Max Weber and Charisma: A Transatlantic Affair: Joshua Derman

Max Weber and Charisma:
A Transatlantic Affair
Joshua Derman
Some concepts in the modern social sciences are so ubiquitous that it is dif-
fcult to imagine a time when they did not exist. This is undoubtedly true of
charisma, a buzzword beloved by sociologists, political scientists, psycholo-
gists, self-help gurus, and scholars of celebrity.
1
But charisma in its modern
secular usage, connoting an individuals claim to leadership on the basis of
his or her exceptional gifts, is a concept of very recent origin. Between 1915
and 1922 the German scholar Max Weber introduced it into the social sci-
ences, frst in a series of articles on the economic ethics of world religions for
the Archiv fr Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik (Archive of Social Sci-
ence and Social Policy), then in the famous lecture Politics as a Vocation,
New German Critique 113, Vol. 38, No. 2, Summer 2011
DOI 10.1215/0094033X-1221785 2011 by New German Critique, Inc.
51
I am grateful to Anthony Grafton, Richard King, Anson Rabinbach, Daniel Rodgers, and Till van
Rahden for their comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
1. For some representative examples, see Ann Ruth Willner, The Spellbinders: Charismatic
Political Leadership (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984); Charles Lindholm, Charisma
(Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990); Douglas Madsen and Peter G. Snow, The Charismatic Bond:
Political Behavior in Times of Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Tony Ales-
sandra, Charisma: Seven Keys to Developing the Magnetism That Leads to Success (New York:
Warner, 1998); William Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Philip Rieff, Charisma: The Gift of Grace, and How It Has
Been Taken Away from Us (New York: Pantheon, 2007); and Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi, eds.,
Constructing Charisma: Celebrity, Fame, and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe (New York:
Berghahn, 2010).
52 Max Weber and Charisma
and fnally in his posthumously published Economy and Society. Until the
eve of World War II charisma in this sense of the word was almost unknown
among American social scientists. When the migr historian Hans Kohn
observed in 1935 that the dictatorship of Fascism is charismatic, nationalis-
tic, and permanent; the dictatorship of Communism is rational, international,
and temporary, a reviewer for the American Political Science Review com-
plained about having to look up the meaning of charismatic in the diction-
ary.
2
It took at least until the late 1960s for the concept to become part of the
American vernacular. In the spring of 1968 the New York Times columnist
Russell Baker declared that the big thing in politics these days is charisma,
pronounced karizma, noting, for example, that all the Kennedys possessed
it, whereas Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon did not. That Baker went
so far as to spell charisma phonetically suggests that he expected many of his
readers were still unfamiliar with it.
3
Why did it take so long for charisma to become a fxture of modern
social science? How did it percolate through German intellectual life in the
Weimar Republic and under National Socialism, and then cross the Atlantic
to the United States? What did it mean to German and American intellectu-
als, and why did they embrace or reject the concept? These are the questions
that this essay seeks to answer. Despite the vast literature that scholars have
devoted to Webers concept of charisma, no concerted effort has been made
to understand its transatlantic history in the decades after his death in 1920.
4

A growing body of recent scholarly work has extended the modern history of
concepts into an international and increasingly global framework. The his-
tory of Webers concept of charismafrst enthusiastically embraced in the
United States during the late 1930smust necessarily be told from such a
transnational perspective.
5
A concept acquires traction in intellectual communities when it proves
itself useful for thinking with: when it helps intellectuals understand or articu-
2. Robert C. Brooks, review of Dictatorship in the Modern World, ed. Guy Stanton Ford, Ameri-
can Political Science Review 29 (1935): 1055. The passage in question came from the contribution by
Hans Kohn, Communist and Fascist Dictatorship: A Comparative Study, in Dictatorship in the
Modern World, ed. Guy Stanton Ford (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1935), 154.
3. Russell Baker, Observer: The Age of Charismatics, New York Times, April 18, 1968.
4. John Potts, The History of Charisma (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), is a brief
account that cites no German-language sources.
5. See, e.g., Douglas R. Howland, Translating the West: Language and Political Reason in
Nineteenth-Century Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002); and Andrew Sartori, Ben-
gal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2008).
Joshua Derman 53
late issues that matter to them, solve problems that they fnd particularly urgent.
If a concept conficts with traditional ways of thinking about a given topic,
intellectuals may fnd it uncongenial to think with. Such was the case with
charisma in the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. For most scholars who
engaged with the concept, charisma connoted an understanding of leadership
that was too individualistic, liberal, frivolous, or foreign to suit their tastes.
The sociologist Theodor Geiger articulated the organicist bias so prevalent
in German social thought when he declared that the leader represents and
embodies the group as a whole.
6
Webers vision of leadership, which pre-
sented the charismatic individual as introducing new norms from beyond (or
in opposition to) the communitys traditional or sacred values, simply did not
square with the holistic approach articulated by Geiger and others. These
considerations militated against the assimilation of charisma into German
social science before 1945.
Some concepts become useful for thinking with only when a conducive
issue or problem presents itself. Charisma in the Weberian sense is a concept
whose initial popularity did not derive from theoretical or purely academic
concerns. Instead, from the very beginning its ascription went hand in hand
with the observation and analysis of current political events. Although a hand-
ful of German writers had employed charisma to describe Benito Mussolini
since the mid-1920s, the concept would resonate only after the Nazi Party
made its entrance onto the political stage in 1930. Today it has become com-
monplace for scholarship on National Socialism to interpret Adolf Hitlers
place in the Nazi system in terms of charismatic rulership.
7
Scholars have not
appreciated, however, that National Socialism was largely responsible for cre-
ating interest in charisma in the frst place. Had it not been for the looming
signifcance of National Socialism in American intellectual life in the mid-
1930s, I argue, neither Webers concept of charisma nor perhaps Weber
6. Theodor Geiger, Fhren und Folgen (Berlin: Weltgeist-Bcher, 1928), 81. On the way in which
organicism hindered the reception of Webers sociology in Germany, see Wolfgang J. Mommsen,
Max Weber in Modern Social Thought, in The Political and Social Theory of Max Weber: Col-
lected Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 17375.
7. See M. Rainer Lepsius, Charismatic Leadership: Max Webers Model and Its Applicability to
the Rule of Hitler, in Changing Conceptions of Leadership, ed. C. F. Graumann and S. Moscovici
(New York: Springer, 1986), 5366; Ian Kershaw, The Hitler Myth: Image and Reality in the Third
Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Kershaw, Hitler (Harlow: Longman, 1991); Stefan
Breuer, Max Webers Parteisoziologie und das Problem des Faschismus, in Das Weber-Paradigma:
Studien zur Weiterentwicklung von Max Webers Forschungsprogramm, ed. Gert Albert et al. (Tbin-
gen: Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 2003), 35270; and Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Vom Beginn des Ersten Welt-
krieges bis zur Grndung der beiden deutschen Staaten 19141949, vol. 4 of Deutsche Gesellschafts-
geschichte (Munich: Beck, 2003).
himself would have attracted as much attention. National Socialism provided
a context necessary for charisma to gain traction in the United States. During
the 1950s the concepts utility for American social science was further extended
through attempts to ascribe it to popular anticolonial movements in Africa and
Asia. By the early 1960s charisma had become a concept associated almost
exclusively with the leaders of nationalist parties in the new states created by
decolonization.
Why did American social scientists fnd charisma a useful concept to
think with? Like totalitarianism, another concept introduced primarily by
German migrs, charisma enabled social scientists to compare the eras
major political movements.
8
Analysts used it to underscore the role played by
individual personalities in mass political movements and to demonstrate how
loyalty to an individual leader facilitated mass mobilization while restrain-
ing the centrifugal forces generated by the mobilization itself. They also used
it to articulate the homologies between leadership in religious and political
movements. In a single word, charisma captured the argumentincreasingly
popular in the 1930sthat mass dictatorship represented a form of secular-
ized religion. Finally, as Peter Baehr has noted, social scientists invoked the
concept of charisma to express their conviction that modern dictatorships,
despite their apparent radicalism, would inevitably be subject to routiniza-
tion. To call a leader charismatic was to suggest that his movement, while
unusual and exceptional, could not indefnitely maintain its revolutionary
fervor. In the case of National Socialism, a political movement characterized
by cumulative radicalization (Hans Mommsen), such predictions of rou-
tinization proved unwarranted.
9
In thinking with a concept, intellectuals frequently change its meaning
or combine it with other concepts to make it more serviceable for their ends.
Charisma became a congenial concept for thinking about leadership in the
new states largely because Talcott Parsons inscribed it in an idiosyncratic
modernization theory of his own creation. Such creative misinterpretations,
as Guenther Roth has called them, are characteristic of all processes of intel-
lectual reception.
10
The fact that Webers concepts lent themselves to so many
8. See Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995); and Anson Rabinbach, Moments of Totalitarianism, History and
Theory 45 (2006): 72100.
9. Peter Baehr, Identifying the Unprecedented: Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the Cri-
tique of Sociology, American Sociological Review 67 (2002): 80431.
10. Guenther Roth, Value-Neutrality in Germany and the United States, in Reinhard Bendix
and Guenther Roth, Scholarship and Partisanship: Essays on Max Weber (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1971), 35.
Joshua Derman 55
creative misinterpretations helps account for their enduring appeal. If we
dismiss them as simply erroneous readings, we lose sight of what Weber has
meant for twentieth-century readers and writers. Who in 1920 would have
believed that Max Webers technical sociological terminology would someday
be the everyday language of the United States, the land of the Philistines, itself
in the meantime become the most powerful nation in the world? the Ameri-
can philosopher Allan Bloom once mused.
11
Very few would have believed it,
just as very few would have believed that Weber would someday rank among
the founding fathers of modern social science. The story of charisma in Ger-
man and American intellectual life is all the more fascinating for that reason.
Weber and Charismatic Rulership
In the last ten years of his life, as part of his ongoing work for the Outline of
Social Economics, Weber sought to identify patterns of rulership (Herrschaft)
in religious, economic, and political associations. In particular, he sought to
understand how individual leaders or institutions ensured that their commands
were obeyed. Obedience could be based partly on conscious calculations of
punishment and reward, or simply on mindless habituation. But Weber believed
that these kinds of motivations were not suffcient to maintain rulership. It was
also necessary that subordinates viewed the system as legitimate. They must
feel obliged to obey out of some kind of ethical duty or compunction; obedi-
ence must seem to them the right thing to do. What kinds of legitimacy were
available to justify the domination of rulers over the ruled? In a famous typol-
ogy, Weber enumerated three pure types of legitimacy, each of which he
associated with a particular style of rulership (though he cautioned that most
actual forms of rulership consisted of combinations of these pure types).
12
The frst kind of legitimacy rested on a belief in the legality of enacted
rules and the right of those elevated under such rules to issue commands.
11. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democ-
racy and Impoverished the Souls of Todays Students (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 147.
12. Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie; Studien-
ausgabe, ed. Johannes Winckelmann (Tbingen: Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1980), hereafter WG, 1617,
122, 124, 15355; Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther
Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), hereafter ES, 31, 213, 215,
26264. See also Weber, Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen: Konfuzianismus und Taoismus,
ed. Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer with the assistance of Petra Kolonko, vol. I/19 of Studienausgabe der
Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe (Tbingen: Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1991), hereafter MWS I/19, 21; H. H.
Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1946), hereafter FMW, 294. Citations of Webers work specify the German text followed
by a reference to the standard English translation unless otherwise noted. In some cases the English
translations have been modifed for the sake of fdelity to the original German.
Weber associated this legitimacy with legal rulership. Under this struc-
ture, subordinates owed their obedience to an impersonal order, a set of norms
and rules ultimately grounded in a constitution. While individual persons
could wield authority, they could do so only because the system specifed their
authority and competencies. A prime example of legal rulership was bureau-
cracy, such as the civil service of the modern state or the administration of the
Catholic Church.
13
Webers second kind of legitimacy was based on an estab-
lished belief in the sanctity of immemorial traditions and the legitimacy of
those exercising authority under them. Individual leaders possessed tradi-
tional legitimacy if they occupied the traditionally sanctioned position of
authority, and enjoyed obedience if their subjects felt the weight of custom to
be binding. Examples of such forms of traditional rulership included patriar-
chy and patrimonial monarchy.
