not be created by the law but was rather presupposed by it. The hypothesis of a historical charismatic giver of law, like Moses, speaking not as the representative of God and divine law but entirely out of their own charisma, was a logically adequate solution to this problem. By definition the charisma of the law-giver was personal and not guaranteed by pre-existing law. This problem can be put in another way. Suppose that the interdictions of the Monsignor discussed earlier are pronounced not by a church figure, but the local Mafia capo. For Weber, this would be a source of power, but not of legitimate authority. But perhaps the problem here can be resolved simply: where there is delegation, or more generally a claim to ‘represent’, there are questions of legitimacy. I may question whether the emissaries of the Mafia capo do in fact speak for him. The capo himself makes no such claim. This suggests the possibility that there is no question of ‘legitimacy’ apart from questions of delegation: for primal authority, whether it is rooted in the dangerousness of the sacred or dangerousness as such, the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate does not apply.

The Trajectory of Charisma Weber himself provided some elements for a perspective on the historical occurrence of charisma that fit with this ‘anthropological’ reconstruction of the argument. The premodern world of demons, magic, witchcraft, extraordinary popular delusions, curses, and so forth, is one in which the occurrence of the charismatic, or the interpretation of the world in ‘charismatic’ terms, is sociologically ‘normal’ – a part of everyday life. Modern rationality means the end of the enchantment of the world as a condition of life and of the role of danger and the sacred from which primitive charisma arises. The disenchantment of the world reduces the future of charisma to the personal ‘presence’ of an individual before a small circle of personal followers. Thus in a rationalized world, the phenomenon of personal magnetism now came to seem to be the core of charisma, the last residue. Stripped of its support in magical thinking, it cannot easily develop into anything more. Only when a radical change undermines the rationalization of the conditions of life might new prophets arise, or old ideals be reborn. What is peculiar about this trajectory is that it was spectacularly wrong, both with respect to politics and with respect to celebrity. Each of these errors needs to be dealt with separately. Hitler and Mussolini rose to influence in the decade after Weber’s death. Subsequently, there was a long parade of charismatic leaders, especially on the margins of the developed world. Hugo Chávez, Kwame Nkrumah, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Miloˇsevic, the Ayatollah Khomenei, Osama bin Laden, Fidel Castro – each fits this type. Bin Laden, indeed, is a figure right from the pages of Weber, and has often been described by his Muslim

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admirers as charismatic. Why should such a collection of leaders have emerged when, and where, they did? A similar question may be raised about celebrity. One source of Weber’s error about the role of charismatic leaders in politics had little to do with this trajectory of charisma, but resulted from a miscalculation about party politics. The arguments of Robert Michels (1959 [1911]) with respect to the bureaucratic selection of leaders – his Iron Law of Oligarchy – in the SPD during the Kaiserreich impressed Weber, and he generalized them to the foreseeable future. This was an error based on an overestimation of the ability of party professionals to win elections without charismatic candidates, and of their eagerness to participate, as Weber puts it, in the castration of charisma rather than in the exploitation of charismatic candidates for their own ends. European politics developed in a particular way as the result of the Second World War and the Cold War, each of which had consequences that undermined the harsh interest politics that characterized Weber’s era, as did the post-war prosperity that resulted in the diminished distinctiveness of the traditional working class. European politics were no longer governed by the kind of totalizing party loyalties that had characterized the interwar years. Parties had to appeal to non-party voters in order actually to hold power. At the same time the emergence of a class of non-party voters who could switch allegiances depending on the candidate made it possible for ‘personal’ political leaders to emerge. These leaders often behaved in a way that conformed to some extent to Weber’s model of the great 19th-century British political leaders, notably Gladstone, whom Weber saw as having considerable power over and against the apparatus of the party organization by virtue of his public demagogic appeal. But the pattern was more complex. The consequence of the technologies of media and particularly television, which had the effect of personalizing the relations of voters to candidates, meant that in politics a certain amount of ‘charisma’ was essential. Party functionaries were turned into managers whose task it was to develop and care for a stable of electoral racehorses. A kind of symbiotic relationship developed between professional election specialists, armed with polls, and leaders who were able to project themselves successfully to an electorate. Charisma was thus technicized and professionalized, but not entirely so – the necessary personal qualifications for constant ‘presence’ in front of television cameras were rare, and could not be tutored if there was no charisma within, to use Weber’s own phrase.3 Moreover, in the Third World, charismatic leaders arose with considerable frequency. Why? If we think of the charisma–fear relationship discussed above, the pattern makes more sense. The ‘baffling successes’ of these leaders rested on their ability to exceed expectations, in a situation of danger and uncertainty. The opponents of these leaders were hegemonic powers, who controlled their empires or spheres of influence not by the direct application of military force, but by bluff. The ‘expectations’ that the leader had to overcome were set by the threats made by the hegemon, threats that a clever leader could see were not likely to be carried out, so that acting or speaking out against the hegemon, and doing so visibly, and


