In Our Time - Charisma

Episode Date: April 14, 2022

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the idea of charismatic authority developed by Max Weber (1864-1920) to explain why people welcome some as their legitimate rulers and follow them loyally, for better or worse, while following others only dutifully or grudgingly. Weber was fascinated by those such as Napoleon (above) and Washington who achieved power not by right, as with traditional monarchs, or by law as with the bureaucratic world around him in Germany, but by revolution or insurrection. Drawing on the experience of religious figures, he contended that these leaders, often outsiders, needed to be seen as exceptional, heroic and even miraculous to command loyalty, and could stay in power for as long as the people were enthralled and the miracles they had promised kept coming. After the Second World War, Weber's idea attracted new attention as a way of understanding why some reviled leaders once had mass support and, with the arrival of television, why some politicians were more engaging and influential on screen than others. With Linda Woodhead The FD Maurice Professor and Head of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at King's College LondonDavid Bell The Lapidus Professor in the Department of History at Princeton UniversityAndTom Wright Reader in Rhetoric at the University of SussexProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programmes if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programmes. Hello, Max Weber 1864 to 1920, devised the idea of charismatic authority to explain why people accept some as their legitimate rulers and not others. Traditional monarchs and those appointed by law were one thing.

but what are the individuals, often revolutionaries, who need to be seen as exceptional, heroic, even miraculous, to command loyalty? And for Weber, that charismatic person can disrupt the old order both for better and for worse, and stay in power for as long as the people are enthralled and the miracles keep coming. When we're to discuss the idea about charisma

are Linda Woodhead, the F.D. Morris Professor and Head of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at King's College London. David Bell, Lillipidus Professor in the Department of History at Princeton University and Tom Wright, reader in rhetoric at the University of Sussex. Tom Wright, what do we need to know about Max Weber in the period in which he was working? So Max Weber was born into a large, prosperous, cosmopolitan family in Erfurt in Central Germany and it was a family dominated by three professions, two ancient professions and one quite modern profession.

and I think this is crucial to understanding Weber and his work. On his mother's side, he came from a line of scholars, and on his father's side, his father was a lawyer. But crucially, his father was also a politician. And so growing up in Berlin, Weber was surrounded by some of the leading politicians of the Bismarck era. And I think this gave him a perspective which is quite rare for a social thinker of his stature,

which is he understood not only the theoretical aspects of political authority, but he also knew quite close up the grubby day-to-day realities of what it was like to be a political authority. And he had a stellar academic career for the first part of his career. He was educated in Heidelberg and Berlin, and by the time he was in his mid-30s, he was a full professor at Freiburg. He became a very well-known historian of agrarian economy. But he had a nervous breakdown in the middle of his career that was to do with his relationship. with his father. And in late 1890s, he stepped back from academia. And while he was stepping back from teaching, he wrote the works for which he's most famous, the Protestant ethic and the spirit

of capitalism. He attracted a very large following for his ideas and something of a cult following as an intellectual. And it's one that he attempted to parlay into politics unsuccessfully. and then he returned to university life and began to think about the subject that we're talking about today, the subject of political authority. And he expressed these ideas most famously in a lecture that he gave in 1919 at the University of Munich, which became known as the vocation lectures, two lectures. And it was soon after this, unfortunately that he died in the pandemic of the era of the Spanish flu in 1920. We'll return to this throughout, but can you summarize Weber's characterization of the three forms of authority?

Okay, so Weber's famous for several things, I think. He's famous for his theory of capitalism, where he links capitalism to the rise of Protestantism, and that's something I know that you've discussed on this program with Linda. But actually, I think what he's most famous for is the words that we're discussing today, this word charismatic charisma. and he gets at that idea through asking a question. And the question is, why do people obey? Now, on the face of it, that's quite a naive question.

It's obvious that sometimes you obey because you're coerced into doing something. Sometimes you obey because it just seems like habit. But Weber wanted to know why do people obey in a legitimate way? That is to say, what are the inner urgings that make people obey? and what are the reasons that people think it's ethical and the right thing to do? And he broke that down in this lecture, which he gave, the vocation of politics, into three different answers to the question. The first answers to the question, why do people obey?

He said that people obey because of tradition. Now, you obey a ruler simply because they've inherited a position or simply because of customs or mores. And this is the kind of authority that we see in monarchies. and it's the kind of authority that we see in pre-industrial societies. Then he's got a second reason for why we obey, and that's because we obey because of rules. We obey because of laws that have been structured around society,

and we might obey a ruler because they've been placed in a particular position, a bureaucrat or an elected politician, for example. But the third type, he says we obey because we believe in the extraordinary, powers of the individual. And he called this charismatic authority. And what he was doing with that idea is summed up in this phrase that he has, where he says, the charismatic figures are obeyed because of the extraordinary qualities of an individual personality,

by virtue of which they're set apart from ordinary men, and treated as endowed with superhuman, supernatural or exceptional powers or qualities that are not accessible to the ordinary person. Thank you. David Bell, let's continue with this phrase, the phrase charismatic authority. It was chosen by Weber, but the phenomenon he describes as ancient. Can you give us some depth to that, some early examples? Weber himself in his work talks mostly about figures from far back.