14
Weber distinguished legal and traditional rulership from the kind based
on devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an
individual person, and the normative patterns or order revealed or ordained by
him.
15
This kind of rulership derived its legitimacy from an exceptional indi-
viduals personal claim to be followed. In the face of such heroism, people
would feel ethically compelled to follow and help fulfll the leaders goals.
Shamans, prophets, berserkers, warlords, plebiscitary rulers, and leaders of
contemporary political parties wielded this type of rulership. As modern
examples, Weber named the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, the Bavarian
socialist Kurt Eisner, and the cult poet Stefan George. Weber called this type
of rulership charismatic.
16
In the New Testament, Paul had used the Greek
word charisma (lit. gift of grace) to refer to the special talents bestowed on
select individuals by the Holy Spirit. In Webers own lifetime, the German
church historian Rudolf Sohm had argued that the authority of the early Chris-
tian church had been based on the charisma of its leaders rather than on any
legal or institutional organization.
17
Inspired by Sohms work, Weber took the
13. WG, 124, 12530 (ES, 215, 21726); MWS I/19, 21 (FMW, 29495).
14. WG, 124, 13040 (ES, 215, 216, 22641); MWS I/19, 22 (FMW, 296).
15. WG, 124 (ES, 215).
16. WG, 14042 (ES, 24145). See also Max Weber, Wissenschaft als Beruf 1917/1919; Politik als
Beruf, 1919, ed. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Wolfgang Schluchter with the assistance of Birgitt Mor-
genbrod, vol. I/17 of Studienausgabe der Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe (Tbingen: Mohr [Paul Sie-
beck], 1994), hereafter MWS I/17, 3738 (FMW, 7980). It was in a letter of June 9, 1910, discussing
the poet Stefan George, that Weber frst used the concept of charisma outside an explicitly religious
context. See Joachim Radkau, Max Weber: A Biography, trans. Patrick Camiller (Cambridge: Polity,
2009), 394.
17. David Norman Smith, Faith, Reason, and Charisma: Rudolf Sohm, Max Weber, and the
Theology of Grace, Sociological Inquiry 68 (1998): 3260.
Joshua Derman 57
conceptual leap of using charisma outside its usual theological and historical
context. In principle, these phenomena are universal, Weber argued, even
though they are often most evident in the religious realm.
18
He defned the
concept as an extraordinary personal quality (originally seen as magical, as in
the case of prophets, people with therapeutic or legal wisdom, leaders in the
hunt or heroes in war) by virtue of which the person is considered endowed
with supernatural or superhuman or at least specifcally extraordinary powers
or qualities not accessible to others, or seen as god-sent or exemplary and thus
a leader [Fhrer].
19
Weber spoke of charisma as if it were at once a real existing thing and
a purely subjective impression. Charisma was supposed to be something
that leaders had, yet its presence was determined entirely by the eye of the
beholder: so long as he or she was regarded as an extraordinary or supernatu-
rally gifted individual, the leader had charisma, but once this impression
wore off, the charisma was gone. Weber refused to defne charisma in terms
of specifc character traits. In premodern times, he suggested, charisma was
particularly associated with sorcerers, shamans, and prophetsindividuals
who claimed to work miracles, slip into trancelike states, or channel the voice
of God. In the ancient Greek city-states and in modern democracies, leaders
with demagogic skills of the spoken word were frequently treated as charis-
matic. But there was no one trait that qualifed a leader as charismatic.
20
In
light of Webers ruthless criticism of colleagues for imputing entelechies to
human personalities or societies, it was a peculiar move for him to base his
sociology of rulership on an unempirical and metaphysical substance like
charisma.
21
Weber believed that charisma represented the specifcally creative
revolutionary force of history.
22
A leader whose legitimacy rested on cha-
risma was capable of changing others subjective values and creating new
18. Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Die Wirtschaft und die gesellschaftlichen Ord-
nungen und Mchte; Nachla: Herrschaft, ed. Edith Hanke with the assistance of Thomas Kroll,
vol. I/22-4 of Studienausgabe der Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe (Tbingen: Mohr [Paul Siebeck],
2009), hereafter MWS I/22-4, 132 (ES, 1112).
19. WG, 140 (ES, 241).
20. Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Die Wirtschaft und die gesellschaftlichen Ordnun-
gen und Mchte; Nachla: Religise Gemeinschaften, ed. Hans Kippenberg with the assistance of
Petra Schilm and Jutta Niemeier, vol. I/22-2 of Studienausgabe der Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe
(Tbingen: Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 2005), 12 (ES, 400401); MWS I/17, 65 (FMW, 107).
21. See Max Weber, Roscher und Knies und die logischen Probleme der historischen Nation-
alkonomie (19036), in Gesammelte Aufstze zur Wissenschaftslehre, ed. Johannes Winckel-
mann (Tbingen: Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1988), 1145.
22. MWS I/22-4, 139 (ES, 1117).
attitudes toward the world. But despite its transformative power, charismatic
rulership was an unstable and evanescent phenomenon. If a charismatic
individual could no longer demonstrate that he or she possessed special pow-
ers, the individuals authority would disappear; thus charismatic rulership
required constant demonstrations of wondrous deeds. Charismatic leaders
avoided formal organization or hierarchy, relying instead on purely personal
bonds of loyalty to disciples chosen on the basis of their own charismatic
qualifcations. Instead of receiving salaries or benefces, the followers shared
in the booty and donations received by their leaders. As a result, charismatic
rulership had diffculty providing for its own long-term stability, the liveli-
hood of its followers families, or an orderly succession of leadership. All
these needs encouraged the followers of a charismatic leader to promote the
routinization (Veralltglichung) of charisma, its decoupling from individ-
ual leaders and association with ruling dynasties (hereditary charisma) or
institutional positions (charisma of offce). Legitimate rulership would
eventually come to rest on traditional or legal norms rather than on extraor-
dinary individuals.
23
Weber insisted that charisma was a value free concept, applicable to
great moral heroes as well as evildoers and charlatans.
24
Toward the end of
his life, however, he made it clear that charisma was a quality he personally
prized in politicians. During World War I, Weber vocally supported the intro-
duction of parliamentary democracy with a Caesarist element into impe-
rial Germanynot because he felt personally committed to democratic ide-
als but because he believed that parliamentary democracy with strong party
leaders would best provide for creative foreign policy. Weber supported the
Weimar Republic, the new parliamentary government introduced after the
monarchys collapse in 1918. But within a year he had grown disillusioned
with how parliamentary democracy functioned in the new republic.
25
He con-
cluded that proportional representation, ideological polarization, and patron-
age had created a parliament of philistinesincapable in any sense of rep-
23. WG, 14048; MWS I/22-4, 13435, 14262 (ES, 24254, 111415, 112148).
24. WG, 140; MWS I/22-4, 132 (ES, 242, 1112).
25. Wolfgang Mommsen, Zum Begriff der plebiszitren Fhrerdemokratie, in Max Weber:
Gesellschaft, Politik und Geschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 4471. On the con-
ceptual transition from Caesarism to charisma in Webers work, see Peter Baehr, Max Weber and
the Avatars of Caesarism, in Dictatorship in History and Theory: Bonapartism, Caesarism, and
Totalitarianism, ed. Peter Baehr and Melvin Richter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004),
15574; and Baehr, Caesarism and Charisma: From German Politics to Universal Sociology, in
Caesarism, Charisma, and Fate: Historical Sources and Modern Resonances in the Work of Max
Weber (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2008), 59114.
Joshua Derman 59
resenting a place for the selection of political leaders.
26
The greatest hindrance
to visionary political leadership was the mediocre level of parliamentary rep-
resentatives and the local notables (Honoratioren) who ensured their own
places on electoral lists.
27
This dim view no doubt refected Webers own frus-
tration over his failure to win a spot on the electoral list of the German Demo-
cratic Party: in a closed-door meeting, the party branch had demoted him in
favor of a local notable.
28
What was missing from German politics, he now
declared, were leaders who pursued their political careers not merely as a
remunerated profession but as a vocation (Beruf ) to which they felt person-
ally called. Germany was in grave danger of being ruled by professional
politicians [Berufspolitiker] without a vocation, without the inner, charis-
matic qualities that make a leader.
29
Weber, by contrast, was a compelling
orator, a magnetic rabble-rouser who came from outside the political establish-
ment. As Webers friend Karl Loewenstein later declared, He himself was the
charismatic man he described.
30
As a consultant to the committee that drafted the Weimar constitu-
tion, Weber pushed for the creation of a Reich presidency that would allow
independent leaders to come to the fore and, if necessary, go over the heads
of feuding parliamentarians to win a following among the population at
large. At the same time, he made it clear that the Reich president must respect
the laws of the land and not attempt to exert executive powers beyond their
limits. Weber did not want to see the pure charismatic rulership of a warlord
or prophet realized in Germany. The president must view the prospect of
the gallows as the reward awaiting any attempt to interfere with the laws or
to govern autocratically, with parliament doing its part to remove those who
had overstepped their bounds.
31
Parliament should also function as a kind
of school for training and disciplining future leaders in the sober business
of committee work. Nevertheless, it was clear that Weber saw parliament as
fulflling only a secondary, controlling function; the real leadership would
26. Max Weber, Zur Neuordnung Deutschlands: Schriften und Reden, 19181920, ed. Wolf-
gang J. Mommsen with the assistance of Wolfgang Schwentker, vol. I/16 of Studienausgabe der Max
Weber-Gesamtausgabe (Tbingen: Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1991), hereafter MWS I/16, 76; Weber,
Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994), hereafter PW, 306.
27. MWS I/17, 62, 6972 (FMW, 1034, 11114).
28. Marianne Weber, Max Weber: Lebensbild (1926; repr. Munich: Piper, 1989), 65456.
29. MWS I/17, 37, 72 (FMW, 79, 113).
30. Karl Loewenstein, Max Webers Political Ideas in the Perspective of Our Time, trans. Rich-
ard Winston and Clara Winston (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1966), 87.
31. MWS I/16, 75 (PW, 305).
come from outside it. Webers contribution to the constitutional committee
did not prove decisive. In the end, the framers did not endow the Reich pres-
idency with the degree of independence vis--vis parliament that Weber had
wanted. Nonetheless, Weber was regarded by many of his contemporaries as
the guiding spirit behind the creation of the Reich presidency.
32
Weber, who died in 1920, did not live to witness the rise of the mass
dictatorships that swept across Europe during the interwar period. Still, in light
of his enthusiasm for charismatic leaders, it is tempting to ask whether he
would have approved of Hitler and National Socialism. Much in Webers polit-
ical writings suggests that he would have welcomed the rise of a political fg-
ure who was a gifted orator, an outsider to the political party system, and an
extreme nationalist. Nevertheless, the content and style of National Socialism
would have been anathema to Webers personality. Although he may have
wished for a strong leader with an authoritarian style, Weber was profoundly
allergic to any kind of authority fgure, whether in academic or political life.
He never missed the opportunity to defend underdogssuch as Jews, social-
ists, anarchists, and feministsat signifcant cost to his own reputation. Shortly
before his death, Weber castigated right-wing students from his lectern at the
University of Munich, with the result that nationalistic fraternity members vio-
lently disrupted his lectures.
33
We should not seek excuses for Webers political
views: he was foolish to dismiss the importance of dissent in a democracy, and
his fascination with authoritarian personalities and visionary leadershipat
the expense of safeguarding political rights and freedomsdid nothing to
strengthen the cause of liberal democracy. But it would be a mistake to view
him as a Nazi in the making.
34
Charisma and German Politics
Webers concept of charisma was certainly not forgotten by German scholars
during the Weimar Republic. Historians and sociologists acknowledged cha-
risma as an important contribution to the theoretical literature on leadership,
even though they were not inclined to incorporate it into their own research
programs.
35
However, it was not in the context of academic history or sociol-
32. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 18901920, trans. Michael S.
Steinberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), chaps. 910.
33. Friedrich J. Berber, Aufzeichnungen, in Max Weber zum Gedchtnis: Materialien und
Dokumente zur Bewertung von Werk und Persnlichkeit, ed. Ren Knig and Johannes Winckel-
mann (Cologne: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1963), 2124.
