[marginalium]
Charisma as Representation
27 Jan 2025
What makes a leader ‘charismatic’? I’ve talked about Weber’s classification before:
he speaks of three ‘ideal’ kinds of political leadership, domination, and authority:
- charismatic authority, that borne of character or perhaps heroism;
- traditional authority, borne of structures such as patrimonialism or feudalism; and
- rational-legal authority, borne of bureaucracy and statehood.
So for Weber, charisma is some attribute of the person—a particular talent or ability that is existentially relevant to the group.
This article takes that idea a bit further—charisma as a form of representation of the group values/interests:
Because charismatic authority emerges from the trust of the followers in the leader, it can also be analyzed as a form of representation. The followers believe, very strongly and for whatever reason (and often wrongly!), that the leader will pursue their interests or promote their values; but if he fails in sufficiently spectacular ways, they may abandon him …
.. charismatic relationships contain moments of authorization (the equivalent of “voting”), when followers “recognize” the leader’s charisma and submit themselves to the leader’s authority, and moments of accountability, when the base decides that some failure of the leader is sufficiently large that they no longer recognize his charismatic gift (they must have been “mistaken”). And charismatic leaders appear to be successful “representatives” to the extent that they mirror or amplify the identity, values, and interests of their base
In Successful Prophets, we sort of end up here—the leaders of spectacularly destructive cults aren’t charismatic in the way we normally connote this. They’re a bit weird and often off-putting. But they become representatives of something, and as I allude to, it’s the buffering effects of the group that allows this behaviour to get out of hand. The group protects the image of the leader as a representative.
Anthologies: Connection, Spiritual Architecture, Collective Architecture, On Leadership, On Politics and Power, Successful Prophets