Some of these figures don't even have names. He talks about ancient shamans, who in hunter-gatherer societies. He talks about prophets, figures like Moses as well come in, and then there are political figures, figures like Julius Caesar, for instance. And he talks a great deal about religious figures throughout. One of his key modern examples is actually the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, whom he sees as in some ways having similarities to these much more ancient religious figures. So he sees it as a timeless phenomenon, something which goes back really as far as written history and even beyond written history and continues into the modern period. Certainly in the period that I work on, which is the age of revolution, the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the word that would come closest probably, at least when it's applied to political figures, would be glory or glorious, figures who are associated with some form of glory, which seems to raise them above the ordinary run of humanity and seize them crowned with some sort of special aura.

The difference being, to a certain extent, that glory is something that really comes particularly from somebody's deeds. rather than from somebody's innate qualities. So you're not born glorious, but you become glorious by the deeds that you carry out, whereas charisma can be seen, is often seen as much more of an innate quality. What was changing in the Enlightenment, you mentioned that in Europe,

that created opportunities for Charismatics? Well, I think that certainly we can look back even before the Enlightenment to see figures who we could certainly characterize as charismatic, whether it's Queen Elizabeth I of English, for instance, or whether Peter the Great of Russia. One of the arguments that I like to make is that if we're going to talk about charismatic authority, we really have to be specific about the way it works in specific historical periods.

One of the things that changes in the Enlightenment is that it becomes possible to see political leaders in a very different way from before. So in the Enlightenment, you have the proliferation, for example, of newspapers, so that for the first time you can actually follow the actions of a political leader on a day-to-day basis. You also have, particularly in the late 18th century, a proliferation of printed engravings, portraits, which come within the reach of at least the educated middle classes, even sometimes the artisanal classes in Western Europe and North America. So they can actually see what somebody looks like, and this makes a great difference. I think before that, if you want to know what the

king looks like and you're in a small province somewhere, really the only image you might have would be the image on the coin. But now you can actually see engravings that at least purport to show what that person looks like. And then you also have yet another thing which happens in the Enlightenment is you have the development of new narrative forms, particularly the novel.

And the novel creates a narrative form that allows people to identify in a very powerful way with people they've never met, with people they don't know, with people who've been encountered only on the page in the written word. And it allows them to imagine

a kind of relationship with that person. And one of the things which is very interesting that happens in the Enlightenment and into the Age of Revolution is that political figures start being depicted, start being described in terms that could almost be drawn from the novels of the period. And so it allows people to imagine a very different kind of connection with figures, much more intense, you know, imagined connection. And so it allows them to see them in a different way. Thank you. Thank you. Linda Woodhead, the word charisma, has religious connotations.

Can you tell me more about that reference to the New Testament? Weber was very interested in religion and he understood the importance of the political significance, the economic significance of religion. And he takes the idea of charisma from a church historian, Rudolf Zom, who used it to explain the development of early Christianity. In the New Testament, we have, well, really two ways of thinking about charisma. or two models of charisma. There's Jesus, of course, and as the New Testament depicts Jesus,

he is at the very least a highly charismatic figure, rather in the sense that Weber thinks about a charismatic, heroic individual. You know, Jesus is a, he's a healer, he's a prophet, he's a miracle worker, he commands nature. He's so powerful that just touching the hem of his robe can cure somebody. And the New Testament tells us that people saw him as dangerous, as possessed, as mad, as well as divine. But there's another understanding of charisma in the New Testament. And it comes from Paul's letters, and particularly a very famous chapter in 1 Corinthians 12, where Paul talks explicitly about charisma and he uses that word, of course, it's in the Greek. He's talking about the gifts of the spirit that are given.

to early Christians. And he uses it rather differently because he thinks that everybody in the Christian community he's talking to is given such a gift, both men and women. And he thinks that they should use them for mutual support. And the gifts he names are prophecy, words of wisdom and knowledge, speaking in tongues, and healing and miracles. All of those things for Paul. our gifts of the spirit that will be given to Christians.