34. For a fair assessment, see Radkau, Max Weber, 4024.
35. Otto Hintze, Max Webers Soziologie (1926), in Soziologie und Geschichte, vol. 2 of Gesam-
melte Abhandlungen zur Soziologie, Politik und Theorie der Geschichte, ed. Gerhard Oestreich
Joshua Derman 61
ogy that charisma found its most interested audience. The frst discussions of
charisma after Webers death were tied to current affairs. Starting in the mid-
1920s, the earliest and most infuential German analysts of Italian Fascism
the economist Jakob Marschak, the political geographer Johann Wilhelm
Mannhardt, and the jurist Gerhard Leibholzreferred to charisma in their sur-
veys of this new political movement. All three had studied at Heidelberg, which
may explain why they were among the frst German scholars to avail them-
selves of Webers concept.
36
They identifed Mussolinis charisma as the qual-
ity that prevented the constituencies in the Fascist movement from going their
separate ways. They noted that Mussolini and the Fascists paid lip service to
the rational legitimacy of the constitution and the rule of law to maintain the
support of bourgeois elites and the Catholic Church, and they predicted that
Mussolini would have to routinize his charismatic rulership into a legal form if
he wanted Fascism to survive.
37
Starting in the mid-1920s, a small but signifcant political movement
in Germany used the concept of charisma to articulate its leadership goals.
Known as the Junge Rechte (the Young Right) because they stood on the
(Gttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1964), 14344; Albert Salomon, Max Weber, Die Gesell-
schaft 3, pt. 1 (1926): 13153; Franz W. Jerusalem, Grundzge der Soziologie (Berlin: Industrieverlag
Spaeth und Linde, 1930), 75, 8081; Wilhelm Vleugels, Die Masse: Ein Beitrag zur Lehre von den
sozialen Gebilden (Munich: Duncker und Humblot, 1930), 16, 41; Theodor Geiger, Fhrung, in
Handwrterbuch der Soziologie, ed. Alfred Vierkandt (1931; repr. Stuttgart: Enke, 1959), 13641.
36. The Russian-born Marschak studied with Karl Jaspers and Alfred Weber, contributed an
article to the Outline of Social Economics, and later helped collect Webers political journalism for
posthumous publication. Leibholz received his doctorate under the supervision of Richard Thoma,
a close friend and admirer of Webers. Mannhardt studied law and classical philology for a period
of time at Heidelberg. See Edith Hanke, Max Webers Desk Is Now My Altar: Marianne Weber
and the Intellectual Heritage of Her Husband, History of European Ideas 35 (2009): 354; Lewis A.
Coser, Refugee Scholars in America: Their Impact and Their Experiences (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1984), 152; Manfred H. Wiegandt, Antiliberal Foundations, Democratic Convic-
tions: The Methodological and Political Position of Gerhard Leibholz in the Weimar Republic, in
From Liberal Democracy to Fascism: Legal and Political Thought in the Weimar Republic, ed.
Peter C. Caldwell and William E. Scheuerman (Boston: Humanities, 2000), 110; and David Thomas
Murphy, The Heroic Earth: Geopolitical Thought in Weimar Germany, 19181933 (Kent, OH:
Kent State University Press, 1997), 15557.
37. Jakob Marschak, Der korporative und der hierarchische Gedanke im Fascismus I, Archiv
fr Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 52 (1924): 717, 727; Marschak, Der korporative und der
hierarchische Gedanke im Fascismus II, Archiv fr Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 53
(1925): 11213, 11516; J. W. Mannhardt, Der Faschismus (Munich: Beck, 1925), 259, 261; Gerhard
Leibholz, Zu den Problemen des fascistischen Verfassungsrechts (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1928), 2223.
For the reference to Marschaks discussion of charisma in conjunction with Fascism, I am indebted
to Dirk Ksler and Thomas Steiner, Academic Discussion or Political Guidance? Social-Scientifc
Analyses of Fascism and National Socialism in Germany before 1933, in Sociology Responds to
Fascism, ed. Stephen P. Turner and Dirk Ksler (London: Routledge, 1992), 90.
right wing of the Social Democratic Party, this group of young intellectuals
believed that German socialism had failed to cultivate the latent energies of
the youth movementin particular, its antimaterialism, irrationalism, and
nationalism. Intellectuals associated with the Junge Rechte stressed the indis-
pensability of strong leadership for socialism, a quality that they believed had
been ignored by Social Democratic theorists. A number of intellectuals in the
orbit of the Junge Rechte looked to Webers political writings to confrm that
democracy and strong leadership were compatible principles.
38
One of the
movements founding fgures, Franz Osterroth, was particularly enthusiastic
about the way that charisma captured these ideals. Reading Max Weber
had made a strong impression upon him, recalled his erstwhile collaborator
Ernst Niekisch. It was in particular the concept of charisma around which
his thoughts circled.
39
The theologian Paul Tillich, later famous as an migr in the United
States, was a spiritual beacon to many in the Junge Rechte. In The Socialist
Decision, published in 1933 just before his fight from Nazi Germany, Tillich
argued that socialism could revitalize itself by appropriating the Rights exis-
tential critique of bourgeois values without accepting its political ideology.
40

Tillich believed that German socialism had inherited a bourgeois concep-
tion of human nature that denigrated the middle stratum of the human spirit
between pure reason and mere subservient matter.
41
In basing itself on eigh-
teenth-century Enlightenment principles, he argued, German socialism had
rendered itself incapable of producing a leader to rival Adolf Hitler:
Socialisms adoption of the bourgeois conception of human nature, and
thereby its separation of the middle stratum from the evaluation of human
beings, has e.g. effected a disregard for the charismatic personality, i.e. for
38. Stefan Vogt, Nationaler Sozialismus und Soziale Demokratie: Die sozialdemokratische
Junge Rechte, 19181945 (Bonn: Dietz, 2006), 227.
39. Ernst Niekisch, Gewagtes Leben: Begegnungen und Begebnisse (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und
Witsch, 1958), 138. On Osterroths career, see Franz Osterroth, Der Hofgeismarkreis der Jungso-
zialisten, Archiv fr Sozialgeschichte 4 (1964): 52569.
40. The fusion of left ethics and right epistemology that Georg Lukcs sought in his early
work (The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971], 21) could
equally characterize Tillichs efforts in The Socialist Decision. When the Nazis revoked his profes-
sorship in 1933, Tillich complained that as a theoretician of religious socialism I have fought through-
out the years against the dogmatic marxism [sic] of the German labor movement, and thereby I
have supplied a number of concepts to the National Socialist theoreticians (quoted in Coser, Refugee
Scholars in America, 316).
41. Paul Tillich, Sozialphilosophische und ethische Schriften, vol. 3 of Hauptwerke, ed. Erd-
mann Sturm (Berlin: de GruyterEvangelisches Verlagswerk, 1998), 340.
Joshua Derman 63
that kind of person who convinces through his Being, his spiritual-vital
core, entirely regardless of his rational formation and classifcation. This is
the reason for the absence in German socialism of people vital in symbol
and Being who can create Eros and devotion, and for the fact that, in sharp
reaction, a personality weak in strength of Being could become the symbol
and leader of revolutionary political Romanticism.
42
A year later, writing in English as a refugee in New York City, Tillich had still
not fundamentally changed his opinion of charisma. In charismatic leader-
ship there is something unique and non-institutional; there is a sort of depen-
dence upon the free inner as well as the external recognition of those who are
led, he observed in the journal Social Research. But as soon as the leader
transfers his personal authority to the authority of his offce the interrelation-
ship between the leader and his following is lost even if there is an attempt to
maintain it. The original restricted power of personal authority becomes trans-
formed into a derived but unlimited power of the authority of offce. For
Tillich, charismatic rulership in its pure form was consensual and liberatory.
What had gone wrong under totalitarianism, he suggested, was that the origi-
nal restricted power of personal authority had become ossifed into a cha-
risma of office whose institutional power over the individual knew no
bounds.
43
We might expect to fnd many other Weimar intellectuals who shared
Osterroth and Tillichs favorable attitude toward charismatic rulership. Intel-
lectuals in fn de sicle Europeand Germany in particularwere accustomed
to thinking about leadership in terms of great, creative individuals (such as
those apotheosized by Thomas Carlyle and Friedrich Nietzsche); a volunta-
ristic ethos of political action had become popular on both the radical right and
the left of the political spectrum.
44
When the Weimar Republic struggled to
resolve burning issues of economic redistribution and renegotiate the punitive
burdens of the Treaty of Versailles, parliamentary democracy appeared increas-
ingly unattractive in comparison with more authoritarian forms of rule. As is
well known, many German conservatives rejected parliamentarism from the
outset, but even liberal supporters of the Weimar Republic came to advocate
42. Tillich, Sozialphilosophische und ethische Schriften, 342.
43. Paul Tillich, The Totalitarian State and the Claims of the Church, Social Research 1
(1934): 415.
44. Gerth and Mills, Introduction, in FMW, 5254; Georg Kamphausen, Charisma und Hero-
ismus: Die Generation von 1890 und der Begriff des Politischen, in Charisma: TheorieReligion
Politik, ed. Winfried Gebhardt, Arnold Zingerle, and Michael N. Ebertz (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1993),
22146.
increasing the powers of the Reich president at the expense of a fractious
parliament.
45
Thomas Mergel has observed that enthusiasm for a plebisci-
tarily legitimated, but authoritative, if not always authoritarian conception
of rulership could be found across the ideological spectrum in Weimar Ger-
many.
46
It is thus all the more surprising to discover how many German intel-
lectuals deliberately rejected the concept of charisma or refused to take it seri-
ously during the 1920s and early 1930s. Webers conception of leadership
seemed too unrealistic, frivolous, liberal, or individualistic to do justice to
their own vision of Fhrertum.
Curt Geyer, an editor at the Socialist newspaper Forward, warned that
the concept of charisma set an entirely unrealistic standard for leadership.
The demand that the leader should accomplish the superhuman, that he should
with one stroke change mens institutions and the fundamental attitude and
orientation of their action, is silly because it is unrealizable, Geyer declared.
In the whole history of mankind there has been no precedent for such lead-
ers. The charismatic leader was nothing more than an extra-human ideal
type, the projection of a deeply felt inadequacy. It could serve as a plausible
ideal only for those whose own lack of self-confdence made them demand
[from a leader] what he cannot perform.
47
Karl Kautsky, the preeminent theo-
rist of German Social Democracy, devoted a chapter of his magnum opus, The
Materialist Conception of History, to arguing that the concept was incoherent.
The religious overtones of charisma caused unnecessary confusion by suggest-
ing that such leaders possessed the capacity to prophesize and work wonders.
By using charisma instead of the simple, generally understood word gift
[Begabung], he objected, Weber brings a mystical element into the subcon-
scious during this whole discussion, which does not promote clarity.
48
The
kind of magical aura that Weber imputed to charismatic leaders typifed a few
45. Kurt Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik: Die politischen
Ideen des deutschen Nationalismus zwischen 1918 und 1933 (Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshand-
lung, 1962); Herbert Dring, Der Weimarer Kreis: Studien zum politischen Bewutsein verfassung-
streuer Hochschullehrer in der Weimarer Republik (Meisenheim am Glan: Hain, 1975).
46. Thomas Mergel, Fhrer, Volksgemeinschaft und Maschine: Politische Erwartungsstruk-
turen in der Weimarer Republik und dem Nationalsozialismus, 19181936, in Politische Kultur-
geschichte der Zwischenkriegszeit, 19181939, ed. Wolfgang Hardtwig (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck
und Ruprecht, 2005), 106, 1089. See also Klaus Schreiner, Wann kommt der Retter Deutschlands?:
Formen und Funktionen von politischem Messianismus in der Weimarer Republik, S aeculum 49
(1998): 10760.
47. Curt Geyer, Fhrer und Masse in der Demokratie (Berlin: Dietz, 1926), 123. For the refer-
ence to Geyer, I am indebted to Mergel, Fhrer, Volksgemeinschaft und Maschine, 109. Mergel,
however, interprets Geyers text as ultimately an affrmation of charismatic rulership.