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doing so without being crushed, would exceed expectations, and indeed produce a ‘baffling success’ that would persuade potential followers of the special political prowess of the leader and the validity of his vision. The leader’s bluster and the hegemon’s empty threats produce a peculiar dynamic, which conforms to Weber’s model of the career of the charismatic leader – each time the leader raises the stakes, the hegemon responds with a threat, to which the leader responds by defiance, thus passing another ‘test’. In this way (and also by attempting to negotiate with the leader, which the leader permits only in order to be seen to refuse to give in, thus passing another test), the hegemon inadvertently builds up the leader’s charisma. The tests are ‘artificial’ in the sense that the hegemon and the leader both understand, unlike the audience, that the threats will not be acted upon. And even if the hegemon becomes less threatening, it is in the interest of the leader to create an atmosphere of uncertainty and danger that he can then overcome. Castro, for example, produces propaganda to create the illusion of an imminent threat from the United States, which serves to continue the dynamic of charismatic testing and the illusion of ‘baffling success’. But the same effect was produced during the 1990s, when the Clinton administration attempted to negotiate with Miloˇsevic: giving him an opportunity to face down the hegemon made it appear that he was powerful. The European dictators of the first half of the 20th century understood the same dynamic – the fact that their opponents were less likely to act against them than their audiences believed allowed for them to surpass expectations, confirming the idea that their self-conceived ‘missions’ and the worldview that went with them were valid, and that the promises of the new order that they represented were not only possible but possible only through obedience to them. Weber’s miscalculation with respect to political parties was paralleled in his view of bureaucracy. He supposed that bureaucratic leadership excluded charisma. Yet even in bureaucratic organizations, an ability to motivate people to use their bureaucratic discretion to contribute to the goals of the organization turned out to be not only important, but increasingly so, as the fixed and rigid bureaucratic structures of the 19th century gave way to more flexible organizations. In management studies, charisma became an important concept in the wake of the discovery of ‘corporate cultures’ that got in the way of needed change. Charismatic ‘change agents’ were people who could change culture by modeling the desired culture. So the problem became one of identifying such people and their special traits. This application fits very well with the ‘anthropological’ interpretation of charisma in the previous section. The basis of resistance to organizational ‘cultural’ change is characteristically closely bound up with fear. There is obviously a significant theoretical tension between the notion of charisma as a kind of culturally defined and constituted phenomenon of the sort that behavioral scientists could measure through psychological tests, and the eruptive, order-establishing or value-establishing notion of charisma. Indeed,