And the Acts of the Apostle talks about them being poured out at Pentecost. That's where we get the idea, the word for the modern charismatic and Pentecostal movements within Christianity. Can you draw a line, a straight line, a line between Weber's idea of charismatic authority and the irrational? Well, Tom was talking about Weber three kinds of authority, those traditional authority, appeals to ritual and custom and practice. You know, that's the way we've always done things. And then there's secondly bureaucratic authority that appeals to reason and rationality and says, well, this is the efficient way of doing things. And charisma, yes, it appeals to, I wouldn't say irrational, but it appeals to our emotions, our guts, our intuition, our spiritual

sensibility, to the mysterious. Weber called it the enchanted. And actually those are the really powerful things that drive us. So in that sense, charismatic authority is more powerful than traditional authority or bureaucratic authority. Traditional and bureaucratic authority, they always ultimately rely on coercion. Charismatic authority doesn't. It doesn't have an apparatus of coercion behind it. You know, it directly inspires or seduces people. It doesn't have to boss them around and regulate them as well. He had this phrase, the iron cage. How does that fit into what you've been saying. Weber thought that the tragedy in a way of being a somebody living in the modern world was that the spirit of rationalisation has engulfed us and so we are bound by

bureaucratic processes. I'm sure we can all identify with that in every organisation. And that's an iron cage. We kind of love it because it gives us security and tries to ensure efficiency and fairness, but it also restricts us. And what fascinates them about charismatic or authority, is it's really the only thing that can break through that iron cage and do things differently. And that's why we're so fascinated by and attracted to charismatic people and why it still really matters in the modern world. Tom Wright, Weber was fascinated by beliefs he found in the USA. What did he see there that he informed his ideas? As David was saying, he was fascinated by what he saw as a combination of quite distinct,

but overlapping forces in America. He saw America as a crucible of democracy, as this great experiment in democratic sovereignty, and he saw that as one of the ways in which you can see new types of authority emerging, but he also saw it as an incredible marketplace of religious ideas. He was fascinated by the sects that rose up and which flourished during the period, which became known as the Second Great Awakening

where different types of Protestantism competed against each other in the eastern United States. And one of the things he was fascinated by were how people like Smith that David was talking about could found seemingly new religions. And Joseph Smith is an excellent example of the charismatic authority who uses, as David was saying, uses print.

he has visionary experiences that he writes down and publishes them as the book of Mormon and then they become through a print network a charismatic phenomenon. But I think it's also important to come back to what Linda was saying that Vable was deeply drawn to anything that could get us beyond the rational to beyond the modern. And one of the reasons he was fascinated by the USA and Canada and North America was what he saw as the residual forms of Native American beliefs and Native American. and cultures. He went to the United States in the early 1900s, and it's quite telling, I think, that he was invited to the White House by Theodore Roosevelt, but he decided to turn that down,

and he went to Oklahoma. He went there because he wanted to glimpse firsthand what he called the leather-stocking romanticism of the prairie, and specifically he wanted to see what he could learn from structures of what we would now call, thanks to Weber, indigenous charisma. And in particular, in his writings, he not only drew on structures of tribes for his examples, but he drew on one particular idea. There was this one particular idea that comes from the Huron language, Orenda, from the Iroquois people of the northeastern United States and Canada. And it's this idea of mystic potence, a mystic potence which flows through all things, which is present in the environment, and which can be harnessed by a particular

individuals for powerful ends. And Weber drew upon this idea and other ideas such as mana, the Melanese and concept, and said, yes, this is what I'm trying to fold into my idea of charismatic authority. Still in America, David Bell, what about the example of George Washington? What does that tell us about the relationship between charisma and democracy? Washington was a Virginian. He was a wealthy planter who'd gotten much wealthier because he married a wealthy widow, Martha Custis. And he had had military experience with the British Army as a member of the Virginia militia when Virginia was still a British colony during the Seven Years' War.

He was something of a hero because he had managed to lead the retreat after General Braddock had been terribly defeated at the Battle of the Monongahela, one of the worst British defeats during the Seven Years' War. So when the revolution broke out, when the American Revolution began, Washington was an obvious person to be named the head of the Continental Army. And there's an extraordinary scene when he rides into Cambridge, Massachusetts for the first time to take command of the Army. And here he is. He's a Virginian aristocrat. He is six foot three. He is acknowledged by everybody to be a very graceful individual. He is physically a very powerful individual. He's very handsome. He knows exactly how to dress.

He is riding one of the most expensive horses to be found in the United States at the time. So probably the equivalent of driving a Maserati today. And certainly the cost would have been enormous for most people. And the sort of Puritan burgers of Massachusetts have never really seen anything like this before. He sort of knocks them dead almost there. They don't really know quite what to make of him, but they're quite overawed by him. And he seems to be an embodiment of virtue, of strength, of power. of grace, as I've said, and he seems to them the obvious person to really entrust their fortunes to.

So that already at the beginning of the American Revolution, there is just an extraordinary cult of George Washington that develops, where people are writing hymns to him. They are talking about how he should become king of America, something that he doesn't like at all, because he is definitely a Republican. They take the anthem, God Save the King, and they change the words to say, God save Great Washington. Quite remarkably, his first outings, he was his first outing, as the commander of the American Army are actually not terribly successful for the most part.