48. Karl Kautsky, Die materialistische Geschichtsauffassung, vol. 2 (Berlin: Dietz, 1927), 480.
Joshua Derman 65
extraordinary dictators who are either demigods or impostors, but certainly
not the mainstream leaders of modern politics. Neither Napolon, Otto von
Bismarck, August Bebel, Vladimir Lenin, nor Mussolini based their reputation
on supposed supernatural powers.
49
Kautsky was particularly offended that
Weber had enlisted Kurt Eisner, the martyred socialist revolutionary, as a pro-
totypical charismatic leader alongside such colorful historical fgures as ber-
serkers and epileptic shamans. Eisner had won the confdence of the masses
through his selfessness and intelligence, Kautsky insisted, and not through
magic, seizures or fraud.
50
In light of the challenges that Weimar democracy faced from the right
wing of the political spectrum, did Webers concept of charisma awaken more
enthusiasm among conservative intellectuals? The constitutional jurist Carl
Schmitt, arguably the most infuential conservative political thinker in Weimar
Germany, would be a plausible candidate. Schmitt had taken classes with
Weber at the University of Munich after World War I and throughout his career
frequently referred to Webers writings and ideas.
51
In the waning years of the
Weimar Republic, Schmitt gained political infuence thanks to his radical
interpretation of the constitution that endowed the Reich president with quasi-
dictatorial powers; in May 1933 he joined the Nazi Party and briefy served as
an important legal adviser to the regime. Theorists and historians, Wolfgang
Mommsen most famously among them, have long maintained that Schmitts
political thought should be understood as a radicalization of Webers concept
of charismatic rulership.
52
Despite its almost canonical acceptance, this inter-
pretation is substantiated by none of Schmitts writings. While Schmitt doubt-
less regarded Weber as a prescient diagnostician of the crisis of legal positiv-
ism, a closer examination of Schmitts work shows that he rejected charisma as
a concept for articulating his own vision of political legitimacy.
49. Ibid., 481, 486.
50. Ibid., 48182.
51. In 1917 Schmitt took a position in the offce of the wartime military censor in Munich,
which gave him the opportunity to attend Webers political speech Germanys New Order as well
as the famous lectures Scholarship as a Vocation and Politics as a Vocation. Schmitt also attended
Webers course offerings at the University of Munich in the winter semester of 191920, in addition
to conducting several private conversations with him about Oswald Spengler, politics, and the state.
See G. L. Ulmen, Politischer Mehrwert: Eine Studie ber Max Weber und Carl Schmitt (Weinheim:
VCH Verlagsgesellschaft, 1991), 2021.
52. See Karl Lwith, Max Weber und seine Nachfolger (193940), in Hegel und die Aufhebung
der Philosophie im 19. JahrhundertMax Weber, vol. 5 of Smtliche Schriften, ed. Klaus Stich-
weh and Marc B. de Launay (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1988), 40818; Mommsen, Max Weber, 38189;
and Wil liam E. Scheuerman, Carl Schmitt: The End of Law (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefeld,
1999), 185.
Schmitt belonged to a generation of antiliberal thinkers whose political
horizons were defned by World War I, the collapse of the Hohenzollern mon-
archy, and the civil unrest of the immediate postwar period. In his legal and
political theory Schmitt sought to identify a sovereign force that could main-
tain the integrity of the state under the threat of civil war. During the early
1920s he looked to the Catholic Church as a model for the kind of political
sovereignty he wished to see realized in Germany. Schmitt believed that the
popes authority derived from his capacity for representation, that is, his abil-
ity to make an invisible entitythe person of Christpublicly present.
53
In his
essay Roman Catholicism and Political Form, Schmitt explained that
The pope is not the prophet but rather the Vicar of Christ. Such a formation
keeps all the fanatical wildness of an unbridled prophetic class at bay. By
virtue of the fact that his offce is made independent of charisma, the priest
receives a dignity that appears entirely abstracted from his concrete person.
Nevertheless he is not the functionary and commissar of republican thought,
and his dignity is not impersonal like that of the modern offcial. Instead,
his offce goes all the way back, in an unbroken chain, to the personal mis-
sion and person of Christ. That is indeed the most amazing complexio
oppositorum.
54
According to Schmitt, the Catholic priesthood successfully navigated a mid-
dle course between the Scylla of irrational prophecy and the Charybdis of
impersonal bureaucracy. It could do so because it was capable of publicly
representing Christ and his dignity on earth. In his political writings of the
late 1920s and early 1930s, Schmitt criticized Weimar parliamentarism for
yielding a quantitative calculus of special interests rather than a represen-
tation of the nation (Volk) as a whole. This latter task, he argued, could be
accomplished much more effectively by the popularly elected Reich presi-
dent.
55
Nonetheless, as is clear from his denigration of charismas role in the
Catholic Church, Schmitt attached little importance to the personality and
demagogic talents of the religious or political leader, qualities that had been
of such central importance to Weber. As Andreas Kalyvas has noted, Schmitt
believed that the sovereigns legitimacy derived from something entirely
53. John P. McCormick, Carl Schmitts Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 161.
54. Carl Schmitt, Rmischer Katholizismus und politische Form (1925; repr. Stuttgart: Klett-
Cotta, 2002), 2324.
55. McCormick, Carl Schmitts Critique of Liberalism, 163, 169, 194.
Joshua Derman 67
56. Andreas Kalyvas, Whos Afraid of Carl Schmitt?, Philosophy and Social Criticism 25
(1999): 92.
57. Erich Voegelin, Die Verfassungslehre von Carl Schmitt: Versuch einer konstruktiven
Analyse ihrer staatstheoretischen Prinzipien, Zeitschrift fr ffentliches Recht 11 (1931): 1024.
58. Christoph Steding, Politik und Wissenschaft bei Max Weber (Breslau: Korn, 1932). On Sted-
ings promising career, cut short by his untimely death in 1938, see Walter Frank, Christoph Steding:
Ein Denkmal, in Christoph Steding, Das Reich und die Krankheit der europischen Kultur (Ham-
burg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1938), xiiixlviii; and Helmut Heiber, Walter Frank und sein
Reichsinstitut fr Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1966),
50132.
59. Steding, Politik und Wissenschaft bei Max Weber, 11. Carl Schmitt later praised Sted-
ings outstanding, gripping, always concrete and yet always penetrating scholarly analysis of
Max Weber (Neutralitt und Neutralisierungen: Zu Christoph Stedings Das Reich und die
Krankheit der europischen Kultur [1939], in Positionen und Begriffe im Kampf mit Weimar
GenfVersailles, 19231939 [Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1988], 272).
60. Steding, Politik und Wissenschaft bei Max Weber, 56.
impersonal, namely, the power to represent the people or state as a whole.
56

Schmitts disregard for the concept of charisma was evident even to his con-
temporaries. As early as 1931 Erich Voegelin suggested that Schmitts con-
stitutional theory would have gained conceptual clarity by distinguishing
between the personal charisma of a ruler, the charisma of offce, and what
Voegelin called the pathos of the people.
57
The reaction of the young conservative historian Christoph Steding to
charisma suggests that Schmitts aversion was not purely idiosyncratic. On the
eve of Weimars collapse, Steding, a future darling of the Nazi academic estab-
lishment, published a dissertation titled Max Webers Politics and Scholar-
ship.
58
This short and incisive monograph, which attracted positive attention
from Schmitt among others, sought to show that Webers scholarly theses and
political views were in fact objectifcations of one and the same self, and thus
identical with each other.
59
At the core of Webers life, Steding argued, was an
ethos of radical individualism that opposed all institutions or movements that
sought to bind the individual in a totality. Even though Weber claimed to abide
by the principle of value freedom in scholarship, his entire oeuvre could be read
as an act of self-interpretation and self-realization, an attempt to project his own
bourgeois ego onto the canvas of world history to make up for his lack of real-
world opportunities for action. Webers studies of Hebrew prophets and Puri-
tans were disguised self-knowledge in that they purported to identify the
qualities Weber most admired in himself as decisive forces in the develop-
ment of Western civilization.
60
For great charismatics such as the ancient
Hebrew prophets or modern demagogues, Steding observed, the most impor-
tant thing is inner independence and freedom against every regulation. The
61. Ibid., 45, 67.
62. Julius Binder, Fhrerauslese in der Demokratie (Langensalza: Beyer, 1929), 38, 3738. On
Binders career, see Ralf Dreier, Julius Binder (18701939): Ein Rechtsphilosoph zwischen Kai-
serreich und Nationalsozialismus, in Rechtswissenschaft in Gttingen: Gttinger Juristen aus
250 Jahre, ed. Fritz Loos (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1987), 43555.
63. Binder, Fhrerauslese in der Demokratie, 38.
64. Ibid., 4245, 5051.
tone of agitation so palpable in Webers political writings, and the invective he
launched at German offcialdom, evinced the personal charisma of this radical
individualist who rebels against every authority.
61
Steding believed that sympa-
thetic engagement with liberal thought was necessary for Germany to complete
its passage into a new conservative era, for only by coming to terms with liber-
alism could Germans reconcile themselves to their political past and at the same
time transcend it. As the embodiment of both the greatness and the foibles of fn
de sicle liberalism, Steding argued, Weber provided the perfect subject for a
case study. Stedings book implied that charisma represented liberalisms noble
longing in the hour of its demise, rather than an ideal for future leadership.
In the fnal years of the Weimar Republic, the conservative Gttingen
law professor Julius Binder expressed similar reservations about the indi-
vidualism embodied in Webers vision of leadership, even though he did not
refer to charisma explicitly. Binder expressed his admiration for Weber, whom
he described as an astute and original scholar who towers over the other
[German democrats] in his clarity of judgment and strength of political will.
62

In his view, Weber could not be compared with the opportunistic democrats
(Konjunkturdemokraten) of the German Revolution, since Weber was much
too skeptical of the parliamentary republic of 1918 for them to claim him as
one of their own.
63
Nonetheless, he was bothered that Weber expected the
leader to follow his own faith (Glaube). This element of individualism only
accentuated the pluralism of the parliamentary system and minimized deci-
sive political action. Politicians ought to follow objective norms rather than
subjective beliefs, Binder argued. The leader was supposed to embody the
spirit of the Volk, as an organic outgrowth of the group, not as a detached indi-
vidual standing outside it.
64
The Nazi Party was a minor political phenomenon until the national
elections of 1930, when fnancial crisis and parliamentary deadlock cata-
pulted it to 18.3 percent of the national votea vast improvement over the
2.6 percent it had received two years earlier. In The German Political Par-
ties, published two years after the Nazis electoral breakthrough, the sociolo-
gist Sigmund Neumann observed that
Joshua Derman 69
65. Sigmund Neumann, Die deutschen Parteien: Wesen und Wandel nach dem Kriege (Berlin:
Junker und Dnnhaupt, 1932), 103. Neumann had studied at Heidelberg with Alfred Weber and
then written his PhD at Leipzig under Hans Freyer, a great admirer of Max Webers work. Already
distinguished by the end of the Weimar Republic, Neumann would rise to prominence as an migr
in England and the United States. On his career, see Alfons Sllner, Sigmund Neumanns Perma-
nent Revolution: Ein vergessener Klassiker der vergleichenden Diktaturforschung, in Totalitaris-
mus: Eine Ideengeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Alfons Sllner, Ralf Walkenhaus, and Karin
Wieland (Berlin: Akademie, 1997), 5373.
66. Heinz Marr, Grostadt und politische Lebensform, in Friedrich Muckermann et al.,
Grostadt und Volkstum (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1927), 151.
67. On Marrs career, see Notker Hammerstein, Von der Stiftungsuniversitt zur staatlichen
Hochschule, 19141950, vol. 1 of Die Johann Wolfgang GoetheUniversitt Frankfurt am Main
(Neuwied: Metzner, 1989), 12628; and Carsten Klingemann, Soziologie im Dritten Reich (Baden-
Baden: Nomos, 1996), 10513.
in Germany, and especially in times of crisis, political leadership of a charis-
matic nature receives outstanding recognition: the hero and miracle worker
of superhuman grace, who fnds believers on the basis of enthusiasm or des-
peration and hope; who appeals to a transformation of fundamental convic-
tions over knowledge of correct objectives; whose leadership is a mission
and inner task of a specifcally extraordinary nature.