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the idea that a charismatic leader could be measured by a ‘paper and pencil’ test seems ludicrous. But in practice the origins of cultural tendencies of a novel kind in contemporary society do seem to cohere reasonably well with this. ‘Originality’ is a feature of the cultural notion of charisma itself, and the ability to get others to follow one’s ‘original’ cultural contribution, values and attitudes is a defining feature of the ‘cultural’ notion of charisma. In the case of organizational culture change, the link between charisma and fear and uncertainty is clear, and if we generalize, we can begin to make more sense of the present role of celebrity. In a recent book, the feminist literary critic Elaine Showalter argues that the women’s movement has needed, and continues to need icons, role-models, ‘as a way of confronting and reinventing ourselves’ (quoted in Taylor, 2002: 6). The significance of this need becomes more evident when we consider the places in which celebrity is most effective. I have already discussed the example of Madonna, and noted that it is the presence of social fear that gives the fan’s imitation of Madonna its force – imitation is a way of overcoming this fear. If the need for icons is a sign of social fear, of a situation of social danger and uncertainty that a charismatic example can serve to dispel by defining and localizing, one can ask why there is this fear and uncertainty. And one can give a Weberian answer. Weber was living in what might be thought of as an early post-Christian period in which the terms that had been put in place by older religious systems, like sin, had lost the cognitive support they once had. It was the generation that had eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge. As I have noted, 19th-century ethical thinking leans very heavily on concepts of obligation that to our ears seem peculiarly formal and technical and survive mostly in the context of law and ethical theory rather than ordinary speech. The loss of the burden of these concepts, however, comes at a price in certainty and security. Today uncertainty surrounds sex roles. With this we come full circle, to the Polynesians and their taboos. Charismatic leaders and charismatic exemplars are probes into the uncertainties and dangers of the world. Their successes and failures tell their audiences something that reduces that uncertainty and defines it – ‘localizes’ it, in Steiner’s terms. The process seems mysterious only if we imagine interdictions or charismatic examples outside of the special situations that give them their force – situations of diffuse uncertainty or ignorance and fear in which any information about danger has a powerful defining effect. But diffuse uncertainty and fear, and bafflement about success, are a matter of degree, and consequently so is the force of the examples and interdictions that make dangers specific.

The Age of Charisma? Weber never imagined that what the future held was a new age of charisma, and indeed he specifically placed the possibility of the old Gods arising from their graves at the time after the last ton of fossilized coal had been burned, after which


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a new era of cultural creativity might emerge as well. But what we see instead is the ubiquity of originality, a kind of ongoing cultural change in no particular direction, for example the decline of which Spengler wrote. This amounts to an age in which the extraordinary is ordinary, in which changes in values and attitudes led by the example and personal force of publicly acclaimed personalities is a characteristic feature of the culture. These considerations point to an ironic conclusion: that charisma has become mundane, or everyday, and has lost its special force not because it has become rare but because it has become commonplace. The conclusion that we now live in a culture of celebrity and that celebrity is a concept that bears some resemblance to Weber’s notion of charisma is trite. Nevertheless it points to a larger problem. Much of the conceptual machinery that social theory employs to talk about the normative – norms, values, obligations, and the like – is a product of the secularization of Christian ethics, and of the particular moment in which Christianity ceased to provide the support that notions like obligation required, a point that Weber himself made in his comment that these concepts prowl about in our lives like the ghosts of dead religious beliefs. Kant’s ethical writings are a product of this situation, and represent a desperate attempt to overcome it. Alasdair MacIntyre has argued that this situation, in which concepts live on to perplex us, is a normal consequence of social changes in which the conditions of application for the original concepts have changed. Notions of faith and commitment that persist in the present do so in connection with notions like values; yet even notions like values have come to lose their original significance. Obligation, one might say, is a term from a world in which the failure to fulfill a social role produced predictable social sanctions; ‘values’ from a world in which life decisions produced predictable results. ‘Virtue’, as MacIntyre famously argued, was a term from a world in which the fulfillment of social roles produced predictable collective benefits (1981: 171). Today these terms have become merely descriptions of our habitual desires and preferences, so that a statement of values is a statement of style. Some such denouement is precisely what one might expect from reading other passages in the last pages of The Protestant Ethic (1958 [1905]), where the struggle that capitalism represents is reduced to a matter of sport. In the United States in the 1990s there was a series of mutually referring bumper stickers with slogans, beginning with ‘the one who dies with the most toys wins’ – a peculiarly explicit formulation of the idea that the pursuit of wealth, and more broadly the question of the meaning of life, is reduced to a matter of sport. These were, interestingly, responded to by Christians with bumper stickers that have most recently led to the response, ‘Don’t let the car fool you, my treasure is in heaven.’ The bumper stickers amount to a juxtaposition of a very radical kind between two variations on the basic Christian theme of salvation already identified by Weber. But each represents a statement of personal style. Even the topic of salvation itself

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becomes a subject for personal expression rather than a constitutive part of deeply felt and highly structured worldview. In this respect our situation is not unlike that of the Polynesians. The highly structured worldviews of Christian ethics and its intellectual progeny no longer provide us with the certainties and reassurances that they once did. The interdicts that have force for us are those that can be understood in the face of the uncertainties and fears that we face – and we use them experimentally, so to speak, and by learning from the examples of those whose successes baffle us.