His own subordinates are saying, well, he doesn't really have a lot of experience in a command position. He's hopeless. We should get rid of him. And yet, in this moment, when things look terribly bad, there's not a single word of criticism of him that appears in the American press because people are, again, so overawed by him,

so impressed by him, and they need so much to have a figure like that. And then this translates forward in Washington's career so that later on, after the Revolutionary War is over and won, and he's been the great hero of the Revolutionary War, after he has made this remarkable gesture of resigning his command, for which George III of England, of Britain, actually says, well, if he does that, he's the greatest man who ever lived. And then he chairs the Constitutional Convention. And he does have this charismatic aura.

People are constantly referring to him as Divine Washington. Another writer writes of him that had he lived in the days of old, he would have been worshipped as an idol. idol. So people are constantly invoking religion to talk about him because they see him almost as a kind of, almost a supernatural figure. And this matters a great deal for the creation of American democracy, because people are still not used to, certainly they're not used to a party system. They're not used to a system where you don't have a monarch at the head of it. They're not used to a system where you might have to entrust your political destinies to somebody who has, who you voted against, somebody you may not like somebody who holds political ideas opposed to yours. So it's very, very important at the

beginning of American democracy that there can be a figure as the first president whom everybody really just has absolute confidence in. And Washington's charisma plays an enormous part in this. I think that if Washington had not been there, I think it's very unlikely that the Constitution would have been ratified because people wouldn't have been willing to entrust so much power to a new central government as they did with the American Constitution had it not been for their confidence that this great charismatic figure was there. Thank you, Linda. Let's switch here. What, if anything, has been the connection between women and charismatic authority in religion?

That's a great question because we've been talking mainly about men, and that often happens in talking about charisma. But actually, I would suggest that women and minorities, racial minorities, poor people are probably the most likely to be charismatic. And there's a very Vibirin explanation for that, which is that traditional and bureaucratic forms of organisations and forms of authority are stacked against them. So charismatic power, authority is available to them. And that's, I think, always been the case. I mean, if we just take, if we just stick with, let's stick with the USA in the 20th century, who are the great religious figures, well, Martin Luther King and Amy Semple McPherson.

Amy Semple MacPherson was a much bigger figure than Billy Sunday, which was more pioneering than Billy Graham. She turned established Protestantism on its head by bringing charismatic experience into the white Protestant church in the USA. And she was an enormous celebrity of her day. She pioneered the use of broadcast media to pull in audience and revenue. She incorporated wonderful stage techniques into her weekly sermons. She founded an early megachurch in Los Angeles.

She sort of was the place where Hollywood meets religion, charisma meets politics. And she was a huge figure of her day. But I think we tend to then forget the female charismatic figures. They don't get nearly as much airtime or attention. But certainly in religion, women charitematics are just as important, probably more important in shaping and changing things. Please come in. is absolutely right about that. But I think in politics, it can be surprisingly difficult,

particularly when there's a question of trying to imagine a kind of personal relationship with the person, which can depend on having intimate details about their private life. And this places women in a very difficult position. So I think that certainly in the 18th, 19th, into the 20th century, it could be very difficult for women, for example, Hillary Clinton, to exert a kind of charismatic appeal because of the way that their private lives would constantly be brought into the public and denigrated. It's funny you should say that, because Amy Semple-McPherson

was brought down constantly in the press for her private life and her three divorces. Tom Wright, in what ways leaders who rely on charismatic authority more vulnerable than other leaders? Weber, in drawing those three types of

authority that I sketched earlier, he stressed that the first two were stable, that tradition and laws were both a source of immense stability, but the double bind of charisma was charismatic authority, it was fluid, it was dynamic, it was volatile, it could therefore bring together through an emotional bond types of people, groups of people that might not be able to be brought together through the other more stable forms of authority, but the flip

side of that is that it's transient, that it is always in danger of collapsing, that if the leader doesn't continue to demonstrate their extraordinary qualities, then they're in danger of losing that particular charismatic power. If they don't still have the visions, if they don't still have the victories, then what remains of the charismatic authority can evaporate? And I think perhaps the most dramatic example of this, if we're coming back to Weber's obsession with 19th century America,

is one which is sometimes painted as quite a comic episode in history. So the millerites are a sect in 19th century America that were based around the teachings of William Miller, who argued that Jesus Christ would return in 1843. As 1843 approached, he changed that to 1844, but he had half a million people believing in his charismatic authority and reading his writings and following his preachings. 1844 came along, and as we know, the world didn't end,

and you see this Millerite movement collapse. It's a classic example of how the instabilis of charisma is based on the extraordinary visions being true or the victories continuing. Now, there are some examples, and David will know this more than anyone as someone who's written about Napoleon where this doesn't happen. David? Well, I think that Napoleon was somebody who was a very, I think, keen observer of the politics of his time.