Paraphrasing Weber, Neumann noted that charismatic leadership must undergo
routinization or rationalization to satisfy its followers material needs. Neu-
mann identifed a specifcally charismatic character in the Nazi conception
of leadership and the faith of its followers, and predicted that National Social-
ism, too, would experience routinization and rationalization to secure its
survival and daily effectiveness.
65
The sudden rise of National Socialism inspired at least one German
intellectual, the Frankfurt sociologist Heinz Marr, to reconsider his earlier
negative attitude toward charismatic rulership. In 1927 Marr had published an
article lamenting the absence of gifted political leaders in Germany. There he
declared, I am not Italian enough to place my hope for the political future of
my German people on the charisma, on the magic of an adventurous person; I
fnd such sensational, such big-city and cinematic longings completely beneath
the dignity of our past and the gravity of our current situation.
66
For Marr,
charisma was clearly too redolent of Italian Fascism and thus inappropriate for
the seriousness of German politics. During the Weimar Republic, Marrs polit-
ical views tended toward the nationally oriented socialism espoused by Fried-
rich Naumann. Nonetheless, after the Nazi government came to power in 1933,
Marr was offered the University of Frankfurts chair in sociology, which
had been vacated by the dismissal of Karl Mannheim.
67
To ingratiate himself
68. Heinz Marr, Die Massenwelt im Kampf um ihre Form: Zur Soziologie der deutschen Gegen-
wart (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1934), 44445. Marrs surreptitious revisions appear
to have gone unnoticed by both contemporaries and modern scholars.
69. Ibid., 45152.
70. Ibid., 49294. Marr derived his model of the Bund from the sociologist Herman Schmalen-
bach, who was himself partly inspired by Webers concept of charisma. See Schmalenbach, Die
soziologische Kategorie des Bundes, Die Dioskuren 1 (1922): 35105. Marrs analysis of National
Socialism in terms of charisma and Bund was subsequently endorsed by the sociologist Alfred von
Martin (Zur Soziologie der Gegenwart, Archiv fr Kulturgeschichte 26 [1937]: 11819).
with the new regime, Marr published a collection of articles that he revised
to make his earlier political views seem continuous with his belated support
for National Socialism. Marr altered and amended the text of his 1927 article
so that it would project a more positive disposition toward the concept of
charisma:
I am not romantic enough to place my hope for the political future of my
German people on the magic of an adventurous person; I fnd such sensa-
tional, such big-city and cinematic longings completely beneath the dignity
of our past and the gravity of our current situation. But I will admit that our
people needs exemplary unpolitical leaders in order to awaken its demo-
cratic powers (and here I mean democratic in the Prussian sense), proba-
bly [wohl auch] a charismatic person, who presents exemplary qualities of
leadership in the sense of German virtues, and not with the entitlement of
Mussolini, the late Caesar!
68
Marr pretended as if these sentences had appeared in the original text
from 1927, claiming elsewhere in the book that his longing for a charismatic
leader had been fulflled by Hitlers arrival:
Our benefcent God has obtained for us in the exalted form of our dear Reich
leader the exemplary unpolitical leader; he has also bestowed upon us the
charismatic person that I then pointed to. And in that regard, it was divine
providence that Hitler could not take the short and comfortable path of Mus-
solini, but rather that he felt himself compelled to shoulder the hardship of
winning popular support through the disagreeable counting of votes.
69
For Marr, Hitlers great innovation had been to take the sociological form of
the Bund (league)an association of individuals bound together not by tradi-
tional or contractual obligations but by their highly emotional attachment to
an extraordinary leaderand turn it into a powerful alternative to the typi-
cal parliamentary party.
70
Why had Marr suddenly changed his mind about
charisma? It is diffcult to account for this peculiar about-face. Marr was an
Joshua Derman 71
71. Marr, Die Massenwelt im Kampf um ihre Form, 487.
72. Hans Bernhard Braue, Die Fhrungsordnung des deutschen Volkes: Grundlegung einer
Fhrungslehre (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1940), 4.
73. Michael Stolleis, A History of Public Law in Germany, 19141945, trans. Thomas Dunlap
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 418.
74. Heinrich Triepel, Die Hegemonie: Ein Buch von fhrenden Staaten (Stuttgart: Kohlham-
mer, 1938), 45.
75. Stolleis, History of Public Law in Germany, 384.
76. Arnold Kttgen, Die Gesetzmigkeit der Verwaltung im Fhrerstaat, Reichsverwal-
tungsblatt 57, no. 22 (1936): 460.
admirer of Webers sociology, referring to him in his book as my teacher and
master.
71
Perhaps the best explanation is that Marr believed Hitlers legiti-
macy was truly charismatic in the way that Weber had described it. If Marr
wanted to express his loyalty to the Nazi regime, intellectual if not personal
consistency would require him to amend his earlier views on the importance
and value of charisma.
Although Webers equation of real leadership with charismatic ruler-
ship remained still perceptible in Germany after the Nazis came to power,
as one contemporary noted, it received relatively little attention from schol-
ars.
72
Two noteworthy exceptions were the jurists Heinrich Triepel and Arnold
Kttgen. Triepel was an international lawyer and national-conservative emer-
itus who was removed from National Socialism.
73
In 1938 he published a
treatise on Germanys status in the new world order titled Hegemony: A Book
of Leading States, where he took the occasion to assert that the true leader
was one who possessed original authority. So long as one understood cha-
risma simply to mean a persons energy of volition, he argued, it was entirely
correct to characterize the leader simply as the man endowed with charismatic
power.
74
It is diffcult to detect the larger political or intellectual motivations
driving Triepels use of charisma. However, in the case of Kttgen, a young
professor at the University of Greifswald who was a leading scholar of admin-
istrative law under National Socialism, we can detect a specifc strategy behind
his use of the concept. According to a prominent historian of German law,
Kttgen attempted to defend rationality, the adherence of administration to
the law, and administrative law as a system of order against the chaos of the
unregulated exercise of power, even while he rejected the positivist juris-
prudence of Weimar Germany.
75
Kttgen used the concept of charisma to
distinguish between the nature of administration and political leadership
under National Socialism. Paraphrasing Webers typology of legitimate rul-
ership, he insisted that bureaucratic administration was based on the legal-
ity of a rational order.
76
Political leadership, on the other hand, was in its
essence charismatic. It is not the objective institution of the head of state
77. Arnold Kttgen, Deutsche Verwaltung (Berlin: Weidmannsche Verlagsbuchhandlung,
1937), 19.
78. Kttgen, Die Gesetzmigkeit der Verwaltung im Fhrerstaat, 460.
79. Herbert Krger, Fhrer und Fhrung (Breslau: Korn, 1935), 89.
80. Webers writings on charisma frst appeared in English translation in Gerth and Mills, From
Max Weber, and in Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, ed. Talcott Par-
sons, trans. A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (1947; repr. New York: Free Press, 1964).
that stands at the apex of a state and its people, Kttgen stipulated, but
rather a concrete person, who as such bases his authority not so much on an
abstract norm as on a personal charisma.
77
This dichotomy enabled Kttgen
to assert the need for rational administrative law to coexist alongside irra-
tional charismatic leadership. It is precisely in the leadership state [Fh-
rerstaat] that the charismatic character of political leadership cannot be
dispensed with, while on the other hand, in contrast to primitive forms of
administration, the current administration responsible for satisfying modern
mass needs iswith the same necessitydependent on extensive rational
orders.
78
With the exception of Marr, Triepel, and Kttgen, German scholars
under National Socialism did not fnd charisma a useful concept to think with.
We may infer one major reason for this disregard from a 1935 book titled
Leaders and Leadership, written by the constitutional jurist Herbert Krger. If
the charismatic leader was an ahistorical category that included shamans,
prophets, and berserkers, Krger argued, then the uniqueness of a leader who
inaugurated a new age could not be appreciated. For how could the grandeur
of such a leader be comprehended through odious comparisons with these
defunct and less worthy forms of leadership?
79
The implication was that
Webers ideal-typical understanding of leadership demeaned the epochal sig-
nifcance of Germanys political revolution after 1933. In an age of messianic
leadership, to suggest that Hitlers place could be historicized or generalized
through social-scientifc terminology would be to demean the Fhrer.
From Europe to the United States
By the end of World War II, it was in the United States, not in Germany, that
charisma had become a foundational concept in the modern social sciences.
Since Webers own writings on charisma remained untranslated into English
until 194647, the interpretations of migr and American scholars mediated
the introduction of the concept into American social science.
80
The initiator of
this process was Webers close friend Robert Michels, a German sociologist
who had emigrated to Italy well before World War I. Michelss study of oligar-
Joshua Derman 73
81. Roberto Michels, Some Refections on the Sociological Character of Political Parties,
American Political Science Review 21 (1927): 754, 75557. For his impressions of American social
science, see Robert Michels, Soziale und politische Wissenschaften in Amerika, Zeitschrift fr die
gesamte Staatswissenschaft 85 (1928): 89124. Following his emigration to Italy, Michels often
published under the name Roberto rather than Robert.
82. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Max Weber and Roberto Michels: An Asymmetrical Partnership,
Archives europennes de sociologie 22 (1981): 1024, 107; David Beetham, From Socialism to Fas-
cism: The Relation between Theory and Practice in the Work of Robert Michels, Political Studies 25
(1977): 516, 16162, 168; Wilfried Rhrich, Robert Michels: Vom sozialistisch-syndikalistischen
zum faschistischen Credo (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1972), 15167.
chic tendencies in mass politics, Towards a Sociology of Political Parties in
Modern Democracies (1911), brought him international prominence and was
quickly translated into English. The University of Chicago invited him to be a
guest lecturer in 1927, and his English-language article, Some Refections on
the Sociological Character of Political Parties, appeared that same year in the
American Political Science Review. There he explained that if the leader
exercises his infuence over his followers by qualities so striking that they seem
to them supernatural, one can call him a charismatic chief, naming as exam-
ples Ferdinand Lassalle, Bebel, and Jean Jaurs (all socialists), as well as Mus-
solini. Michelss article was the frst to refer to Webers concept of charisma in
the United Statesbut it made no reference to Weber himself.
81
Michels began his career at the turn of the twentieth century as a syndi-
calist critic of German socialism. He frst came to Webers attention when he
published articles in the Archiv fr Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik that
attacked the Social Democratic Party for seeking votes at the expense of pro-
moting revolutionary consciousness. When Michels was barred from univer-
sity employment in Germany on account of his socialist affliations, Weber
helped him fnd a teaching position in Italy and continued to support his career
despite their great differences in temperament and political views. It was in
Italy that Michels became acquainted with the elitist theories of Gaetano
Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto; their sociological thesis, that mass movements
invariably come to be dominated by a small coterie of leaders, led him to con-
clude that social democracys decadence was symptomatic of a more general
tendency toward oligarchy and conservatism in democratic organizations.
Now alienated from both socialism and democracy, Michels came to see Mus-
solini and the Fascists as the bearers of a new elite that could rejuvenate Italys
enervated political culture.
82
Michels lent his scholarly prestige to legitimating
Fascism and, after Mussolinis shift toward outright dictatorship in 1925, began
to use the concept of charisma to describe and endorse the new regime in his
German and Italian writings. As Michels wrote in a survey of Italian culture
83. Robert Michels, Italien von heute: Politische und wirtschaftliche Kulturgeschichte von
1860 bis 1930 (Zrich: Fssli, 1930), 26768. See also Michels, Corso di sociologia politica
(1927), published in English translation as Roberto Michels, First Lectures in Political Sociology,
ed. Alfred de Grazia (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), 12331.
84. Robert Michels, Grundstzliches zum Problem der Demokratie, Zeitschrift fr Politik 17
(1927): 29091; Michels, ber die Kriterien der Bildung und Entwicklung politischer Parteien,
Schmollers Jahrbuch 51 (1927): 510; Beetham, From Socialism to Fascism, 174.
85. Theodore Abel, Systematic Sociology in Germany: A Critical Analysis of Some Attempts to
Establish Sociology as an Independent Science (1929; repr. New York: Octagon, 1965), 150; Talcott
Parsons, Capitalism in Recent German Literature: Sombart and Weber (Concluded), Journal of
Political Economy 37 (1929): 46, 47; Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capital-
ism, trans. Talcott Parsons (1930; repr. London: Allen and Unwin, 1976), 178, 281n105; Albert
Salomon, Max Webers Sociology, Social Research 2 (1935): 64, 7273.
and politics, Mussolini is the modern paradigm of what Weber understood as
a charismatic leader: free and wild, he has derived his charisma not from any
inheritance or overgrown tradition, but from the masses faith in him and from
his own self-developed dynamism, from a faith that for many borders on the
transcendental.