Notes 1.

A formulation of the ‘cultural’ meaning of the term is to be found at http://www.nafe.com/ charisma.html, located in the website of the National Association for Female Executives. Here the term comes simply to mean the appearance of successfulness as conventionally defined, something that can be imitated and acquired by disciplined effort.

2.

Lorraine Daston (2001), writing on the events of 11 September, comments that we were taught that the concepts of charisma and rationality were ‘immiscible’. But this is true only formally, for, as Weber says, they are everywhere found intertwined.

3.

This process was most advanced in the United States, for simple constitutional reasons: the sheer number of elective offices was far higher than was the case in other Western countries, with the consequence that political selection on the basis of personal appeal was relentless and parties largely powerless. The omnipresence of electoral politics in the United States, however, led to the paradoxical consequence that it was only by accident that a particular charismatic leader would make it as far as the presidency. Charismatic appeal, because it typically needed to be tested first in local or state politics, tended to become limited to particular constituencies. Only in rare circumstances, such as Clinton, were politicians able to project a new and broader appeal to novel kinds of constituencies, on a national level. But even Clinton was in his first election unable to reach a high proportion of the votes and in his second barely achieved a majority.

References Adams, David (2001) ‘Venezuelan Leader’s Sanity in Question’, St Petersburg Times, 17 December: 4A. Beetham, David (1977) ‘From Socialism to Fascism: The Relation between Theory and Practice in the Work of Robert Michels’, Political Studies 25: 161–81. Buchanan, James N. (2001) Choice, Contract and Constitutions. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Conger, Jay (1993) ‘Max Weber’s Conceptualization of Charismatic Authority: Its Influence on Organizational Research’, The Leadership Quarterly 4(3/4): 277–88. Daston, Lorraine (2001) ‘11 September: Some LRB Writers Reflect on the Reasons and Consequences’, London Review of Books 23(19): 21.


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Douglas, Mary (1992) Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory. London and New York: Routledge. Douglas, Mary (1999) ‘Franz Steiner: A Memoir’, pp. 3–15 in J. Adler and R. Fardon (eds) Franz Baermann Steiner: Selected Writings, Vol. I. New York: Berghahn Books. MacIntyre, Alasdair (1981) After Virtue. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Michels, Robert (1959) Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy. New York: Dover. (Orig. pub. 1911.) Shils, Edward (1975) Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Steiner, Franz (1967) Taboo. Baltimore, MD: Penguin. (Orig. pub. 1956.) Taylor, Barbara (2002) ‘Mother-Haters and Other Rebels’, London Review of Books 24(1): 3–6. Turner, Stephen (1993) ‘Charisma and Obedience: A Risk Cognition Approach’, Leadership Quarterly 4: 235–56. Weber, Max (1958) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. (Orig. pub. 1905.) Weber, Max (1978) Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. (Orig. pub. 1922.)

Stephen Turner is Graduate Research Professor and Chair, Department of Philosophy, University of South Florida, and Director of the Center for Social and Political Thought. His recent books include Liberal Democracy 3.0: Civil Society in an Age of Experts (2003) and Brains/Practices/Relativism: Social Theory after Cognitive Science (2002). He was editor of The Cambridge Companion to Weber (2000), and has written extensively on Weber’s political thought. His other books include The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions (1994). One of his thematic concerns has been the problem of knowledge and power, and most recently he has been considering the failure of liberalism to acknowledge the problems for ‘government by discussion’ produced by claims to expertise, and the parallel failure of the Left to resolve its ambivalence toward its past embrace of the ideal of rule by experts (as the ‘administration of things’), and the inadequacy of its imagined alternatives. Address: Department of Philosophy FAO 220, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33620, USA. [email: [email protected]]

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