And he said something in the memoirs he dictated, which actually anticipates Weber, because he himself said that I was the keystone of this arch of the state. He says, I was the state. but it depended upon every one of my victories. And I think that to a certain extent, some of his charismatic authority did actually begin to fritter away after the defeat in Russia. I think that people were, for a time, less willing to follow him.

I think his genius was that he was able to recreate that charismatic authority on two separate occasions and in two very different ways. So the first was when he stages this incredible return during the 100 days, where he has been sent into exile on the island of Elba, then he lands in southern France, marches on Paris, and manages to take power again. And this reignites the charismatic bond he had had with the French. And then, at the end of the 100 days, of course, he suffers another crashing defeat at the Battle of Waterloo. And then in his final exile, he manages to, through the dictation of these memoirs,

particularly what becomes known as the Memorial of St. Helena, he recreates a kind of image of himself as almost the great victim, as a kind of Prometheus chained to a rock in the South Atlantic and gnawed at by British vultures. And many people in France start to see him almost as a Christ-like figure, someone who has sacrificed himself for France. So with Napoleon, you see this constant reinvention of different sorts of charismatic appeal. It's good that you bring in the Christian idea

because, Linda, can we talk about people who had a religious context, religious background, religious conviction? Well, there's another very very important. important concept in all the Abrahamic religions, which is the Messiah, you know, the promised one, the Savior who's going to appear on earth and put things to rights. Christ is the Greek word for Messiah. And of course, Christians thought the Messiah had come in Jesus. And Messiah figures are often associated not just with charisma, but also with millennial or apocalyptic belief. The Messiah comes at the end of time. History is going to come to an end. And some political

figures draw on that idea as well, or their followers attribute that to them. I think in parentheses, everything we're saying, Weber recognized, charisma is only as good as the people who recognize it. It's a reciprocal relationship. I mean, there have been plenty of claimants to the Messiah, and there have been plenty of people proclaimed the Messiah right up to modern times, both women and men, religious figures and political figures. it's another trope that keeps getting reinvented. Without the religious content, has it changed its nature? Is it a different sort of thing after that time, the time of miracles went?

If you think of charisma as a gift, you know, there's not a technology of it. You can't learn it. You can't set about being charismatic. Yes, of course you can stage it to some extent and you can learn certain things. But it always seems to have this irreducibly... from outside quality. It's something ecstatic, and charismatic or gifted people often talk about that, that they don't know what comes over them or they feel possessed. And that's got just as much secular resonance, artistic inspiration or scientific creativity. But they all depend on the idea that there's

something, a spirit from outside, an inspiration that comes from outside. So in that sense, Melvin, I think that charisma is sort of inherently religious. Even if you don't acknowledge there as a god, it does depend on thinking there is something bigger than you that you are somehow channeling. It's not just you. One of the main problems in the idea that we're discussing is that it's an unfinished idea.

Weber has multiple contradictions and inconsistencies in what he's saying. Is it a property of an individual? Is it to do with followership? Is it something which can, be learned or is it something which is gifted by grace. And I think what we need to understand about this idea is that it's an unfinished idea. Weber may have been on the cusp of developing this idea and honing it and developing it in a way which made it more coherent and made it more

usable. But it's like an idea like it would be as if Marx died during capital or Hannah Arendt died during her work on totalitarianism. We don't quite know where Weber was going with the idea. and as a result of that, people have been able to take the idea in multiple different ways. One of the most important things that's happened to charisma is that it's been diluted, it's become a threadbare cliche. I don't think an hour will go by here in Broadcasting House without someone using the word on the air. But we don't agree, all three of us here today, Melvin, and people who use the word are not using it in the same way. What about the connection that leaders with charismatic authority have to change?

Weber says that charisma is a specifically creative force in history. It's how change happens. It's how a break with a traditional order can come about. And that's usually because there is an emotional bond. And a bond is created with followers that transcends custom, that transcends the everyday concerns that. creates a new set of norms and values. And that's something which you see in what Linda was saying about women and outsiders

are often some of the most charismatic figures. And that's often because they're at one removed from power and they're therefore able to galvanise a form of loyalty which is against the traditional, which is against an ordinary bond. You can think of taking it beyond the European and the South American context to think about the founding of nations in the post-colonial world, for example. You can think about some of the greatest changes in global politics, the rise of nations in Africa, breaking free from European rule. Charismatic politics plays a great role in that period of history, that epic change from European domination to independence, the foundation of the foundation of, the foundation of. nations, you see, you know, Magabe or Mobutu or Yerere, all of these figures in Africa,

who are in some ways part of a continuity with the figures that David was talking about earlier, these figures from the history of revolution. And so you see this continuing association with, of charisma with change. And one of the interesting questions is, when Weber is talking about charismatic authority, is he praising it or not? Is he saying that this creative force in world history is what we need, or is it the problem? And at times he seems to suggest that the Weimar Constitution, which he helped to write, he didn't live to see, needed to create more space for a charismatic authority figure, a Caesarist figure. And by doing so, create more space for change to take place within a political structure.