83
Michels believed that parliamentary democracy operated on
the spurious principle that voters could actually delegate their individual wills
to their elected representatives. Charismatic rulership, on the other hand, suf-
fered from none of these hypocrisies. When faced with an individual who pos-
sessed outstanding qualities, and whose successes were perceived to derive
from his supernatural powers, the masses voluntarily made a sacrifce of
their will to the leader.
84
The political relevance of charisma was not immediately apparent to
sociologists in the United States. When American and migr German schol-
ars provided their frst brief glosses on the concept in the late 1920s and early
1930s, they emphasized its relevance to economics, the sociology of religion,
and the anthropology of primitive communities.
85
Like Weber at the time, cha-
risma still stood on the periphery of American social science. But starting in
the mid-1930s, and accelerating markedly throughout the decade that followed,
German migrs and American social scientists embraced charisma for ana-
lyzing the eras political transformations. This period witnessed both the rise
of National Socialism and the consolidation of Joseph Stalins dictatorship in
the Soviet Union. In the eyes of many observers, the rise of Mussolini, Lenin,
Stalin, and above all Hitler augured an age of charismatic leaders, and Webers
sociology appeared to hold a skeleton key for understanding these profound
developments. Social scientists came to appreciate that charisma was a con-
cept not only of historical or academic interest but also of great relevance for
understanding the modern world.
Joshua Derman 75
86. See Carl A. Dawson and Warner E. Gettys, An Introduction to Sociology (New York: Ron-
ald, 1935), 571; and Francis Graham Wilson, The Elements of Modern Politics: An Introduction to
Political Science (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1936), 495n1.
87. See Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion, trans. George Staunton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2006); and Hans Maier, Concepts for the Comparison of Dictatorships: Totali-
tarianism and Political Religions, in Totalitarianism and Political Religions: Concepts for the
Comparison of Dictatorships, trans. Jodi Bruhn, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 1996), 199215.
Michelss English-language writings offered one source of inspiration
for American scholars who wished to describe Mussolini, Hitler, and Lenin in
charismatic terms.
86
Of greater consequence was the arrival in the United
States after 1933 of German-speaking refugee scholars, many of whom already
admired Webers work. Seeking employment and professional visibility, they
saw the opportunity to popularize a relatively unknown German thinker whose
concepts had become eerily relevant after the rise of National Socialism. The
concept of charisma was invoked by many of the leading fgures in the Ger-
man intellectual emigration, such as Hans Gerth, Waldemar Gurian, Hans
Kohn, Emil Lederer, Franz Neumann, Hermann Rauschning, and Paul Tillich.
They were joined by a handful of American scholars who read German and
were familiar with Webers sociological writings, in particular, Theodore Abel,
Howard Becker, and Parsons. Since Webers writings on charisma were not yet
available in translation, these migrs and American specialists wielded great
infuence when it came to determining the context and interpretive framework
in which Americans would understand charisma.
What made charisma such a good concept to think with? The frst attrac-
tion was only partly related to Webers own work. Since the early 1920s vari-
ous European writers had sought to understand frst Fascism, and later Bolshe-
vism and National Socialism, as essentially secularized religious movements.
On the eve of World War II this tendency to interpret modern mass dicta-
torships in terms of political religion reached an important conjuncture in
the works of the migr scholars Voegelin, Gurian, Tillich, and others. These
authors argued that totalitarian political movements not only looked and felt
like organized religions, as evident in their embrace of ritual, mysteries, and
mass celebrations, but that they also aimed to compete with religions by offer-
ing holistic interpretations of the world that featured dogma, catechism, and
theodicy.
87
In light of its status as a religious concept transplanted into the
sphere of politics, charisma could serve as shorthand for encapsulating or
articulating the theory of political religion, and it was used in this sense by
migr and American writers, often without any explicit acknowledgment of
Weber or his works. Lederer, a former Heidelberg professor teaching at the
88. Emil Lederer, State of the Masses: The Threat of the Classless Society (1940; repr. New York:
Fertig, 1967), 190; R. M. MacIver, Leviathan and the People (University: Louisiana State University
Press, 1939), 14; Frank Munk, The Legacy of Nazism: The Economic and Social Consequences of
Totalitarianism (New York: Macmillan, 1943), 6; Peter F. Drucker, The End of Economic Man: A
Study of the New Totalitarianism (London: Heinemann, 1939), 217; Franz Neumann, Behemoth:
The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 19331944 (1944; repr. New York: Octagon,
1963), 8397.
89. Theodore Abel, Why Hitler Came into Power (1938; repr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1986). His fndings were published in an earlier version as Abel, The Pattern of a Success-
ful Political Movement, American Sociological Review 2 (1937): 34752. For an insightful discus-
sion of Abels approach to understanding National Socialism, evaluated in the context of his time,
see Baehr, Identifying the Unprecedented, 81519.
New School for Social Research, contended that any mass party which does
not stand for a special group or interest or idea, which claims the dignity of a
religion, depends upon the charisma of the leader, noting that this charisma
is one of the greatest secrets of social psychology and of history. Robert
MacIver of Columbia University believed that Europeans were experiencing
a profound spiritual crisis and seeking salvation by resort to a new form of
authority, no more the authority of king or emperor or pope but the authority
of the prophet arising from the people, the charismatic leader, the man of
destiny. In particular, it was Hitlers leadership style that drew comparisons
through the concept of charisma to a religious revival movement. Unbelievers
may smile at the religious zeal and devotion of his followers, wrote the mi-
gr Czech economist Frank Munk, but to millions of Germans Hitlers cha-
risma is as real as that of any founder of a new church was in his time. The
Austrian economist and future management guru Peter Drucker explained that
the main function of the fascist dictator is to save society by his personal
demonic charism [sic]. It is no accident that German Protestant farmers gener-
ally put Hitlers picture where the picture of Christ used to hang. In Behemoth
the migr jurist Neumann argued that Hitlers leadership represented a recru-
descence of medieval thaumaturgic kingship, a topic that he treated in a chap-
ter titled The Charismatic Leader in the Leadership State.
88
Beyond the somewhat superfcial treatment it was accorded by propo-
nents of the theory of political religion, Webers concept of charisma proved
useful for analyzing the sociology and institutional dynamics of National
Socialism. In one of the earliest such studies, Why Hitler Came into Power,
the sociologist Abel employed the concept of charisma to explain both the
attraction of National Socialism to party members and its ability to remain
coherent as a movement in the face of centrifugal political forces.
89
Born and
raised in Poland, Abel received his doctorate in sociology from Columbia
Joshua Derman 77
90. Abel, Systematic Sociology in Germany.
91. Abel, Why Hitler Came into Power, 166.
92. Ibid., 181.
93. Ibid., 182.
University in 1929 with a dissertation that contained the frst substantive
analysis of Webers interpretive sociology in English.
90
In 1934 he traveled to
Germany to interview members of the Nazi Party, offering prizes for the
best autobiographical accounts of their political trajectories, which he then
used as source material for his sociological analysis of the movement. Abel
concluded that National Socialism appealed to its followers for four major
reasons: popular discontent with the existing social order, National Social-
isms ideology and program for social transformation, its organizational
and promotional technique, and, last but not least, the presence of charis-
matic leadership.
91
As Abel explained,
To them he [Hitler] was a prophet whose pronouncements were taken as
oracles. In their eyes he was a hero whom they navely trusted to perform
the impossible if it were necessary. He was endowed by them with that high-
est degree of prestige which emanates not merely from the recognition of
ones own inability to imitate or compete with such a person, but from the
belief that he possesses an out-of-the-ordinary, superhuman power, that a
special star is guiding his destiny. In all cases of mass leadership, this belief
has been present to a greater or lesser degree. It is the basis of what Max
Weber has called charismatic leadership.
92
Abel concluded that Webers concept of charisma proved extremely use-
ful for explaining Hitlers attraction to his supporters. He then went beyond
this observation to use Webers concept of charismatic rulership to model the
political dynamics of Hitlers regime: Personal allegiance to Hitler was the
common bond which united the supporters of National Socialism and coun-
teracted the disruptive effects of divergent opinions and aims. Charismatic
leadership may be said, therefore, to be an integrating factor of great impor-
tance.
93
For Abel, charismatic rulership helped explain how Hitlers style of
leadership bound the divergent ideological tendencies of the Nazi movement
around a common core.
The migr sociologist Gerth used Webers model of charismatic ruler-
ship to explain the Nazi Partys intrinsic tensions rather than its cohesive
power. Shortly after arriving in the United States, Gerth scrambled to pub-
lish an English-language article that would open the doors to employment at
94. Hans Gerth, The Nazi Party: Its Leadership and Composition, American Journal of Soci-
ology 45 (1940): 51741.
95. Wilhelm Roepke, The German Dust-Bowl, Review of Politics 8 (1946): 51819; see also
Roepke, Die deutsche Frage (Erlenbach: Rentsch, 1945), 32.
American universities. The result of these efforts, an article in the American
Journal of Sociology titled The Nazi Party: Its Leadership and Composition,
argued that the Nazi Party could best be understood as an amalgam of charis-
matic and bureaucratic forms of rulership.
94
Hitler was the paradigm of the
charismatic leader who disdained specialists, raised money through gifts and
bribes rather than through systematic economic activity, gave special commis-
sions to followers in his inner circle instead of delegating precise domains of
responsibility, and resisted circumscribing his own power by refusing to claim
any one particular offce. As a consequence of the Fhrerprinzip, this model of
charismatic rule was replicated at lower levels of the party administration, with
each leaders legitimacy dependent solely on personality rather than qualifca-
tions. The race for power in the inner circle of a charismatic leader in turn
helped generate an endless proliferation of competing and overlapping bureau-
cratic organizations. In the long run, especially under the pressure of military
mobilization and competition with state bureaucracies, Gerth expected that
many of the charismatic elements of National Socialism would become routin-
ized into a more bureaucratic structure.
The new European dictatorships also appeared unique to migr social
scientists on account of their violent dynamism. Unlike traditional dictator-
ships, which prized social order and stability, charismatic leaders required per-
petual mobilization to maintain themselves in power. In National Socialism as
in Fascism and Communism, the economist Wilhelm Roepke observed, there
is the same reckless, violent usurpation of the functions of the state by a minor-
ity rising from the masses and leaning upon them while fattering and at the
same time intimidating them. This minority is headed by what Max Weber
has termed the charismatic leader and, in contrast with genuine dictatorship,
considers its rule by force as the normal, permanent form of state organization,
and not as a temporary mandate to be restored to the legitimate authority once
the emergency for the state has passed.
95
The unique social cohesion charac-
teristic of charismatic rulership could be maintained only so long as the leader
could demonstrate his gift of grace to his followers. Once he could no longer
do so, more conventional methods of repression were required. The terror
policies of the Gestapo and the SS made opposition against Hitler very diff-
cult, almost impossible, explained Gurian, the migr founder of the Review
Joshua Derman 79
96. Waldemar Gurian, Hitlerthe Simplifer of German Nationalism, Review of Politics 7
(1945): 320. Gurian was well aware that Weber had become popular among migr social scientists
seeking to explain National Socialism. See Gurian, On National Socialism, Review of Politics 4
(1942): 348n.
97. Hermann Rauschning, The Conservative Revolution (New York: Putnam, 1941), 44.
98. Talcott Parsons, Introduction, in Weber, Theory of Social and Economic Organization, 85.
99. Parsons discussed charisma only in a religious and economic context in The Structure of
Social Action: A Study in Social Theory with Special Reference to a Group of Recent European
Writers (1949; repr. New York: Free Press, 1968), 56475, 66172. The Structure of Social Action
was frst published in 1937.
100. Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, pt. 3 of Grundriss der Sozialkonomik (Tbin-
gen: Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1922), 124, 127, 637, 768; Weber, Gesammelte Aufstze zur Religions-
soziologie, vol. 1 (Tbingen: Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1922), 269. I consulted copies of both volumes
in the Papers of Talcott Parsons, HUGFP 42.55, boxes 23, Harvard University Archives.
of Politics at the University of Notre Dame. But this pressure became decisive
only after Hitlers position as a charismatic leader (Max Weber) had been
weakened by defeats. Until these last months of the regime Hitler was such a
charismatic leader who was accepted because of unquestioned belief in his
extraordinary personality and qualities.
96
In 1919 Weber had complained about the absence of charismatic lead-
ers in German parliamentary politics. Just over twenty years later German
migrs and American social scientists apotheosized him as a Cassandra-like
prophet of the age of charismatic dictators. For the Nazi apostate Rauschning,
writing in exile, mass democracys transformation into mass dictatorship con-
frmed the trajectory that Weber had predicted so long ago as 1919 in his
remarkable essay, Politik als Beruf.
97
Parsons was even more straightfor-
ward in his assessment. In his introduction to the English translation of part 1
of Economy and Society, he noted that Weber did not predict Hitler or the
Nazi movement, but he quite clearly saw that a large-scale charismatic move-
ment in reaction against modern liberal institutions but with certain demo-
cratic elements was a very real possibility.
98
Weber, of course, had foreseen
no such development. But the peculiar affnity between his concept of cha-
risma and the political phenomena under way in Europe led many scholars to
believe that he had.
Parsons, who had helped introduce the concept of charisma to American
audiences at the end of the 1920s, was not among the frst sociologists to make
charisma relevant for the study of current events.
99
Nonetheless, the concepts
applicability to contemporary political events was clearly on his mind. In his
personal copies of Webers books, the passages on charismatic rulership are
heavily underlined and frequently annotated with phrases such as Hitler,
also NSDAP, Nazis, and Hitler Danger.
100
At a meeting of his Harvard
101. Parsons Sociological Group: Reports of Meetings, in folder Discussion Group Notes
19361937, Papers of Talcott Parsons, HUGFP 42.62, box 1.
102. Gurian to Parsons, August 12, 1938, Papers of Talcott Parsons, HUGFP 42.8.2, box 3;
Talcott Parsons, Max Weber and the Contemporary Political Crisis, Review of Politics 4 (1942):
6176, 15572; Parsons, Introduction.
103. Parsons, Max Weber and the Contemporary Political Crisis, 76.
104. MWS I/22-4, 142 (ES, 1121).
105. Parsons, Max Weber and the Contemporary Political Crisis, 75; Parsons, Introduction, 71.
106. mile Durkheim, On Suicide, trans. Robin Buss (London: Penguin, 2006), 277, 272, 273.
sociological colloquium in 1937, Parsons spoke of the Christian Science
founder Mary Baker Eddy and Hitler as fgures who closely approach the
type of charismatic authority.
101
It was only after Gurian had invited him to
write a study on the political ideas of Max Weber that Parsons published
his thoughts on charisma and current events: frst in the article Max Weber
and the Contemporary Political Crisis for Gurians Review of Politics, and
later in the introduction he wrote for the English translation of part 1 of Econ-
omy and Society. Parsons praised Weber not simply as a great sociologist but
also as an analyst who could provide orientation in the midst of an epochal
social and political crisis.
102
For Parsons, Communism, National Socialism, and Fascismalong with
American religious and political movements such as Christian Science and
Huey Longs Share the Wealth movementrepresented charismatic phe-
nomena in the Weberian sense.
103
Moving beyond this descriptive identifca-
tion, Parsons sought to explain why charismatic leaders tended to arise in par-
ticular times and places and what accounted for their specifc appeal. Here
Webers theory of charisma, taken on its own, could be of only limited ser-
vice. Weber had devoted little space in Economy and Society to accounting
for the appeal or success of charismatic leaders, noting only that they tended
to arise in unusual external, especially political or economic situations, or
from extraordinary inner psychic, particularly religious states, or from both
together.
104
To explain the appeal of charismatic leadership, Parsons chose
to reach beyond the bounds of Webers own sociology. In keeping with the
synthetic approach to European social thought that he had pioneered in The
Structure of Social Action, Parsons attempted to expand the explanatory
reach of Webers concept of charisma by combining it with the French soci-
ologist mile Durkheims concept of anomie.
105

As elucidated in Durkheims classic 1897 study On Suicide, anomie
referred to a state of disorganization characterized by the absence of the
normal regulatory force that fxes with relative precision the maximum
of ease that every class of society can legitimately aspire to achieve.
106
Par-
Joshua Derman 81
107. Parsons, Max Weber and the Contemporary Political Crisis, 7576, 15961; Parsons,
Introduction, 71; Talcott Parsons, Some Sociological Aspects of the Fascist Movements, Social
Forces 21 (1942): 13841.
108. Parsons, Max Weber and the Contemporary Political Crisis, 76.
109. Ibid., 166.
110. Ibid., 75.
111. A noteworthy exception to this trend was Krishnalal Shridharani, War without Violence: A
Study of Gandhis Method and Its Accomplishments (London: Gollancz, 1939), 200202, which
drew on Webers sociology to characterize Gandhi as a charismatic leader. After serving three
months in jail for his political activities on behalf of Gandhis movement, Shridharani left India for
Columbia University, where he studied for his PhD under Robert Lynd, Robert MacIver, and the
resident Weber experts Theodore Abel and Alexander von Schelting.
sons believed that the rational-legal order of Western society was particu-
larly prone to generating such anomie. The variety of social processes that
Weber addressed under the rubric of rationalizationsuch as the rise of mod-
ern scientifc culture, industrialization, and the dissolution of traditional social
and religious valueshad created a situation in which many people felt that
the regulating bonds of society were no longer operative. Moreover, the uneven
character of these processes of rationalization created added strain between
emancipated and traditional sectors of society.
107
Under such conditions,
Parsons argued, charismatic movements of various sorts seem to function
in this situation as mechanisms of reintegration which give large numbers
of disorganized, insecure people, a defnite orientation, give meaning to their
lives.
108
Over time, the charismatic element of National Socialism would
become routinized into a feudal variant of traditional rule based on separate
administrative fefdoms. That the most distinctive cultural features of our
civilization could not long survive such a change, would scarcely seem to
need to be pointed out, he warned.
109
Charisma and the New States
Parsons believed that modern Western society provides particularly fruit-
ful soil for charismatic movements.
110
During the 1930s and 1940s the frst
wave of American scholarship on charisma focused almost exclusively on
contemporary European dictators, with Hitler receiving most of the atten-
tion.
111
However, Parsonss association of charismatic leadership with modern-
ization processes prefguredand helped inspirea profound shift in the way
that American social scientists understood the concept: charisma was increas-
ingly seen as symptomatic of political development in transitional societies.
Starting in the mid-1950s, as a wave of popular anticolonial movements swept
across Africa and Asia, American social scientists prominently employed
112. See, e.g., David E. Apter, The Gold Coast in Transition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1955); Richard Fagan, Charismatic Authority and the Leadership of Fidel Castro,
Western Political Quarterly 18 (1965): 27584; Stuart Schram, Mao Tse-tung as a Charismatic
Leader, Asian Survey 2 (1967): 38388; and Dankwart A. Rustow, Atatrk as Founder of a State,
Daedalus 97 (1968): 793828.
113. This trend was already observed by such contemporaries as William Friedland, For a Soci-
ological Concept of Charisma, Social Forces 43 (1964): 1819n3; Ann Ruth Willner and Dorothy
Willner, The Rise and Role of Charismatic Leaders, Annals of the American Academy of Political
and Social Science, no. 358 (1965): 80; Dankwart A. Rustow, A World of Nations: Problems of Polit-
ical Modernization (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1967), 150; and Robert C. Tucker, The
Theory of Charismatic Leadership, Daedalus 97 (1968): 734.
114. Apter, Gold Coast in Transition, 161.
115. Ibid., 294, 174.
116. For different formulations of this thesis, see George M. Kahin, Guy J. Pauker, and Lucian W.
Pye, Comparative Politics of Non-Western Countries, American Political Science Review 49
(1955): 1025; Gabriel A. Almond, Comparative Political Systems, Journal of Politics 18 (1956):
401; Lucian W. Pye, The Non-Western Political Process, Journal of Politics 20 (1958): 484; and
Rustow, World of Nations, 152. On the origins of modernization theory in the United States, see
Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
charisma in their analyses of emergent nationalist movements centered on
popular individual leaders. The success of such leaders as Kwame Nkrumah in
Ghana, Fidel Castro in Cuba, Mao Tse-Tung in China, and Kemal Atatrk in
Turkey was explained by reference to their charismatic qualities.
112
By the
mid-1960s the social scientifc discussion of charisma focused almost exclu-
sively on political life in the new states created through decolonization.
113
The investigation of charismas role in decolonization was pioneered by
David Apter in his 1955 study The Gold Coast in Transition. As the Gold
Coast (later Ghana) gradually transitioned from British colonial rule to self-
government, traditional tribal chieftains could no longer retain political author-
ity, since their legitimacy had been compromised through collaboration with
British indirect rule.
114
The result had not been anomie, Apter pointed out,
echoing Parsons, since a charismatic leader in the form of Nkrumah had
crystallized popular support outside these traditional institutions and won per-
sonal loyalty for himself and his party.
115
In addition to Apter, leading social
scientists such as George Kahin, Guy Pauker, Lucian Pye, Gabriel Almond,
and Dankwart Rustow argued that charismatic leadership was symptomatic of
societies undergoing transitions to political modernity. In societies where colo-
nialism had eroded traditional, tribal forms of authority, but where modern,
rational forms of legitimacy were not yet present, irrational and emotional
appeals could be particularly successful if made by extraordinary individuals
who claimed to embody the spirit of the nation.
116
Joshua Derman 83
117. Edward Shils, The Constitution of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982),
xvii. See also Shils, Max Weber and the World since 1920, in The Virtue of Civility: Selected
Essays on Liberalism, Tradition, and Civil Society, ed. Steven Grosby (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty
Fund, 1997), 25253.
118. This point had been made by his colleague, Parsons, who likened Webers notion of routin-
ized charisma to Durkheims concept of the sacred (Structure of Social Action, 67375; Introduc-
tion, 7576).
119. Edward Shils, The Concentration and Dispersion of Charisma: Their Bearing on Eco-
nomic Policy in Underdeveloped Countries, World Politics 11 (1958): 4.
120. Ibid., 5.
121. James C. Davies, Charisma in the 1952 Campaign, American Political Science Review
48 (1954): 1083.
The rise of anticolonial movements similarly inspired the sociologist
Edward Shils to make charisma the subject of empirical study. In 1957, while
delivering a conference paper on the role of new ruling elites in Africa and
Asia, Shils experienced a fash of insight: one reason why postcolonial elites
believed that they and not the ordinary people were uniquely suited for lead-
ership had to do with the charismatic qualities they ascribed to themselves.
117

In the article that resulted from this epiphany, Shils sought to show how post-
colonial elites legitimized their status by asserting their special attunement
to sources of cultural sacrality. Even though these elites had left behind their
tribal leaders, kinship groups, and magical rituals, they retain the unitary
response to charismatic thingsregardless of whether they are traditional or
newly emergentwhich is a feature of traditional societies or enthusiastic cul-
tic associations. For Shils, charisma signifed a general receptivity to societys
most fundamental values; it could be embodied in institutions and orders as
well as in people.
118
Since postcolonial elites had convinced the masses that the
nation was the source of everything sacred, their own proximity to the institu-
tions of nationhood legitimated their claims to personify the nation.
119
Their
success demonstrated that the religious sensitivity which is common in tradi-
tional societies and in the traditional sectors of underdeveloped countries lives
on in a transformed way in these societies as they move toward modernity.
120
American social scientists looked on charisma with suspicion and
foreboding during World War II, and to an extent their attitudes persisted
into the early 1950s. In his study of voter perceptions in the 1952 presidential
campaign, the sociologist James C. Davies worked from the assumption that
followers of a charismatic leader constituted an undifferentiated, cancer-
ous cell in the body politic.
121
After 1,799 respondents were asked why they
would vote for Dwight Eisenhower or Adlai Stevenson for president, a board
of judges concluded that charisma was a decisive factor in only 32 cases, all
122. Ibid., 108789, 1099.
123. Apter, Gold Coast in Transition, 29697, 3046.
124. Immanuel Wallerstein, Africa: The Politics of Independence (New York: Vintage, 1961),
94, 99.