David, David, Bill, what happens when someone achieves power through their charisma and wants to find a successor? Well, that's the difficult question, isn't it? I mean, Melvin, it's one of the other things Weber talks about is what he calls the routinization of charisma. The way that charisma can, in fact, be transferred from an individual to an office. Washington is a very good example of a degree of success with that, because the American presidency was very much shaped by George Washington, the first president, and it still retains something of this aura. Just as a parenthesis, to go back to something that Linda was saying, I think one of the reasons that the word charisma itself is so attractive today

in a very secular world is that it allows us to sort of talk about something that has religious resonance, supernatural resonance, without a specific reference to a particular religion or to a particular set of beliefs. So it's very convenient to use that way. We're not actually claiming that a charismatic figure is really supernatural, but still has some sort of aura of the supernatural around him or her. In any case, to come back to the routinization, so Weber did see this as one possibility for how you transfer power to somebody else

by routinizing it, by routinizing the charisma, not so much in an individual but in the office. But a lot of people have failed to do that. Napoleon is actually a very good example. It was altogether too personal with him. And even though he created an empire and had an error to the three, Napoleon the second, no one, you know, there was never really much of a chance that if he was thrown off his throne as opposed to dying in old age, that he, that his son would have been

able to take over from him. So that was a good, even though he created this massive structure in the empire, it didn't, it didn't survive his own rule. I don't think we've talked quite enough about the fact that charismatic people can be bad people, wicked people. Charismatic people can, it can be used in a very malign way. In some ways, being charismatic can be very, very close and overlapping with being what we call narcissistic today in psychological language. And the other factor is that by its nature, if you're charismatic, you haven't got the accountability that being part of a tradition or part of a bureaucratic structure would give you. So you are a loose canon. I mean, that's part of the attraction

and the worrisomeness of it. And there are plenty of examples in religion of course, of people becoming what the press would call a cult leader and abusing their power like Jim Jones and the people's temple leading to mass suicides or David Koresh. It often is when the charismatic authority's leader is ebbing away and is threatened and they're trying to regain that charismatic authority. That can be one of the points of danger. The very nature of charismatic authority is being opposed to legal authority

by Weber means that the charismatic leader can trample on the laws, can violate the laws in the expectation that his followers will follow him or her. Jim Jones actually threw the Bible on the floor and stamped on it. That was one of his routines. Can we talk about Tutu? Arturit of Tutu for a moment. He seemed to embody the three sources of authority, doesn't they? Lender. That's a very important thing to notice

because actually we've been talking as if these three sorts of authority are completely separate. But many people combine them, and that really does make for a powerful figure. Desmond Tutu, from South Africa, who died recently and did so much in the post-apartheid period, and in getting rid of apartheid, of course. As a wonderful example of that, you're quite right,

because he's a traditional authority. He's an archbishop in the Anglican church. He nearly always wore his purple cassock, and he was called the arch. And yet he also, he combined that with enormous charisma. He could do amazing things. He could go to a funeral where a very tense situation where a black person has been murdered.

And he could end up getting people sort of waving their hands in the air and saying we love black and white people, were all God's children. And he could just change the temperature of things through his charisma. But he was also this traditional authority leader. Tom Wright, which has been mentioned. that he didn't complete, maybe didn't complete his work on charisma. How then did it become so influential? Would you say it was very influential?

Not initially. I think it was a minor part of a major thinker's work, but it became indispensable for thinkers in Germany when thinking about what was happening during the rise of Hitler. And then the most important thing that happens to charisma is that it crosses the Atlantic. And it's really only after the Second World War that we see the term rise into popular use. If you go online, if you go on Google Books, for example, you can search for the history of any word. And if you type charisma into the English language or the French language or Spanish, you get the same chart, which is that charisma is nowhere until suddenly in the 1950s and particularly the 1960s, it leaps up into popular usage. And this story is a

really interesting one, I think, because it's really a post-war concept. It's really a cold war concept. It's a concept that people are finding useful when trying to think about what on earth happened in Europe in the 1930s and the 1940s, but they're also trying to think about the new kind of personalized ideological rule in the Soviet Union or in Mao's China and in Africa and the leaders I was talking about. But they're also trying to think. about the new celebrity-driven, television political politics that we now associate with the era of JFK.