125. Seymour Martin Lipset, The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Com-
parative Perspective (1963; repr. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1967), 22.
126. Ibid., 2326.
of which favored Eisenhower. Davies ascertained with relief that charisma was
not now epidemic in our society.
122
But in the context of politics in the decol-
onizing world, American political scientists soon ascribed a more positive
connotation to charismatic leadership: it was increasingly viewed as a produc-
tive force that, at least in the short term, could assist in politically integrating
the new nations of the developing world. In his book on the Gold Coast, Apter
made the case that Nkrumahs charismatic leadership fulflled the same func-
tional requirements as traditional chieftaincy, but within modern institutional
structures. In addition, Nkrumah endowed the transplanted British institutions
of parliamentary democracy with his own personal prestige, thus making them
more attractive to his followers than they might otherwise appear.
123
Immanuel
Wallerstein argued that the charismatic authority of a national hero could
aid in overcoming regional and ethnic divisions, transferring loyalty from tra-
ditional institutions to the rationally constituted nation-state. The charismatic
justifcation for authority (do it because I, your leader, say so) can be seen as
a way of transition, an interim measure which gets people to observe the
requirements of the nation out of loyalty to the leader while they (or their chil-
dren) learn to do it for its own sake.
124
Drawing a parallel between the early
United States and the new states of the developing world, Seymour Martin
Lipset noted that George Washington had fulflled the role of the charismatic
leader under whose guidance democratic political institutions could grow.
125

Fortunately, Washington appreciated that his charismatic rulership was only a
temporary phenomenon that would pave the way for a more enduring form of
legal rulership. In contrast, Lipset argued, charismatic leaders in modern devel-
oping states rarely provided more than an initial sense of national unity. Unlike
Washington, they did not lend their personal prestige to constitutional institu-
tions or provide for the orderly election of a successor.
126
Not all scholars in the United States were happy with the inroads that
charisma had made into political science. Carl J. Friedrich, the leading migr
political scientist at Harvard University, argued that charisma applied only to
those kinds of leadership based upon a transcendent call by a divine being,
believed in by both the person called and those with whom he has to deal in
Joshua Derman 85
127. Carl J. Friedrich, Political Leadership and the Problem of the Charismatic Power, Jour-
nal of Politics 23 (1961): 14.
128. Ibid., 16, 2223; see also Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dic-
tatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), 24.
129. Loewenstein, Max Webers Political Ideas, 79.
130. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., On Heroic Leadership and the Dilemma of Strong Men and Weak
Peoples, Encounter 15 (1960): 6, 7.
131. As one contemporary noted, the absence of a vital cleavage between Nixons and Ken-
nedys proposed policies meant that Kennedys major appeal lay primarily in his charismatic
aura, his ability to win a popular following on the basis of his growing talents (C. L. Sulzberger,
Its Charisma That Counts in the End, New York Times, November 7, 1960).
132. Pye, Non-Western Political Process, 484.
exercising his calling.
127
It was fair to call Moses, Buddha, and Mohammad
charismatic leaders, but men like Hitler and Mussolini, who did not make reli-
gious inspiration the foundation of their claim to rule, could not be brought
under the same category.
128
In the hands of other scholars, this line of rea-
soning only associated charismatic leadership all the more exclusively with
the new states. If charisma were truly peculiar to the sphere of religion, the
migr political scientist Karl Loewenstein argued, then charisma would
apply chiefy to the pre-Cartesian West and, nowadays, to many parts of Asia
and Africa which in spite of advancing rationalization only slowly are begin-
ning to break away from the magico-religious ambiance. The charisma of
leaders like Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Julius Nyere, and Kenneth Kaunda
could persist only because it was sustained essentially by the mystical and
magical climate of the non-western environment.
129
The historian Arthur
Schlesinger Jr. likewise insisted that the magical and mystical connotations of
the concept of charisma further emphasise its irrelevance to the modern tech-
nical world. Among modern political fgures, only Hitler deserved to be called
charismatic, with the exception of leaders in parts of Africa and Asia, where
Webers strict defnition still applies.
130
That Schlesinger, a key supporter and
adviser to then presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, ruled out the relevance
of charisma in Western democratic politics seems ironic indeed.
131
By the mid-1960s American social scientists had relegated charis-
matic rulership almost exclusively to the new states of Africa and Asia. The
sinologist Pye went so far as to declare that charismatic leaders tend to
prevail in non-Western politics.
132
This kind of orientalism, however, was
never part of the concept of charisma as Weber had originally intended it.
According to Weber, premodern forms of rulership tended to be either tradi-
tional or charismatic, while modern forms tended to be legal. But at the same
time, he emphasized that charismatic rulership is by no means limited to
133. MWS I/19, 2124 (FMW, 29499); MWS I/22-4, 152 (ES, 1133).
134. MWS I/17, 38, 6069 (FMW, 80, 10211).
135. MWS I/22-4, 139 (ES, 1117); Martin Riesenbrodt, Charisma in Max Webers Sociology of
Religion, Religion 29 (1999): 4.
136. K. J. Ratnam, Charisma and Political Leadership, Political Studies 12 (1964): 347.
137. Lewis A. Froman Jr., People and Politics: An Analysis of the American Political System
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), 75; Willard A. Hanna, Eight Nation Makers: South-
east Asias Charismatic Statesmen (New York: St. Martins, 1964), 290.
138. Schlesinger, On Heroic Leadership, 7.
primitive stages of development, and the three basic types of rulership can-
not be placed into a simple evolutionary line behind one another, but appear
combined together in the most diverse ways.
133
Nor did Weber believe that
charismatic rulership was in any way peculiar to non-Western societies. On
the contrary, he underlined two forms of charismatic rulership that he con-
sidered unique to the West: the demagogue of the Greek polis and the modern
parliamentary party leader. The American presidential system represented
for Weber the most signifcant form of plebiscitary-charismatic rulership
that existed in a modern, legally legitimated state.
134
Contrary to what Shils
had suggested in his interpretation of charisma, charismatic rulership was
supposed to create new social orders precisely by breaking with sacred tra-
ditions and institutions, not by perpetuating them in new institutional
forms. As Martin Riesenbrodt has observed, Shils in effect superimposes
a Weberian terminology on his own idiosyncratic theory of the sacred in
modern life, which itself had been derived from Parsonss Structure of Social
Action, Durkheims Elements of Religious Life, and Rudolf Ottos Idea of
the Holy.
135
Conclusion
As charisma was becoming part of the language of American social science,
scholars began to wonder whether the concept had lost its empirical basis. Did
charisma possess any explanatory value, or did it only serve as an admission
that there was something one could not explain? When we talk of charisma,
we are in a way saying that while we know why such and such a person was
popular, we cannot explain why he was that popular and why people had
that much faith in him, wrote K. J. Ratnam of the University of Singapore in
1964.
136
American writers were using charisma to signify merely an emo-
tional bond between a leader and his followers, or a leader possessed of a
mystical rapport with his nation and thus, it seems, with destiny.
137
Schle-
singer complained that the word has become a chic synonym for heroic or
for demagogic or even just for popular.
138
Joshua Derman 87
139. Germany: Man of the Year, Time, January 2, 1939, 23.
140. Howard Becker, German Youth: Bond or Free (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner,
1946), 54; Richard Plant, Hitlers Jugend: An Unsolved Problem, New York Times Book Review,
February 23, 1947.
141. Daniel Bell, The Day Fortune Lost Charisma, in Writing for Fortune: Nineteen Authors
Remember Life on the Staff of a Remarkable Magazine (New York: Time Inc., 1980), 163. For other
tellings of the story, see Bell, Sociodicy: A Guide to Modern Usage, American Scholar 35 (1966):
704; and Richard R. Lingeman, The Greeks Had a Word for Itbut What Does It Mean? New
York Times Sunday Magazine, August 4, 1968.
142. Lingeman, The Greeks Had a Word for It; What Ever Happened to Charisma?, Time,
October 17, 1969, 40.
It appears that the popular press in the United States frst picked up cha-
risma at the same time that social scientists didon the eve of World War II.
When Time magazine selected Hitler as its man of the year for 1938, its
cover story noted how the Nazi Party had cultivated the picture of a mystic,
abstemious, charismatic Fhrer during Hitlers rise from obscurity.
139
In 1946
the Wisconsin sociologist Howard Becker published a study of the German
youth movement under National Socialism, in which he emphasized the impor-
tance of the charismatic leader, a term which has won a secure place in the
vocabulary of the modern social scientist. The New York Times Book Review
admired how Becker thoroughly analyzes the peculiar German conception
of a leaders charisma, that strange combination of virility, recklessness and
intellectual force which magically attracts followers. This marked the frst
appearance of charisma in Webers sense in the pages of the New York Times.
140

Until the early 1960s charisma remained a peculiar German notion for many.
When the sociologist Daniel Bell tried to slip charisma into a 1949 Fortune
magazine article about the labor leader John L. Lewis, his editor, an avowed
foe of social-scientifc jargon, refused to allow the unfamiliar word to appear.
Asked by his editor to defne the word in plain English, Bell could only reply,
Well, its like the word Robert Penn Warren used to describe Huey Long,
when he said that he had kindlin power. Or one can say it is a magnetic pres-
ence. This failed to satisfy the editor, who struck the word from the copy.
141
By the end of the 1960s charisma was well on its way to entering every-
day American speech. In 1968 Richard Lingeman observed in the New York
Times that attributions of charisma in the public prints are so abundant that
the charismologist is hard-pressed to keep track of them all, listing among
them Charles de Gaulle, Martin Luther King, George Wallace, Ronald Rea-
gan, Gamal Nasser, and Mao. A year later Time magazine would identify
charisma as one of the dominant clichs of the 60s.
142
At the beginning of
the 1960s American social scientists had assumed that charisma was pecu-
liar to the Third World; by the end of the decade it was a term safely ensconced
143. Baker, Observer.
144. Potts, History of Charisma, 12728.
145. Starting in the early 1960s, American Protestants began using the term charismatic renewal
to describe the growing popularity of Pentacostal-style worship, such as ecstatic dancing and speak-
ing in tongues. While this movement undoubtedly helped popularize the older, explicitly religious
understanding of charisma, it may have also brought the concept itself to greater attention. On char-
ismatic renewal in the twentieth century, see ibid., 13758.
in American popular culture. At the same time, charisma was no longer being
used in the theoretical framework established by Weber, Parsons, Shils, and
others. It was now the nebulous je ne sais quoi that made a celebrity out of an
ordinary American.
What was it about charisma that made it such an apposite concept to
think with during the 1960s? In his observations on charisma, Russell Baker
noted that the word has been debased to mean something much closer to what
used to be called, back in the days of the big Hollywood studios, star quality.
As star quality became a desideratum of American politics during the 1960s,
presidential candidates were increasingly expected to attract voters to the polls
in the same way that marquee names attracted moviegoers to the cinema.
With politics becoming a business transacted extensively on television, the
half-pint son of the silver screen, Baker pointed out that it would not be sur-
prising if we secretly yearned for stars to lead us.
143
The televised presidential
debates between Kennedy and Nixon in 1960 had helped usher in an era in
which millions of viewers could simultaneously appreciate a candidates stage
presence.
144
One might conjecture that nonpolitical developments also played
an important role in creating a cultural framework in which charisma could
be domesticated. The notion of an ineffable spiritual quality, striving against
existing institutions to create revolutionary change, may have seemed particu-
larly appealing in the context of the 1960s countercultures gospel of self-actu-
alization and New Age spirituality.
145
Max Weber found a place in American intellectual life because he
proved himself useful for thinking with. He helped Americans articulate issues
that mattered to them, address developments that loomed on their own social
and political horizons. And these, of course, were not always the issues or
developments that he himself had envisaged. Weber became a classic of mod-
ern social thought not because his work dealt with timeless issues, or because
he correctly predicted the future, but because the world changed so as to make
his concepts particularly timelyand also because enterprising intellectuals
took the initiative to synthesize his concepts with others, such as political
religion, anomie, and star quality, as the history of charisma shows.

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