And this is a fascinating story. And it's actually one which I might hand over to David because one of the intellectuals who does this is the famous intellectual Daniel Bell, who is David's father, who helps introduce and is one of the reasons, perhaps, that we're here discussing this today. Okay, David. Your father? So, yes. I mean, so, so, so my, my father was a sociologist in also a journalist in the 1950s, and he and a bunch of, and several of his colleagues, you know, found that exactly as Tom was saying, to describe the, the new television-driven, celebrity-driven politics that was coming into being in the 1950s or 60s. They were looking for ways to do this. They were, they were devotees of Max Weber, in part because,

they were embracing a kind of modernization theory that was connected with Weber. And so my father, in an article in Fortune magazine back in the 1950s, used the word charisma to describe one of the great labor leaders of the time, John L. Lewis, and his editor, at the time, Henry L.uce, you know, said, well, what is this word charisma that you're talking about? And he talked about it. He added some explanation in the article. And this was not the only origin point, but it was one of them. And the word very quickly exploded into comments. usage. And as Tom said earlier, it's become almost entirely degraded by this point. So it's a kind of synonym for glamour or magnetism. There's an advertisement for salad dressing, which says,

you know, if you're just eating iceberg lettuce, use our salad dressing and you'll add charisma to the crunch. So, and there is, there's, there are soaps that are called charisma. There are perfumes called charisma. Anything, again, too, that can be associated with this, obviously incredibly attractive idea of a person, that, by eating, this or by using this product, you will increase your own personal magnetism. So it's really quite a remarkable story. And my father does have a part to play in it. Don't forget that the charismatic Christianity grows at exactly the same time and is the

fastest growing world movement in religion and uses exactly that word as well. So the Pentecostal charismatic movement. Exactly. Exactly. So do you think that from what David said, do you think the word is utterly debased or is it being reborn in the Pentecostal Charismatic Movement? Is it, does it marching on? It's marching on, isn't it?

And as we keep saying in all of these things, it's fantastically plastic and you can use it in this religious sense with deep and profound meaning and you can use it in secular senses and you can use it in superficial senses as well. And all of these things are happening in spades at the moment. Well, thank you very much. Thank you, Linda Woodhead, David Bell and Tom Wright and our studio engineer Tim Heffer. Next week we'll be discussing Antigali by Sophocles, refutedly, the most performed of all Greek tragedies.

Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What did you not say that you wished you had said or wanted to say? Linda, can I start with you? I think we could say something about how important the internet has been because going back to David's point about once you get printing and you get images and you get mass circulation, that makes a difference. Well, the internet does that with scope and scale.

And anyone can make a bid to have their charisma recognised now online. And so I think that's going to do something interesting to charisma. Ward. It will certainly be a platform for people who haven't previously. had one. And so charismatic people will pop up. I mean, taking religion, let's take Islam, there are lots all the time. There are online Islamic teachers and preachers, often young, highly charismatic, attracting large followers, large followings. And all this undermines traditional authorities in religion. David, do you want to say anything?

Sure. Well, maybe I'll use just a couple of minutes to tell a story that I wasn't able to tell earlier. One of the first figures in the 18th century to be recognized as charismatic is somebody who's today almost entirely forgotten, eclipsed by the other figures of the Age of Revolution. And this is a Corsican, a man named Pasquale Paoli, or Paioli, as we say in the United States, who was the ruler of independent Corsica in the middle of the 18th century. and he attracted an enormous amount of attention because he was seen as this uniquely virtuous figure, this uniquely powerful figure, this uniquely genius figure. And he owed his reputation above all to somebody we know mostly from another context, which was James Boswell, the biographer of Samuel Johnson. And when Boswell was still quite young and unknown, he actually traveled to Corsica and fell entirely under the spell of Paoli.

And he went back to Britain and started, writing newspaper articles about saying how wonderful Paoli was, how a great leader he was, what an extraordinary man he was. And then he published a book about Corsica, which included this really absolutely worshipful portrait of Paoli, which was written in the style very much of a kind of sentimental novel of the time, which included all these personal details about Paoli, but also stressed his genius and it stressed the utter devotion of the Corsican people to him. And this book actually was what made Boswell's career. It allowed him to become a rather than a lawyer. And what also happened is that he started to raise funds for the Corsicans

to fight first against the Genoese, whom they were fighting against and then against the French. And he came very close to actually dragging Britain into war with France simply over Corsica. And the Whig quartermaster general at the time, Lord Holland actually wrote a letter in which he said, you know, we cannot start a war just because Mr. Balswell has been to Corsica. And what's also interesting is that in America, there was an enormous cult of Paoli, part because they appreciated this idea of a figure who was leading an independence movement against an overseas oppressor. And much of the original cult of George Washington was actually built upon the earlier cult of

Paoli, including songs where they simply changed the name from Paoli to Washington, poems, where they did the same thing, engravings which they redid to make it look more like Washington and so on and so forth. So it's interesting how print, again, as Linda was saying, can contribute and how media is so important to the phenomenon of charisma. And actually, just to go on for one more second here, at the beginning of his presidency, Washington actually takes a tour of the United States at the time, mostly the Eastern Seaboard. And everywhere he is almost greeted as a kind of semi-divine figure. There's one of the South American aspiring revolutionaries, Francisco de Miranda, is in Philadelphia when Washington comes in.

And he says, Washington came in as if, and this was as if the Savior had entered Jerusalem again. and everybody is just talking about the enormous enthusiasm, the enormous outpouring of emotion, because as Linda said, charisma is a very emotional thing. And people are really in love with him. I mean, the emotion that they feel towards him is a very powerful love. And it is something that allows the American Constitution to really be stabilized and for American democracy to take root. Tom?

Yeah, I thought it was a fascinating discussion. I'm very interested in the fact that we are all, us three here, are all from different subjects, different academic disciplines, and we all use this word. And I'm very interested in the idea of whether it's still fit for purpose, really. And I'm fascinated by people like David, for example, in a recent book that he wrote, made a very passionate and quite compelling case for bringing charisma back as an idea which can help to explain the role of the individual in history.

And I'm also interested in those who say, actually, it's been, tested and found wanting. It doesn't explain, as Linda was saying, the new forms of emotional connection which flow from the digital world, from the digital media ecology. It doesn't explain racial, sexual disparities and differences in reception.

And I'm interested in whether, a hundred years after it was introduced, this idea it still means anything beyond the conflation that lots of people have between charm and charisma. Obviously, they're from one of the things we didn't say, which is the thing that anyone who talks about charisma or if anyone gets asked is, are they from the same etymology? And they're not.

They're not really. There is a vague connection. But no, the Latin for Carmen feeds into charm, which is a song. And to be charming is to sing a song to someone that they want to hear. but charisma is something quite distinct and I think that distinction is often lost and so it's very useful to try and be specific about what Weber was doing with the idea

and what people have done with it since whilst also recognising its limitations about what it doesn't help explain and what it might leave to one side or the ways of thinking about democracy or about authority that actually prevents us from thinking about. Do you think though, Tom, do you think you can, I'll be seeing

democratisation of the concept now. You'd kind of expect to. And I mean, that's what charismatic Christianity is. It's going back to Paul and saying, actually, it's a gift that everyone should expect to have. Don't just confine it to these great heroic male figures. I think we're seeing that happen, aren't we? And you're right, there are a whole set of synonyms around it as well.

I mean, that's often been used. Men are charismatic, women are inspiring. Yeah. And influence is one of the words that, I'm a historian of the 19th century and that's the words that is used to think about how the authority flows through female power. It's often indirect.

It's at one removed from the sources of power, but the charisma of Elizabeth I, or Sir Jonah Truth, or for that matter, Harriet Beecher Stowe's writings, they're all something which is conceptualized through ideas of flow as much as a gift of grace, which is in some way dominant or domineering in the way that we've been discussing charisma. So I think it's very important to think about digital ecology in the democratization of charisma as taking one of the strands of Weber

that he doesn't explore and developing it in ways which are more consonant with our own media. I would only say that unfortunately, and I agree entirely with what, what you Tom and you Linda were just saying. And yet I'm afraid that as as current events show us, the charisma of powerful male leaders seems to also have a long way to go before it dies out. So I'm afraid that to the extent that the word can be useful in describing that particular phenomenon, it's going to have a long future and a long and impressive future to it. Yeah, if we live in an age of in which newly emotional forms of connection

that are generated by various different technologies and various different social movements and populisms, then we need to understand. And if we want to understand those and we need to understand the vocabulary that we use to understand politics and interrogating charisma in the way that we've been doing today might help us get somewhere in doing that. Do you think it's elastic enough to take, the word charisma is elastic enough to take in very powerful leaders, very powerful notions and somebody who's top of the pops? I think once you put once you make sure that you're talking about,

talking about charismatic authority rather than just charisma, then you're at least talking about a concept which you can differentiate from other forms of authority. Charisma itself floats through your hands. It's a threadbare cliche which doesn't describe as much as it seems to... I agree. I think you need to distinguish between charisma and celebrity, I think is very important. But, I mean, top of the pops, what about somebody like Ariana Grande? You know, we'd not heard of her until there was that terrible tragic bombing in Manchester. And then she suddenly becomes this incredible ritual leader. You know, she orchestrates an amazing ritual ceremony of mourning and memorialization.

And she shows herself to be a really important leader with gravitas. So these things, you can't draw, these lines are hard to draw often. Absolutely. Well, thank you, Alderman. much. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. All right, here we go, OTI. Five, six, seven, eight.

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