Charisma and Patronage

Reasoning with Max Weber

Andrew D. McCulloch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317168362
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

A detailed and richly illustrated analysis of charisma and the political and cultural conditions in which charismatic figures arise, this work of historical sociology critically engages with Max Weber's ambiguous concept of charisma to examine the charismatic careers of a number of figures, including Joan of Arc, Hitler and Nelson Mandela, as well as that of Jesus, who, the author contends - in contradistinction to Max Weber - was not a charismatic leader, in spite of his portrayal in Christian theology. Shedding light on the process of charismatic transformation as it occurs within intensely solidaristic groups and the importance of patronage in charismatic careers, the book distinguishes between charismatic rule and charismatic leadership. With close attention to the social and political legacy of charisma for modern capitalism, it also examines the emergence of a global class of the super-rich, a process buttressed by a belief on the part of business leaders in their own charismatic powers. A rigorous examination of the under-researched political process of charisma, the understanding of which remains as important in modern society as in history, Charisma and Patronage will appeal to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including sociology, history, politics and social geography.

Chapter 1
Max Weber and the Problem of Charisma

Introduction

It is incontestable that it is Weber who has bequeathed to modern sociology the concept of charisma, although he attributes, in a back-handed compliment, its initial “one-sided” formulation to Rudolf Sohm (Weber, 1978: 1112 and note 1156). (One-sided, of course, is a positive description of Weber’s own definition of his ideal-type concepts.) Since Sohm, he writes, “developed this category with regard to one historically important case – the rise of the ecclesiastic authority of the early church – his treatment was bound to be one-sided from the viewpoint of historical diversity. In principle, these phenomena are universal, even though they are most evident in the religious realm” (Weber, 1978: 1112) and one of the reasons that Jesus Christ is the archetypal charismatic figure in the sociological tradition is that Weber puts him there. The evidence for this from Weber’s Economy and Society alone is compelling enough. Many charismatic leaders are mentioned in passing, such as religious figures like Zoroaster or Muhammed, or secular leaders like Napoleon or, from Weber’s own time, the littérateur, Kurt Eisner. Only Jesus Christ’s charisma is described at length over more than three of Weber’s most highly perceptive pages (Weber, 1978: 630–34), which I discuss critically in the next chapter.

Weber’s View of Charisma

It is not just that the unfortunately unclear concept of charisma is, in the judgement of most scholars, at the heart of Weber’s theoretical “system”, it is also that charisma for him was an ultimate value. He demanded it of others and there is persuasive evidence that he could be perceived as charismatic (by) himself. Consider, for instance, Karl Jaspers’ extraordinary assessment of Weber in a commemorative address given in the year following Weber’s death:

In his personality the whole age, its movement and its problems are present; in him the forces of the age have an exceptionally vigorous life and an extraordinary clarity. He represents what the age is … and to a large extent he is the age. In Max Weber we have seen the existential philosopher incarnate. While other men know in essence only their personal fate, the fate of the age acted within his ample soul … His presence made us aware that even today spirit can exist in forms of the highest order. (Jaspers, quoted in Bottomore and Outhwaite, 1982: 23–4)¹

Three important historical episodes illustrate the personal importance of charisma to Weber. The three episodes all occurred within a year or two before his premature death, when he was still at the height of his intellectual powers.

The first significant episode is his dispute with General Ludendorff who had been “in effect Germany’s dictator during the last two war years” (Kershaw, 1998: 187). Ludendorff was designated therefore as the leading war criminal by the victorious allies at the end of the First World War. In order to retrieve Germany’s honour, and particularly that of the officer corps of the army, Weber boldly suggested to Ludendorff that he should offer his life to the victors (Gerth and Mills, 1993: 41–2). Weber was thereafter contemptuous of Ludendorff because he refused to make this act of self-sacrifice. (Hitler in 1943 expected the same sacrifice of his defeated and newly-promoted Field Marshal Paulus in Stalingrad.) Up to that point, Weber had shared the common German view that Ludendorff was a war hero, chiefly famous for leading the resistance to the Russians on the Eastern Front.

Weber apparently expected that the general would live up to his ideals of the charismatic leader (although it is very odd that Weber felt that he had to point out to Ludendorff his duty). In the course of this epistolary exchange, Weber described to Ludendorff his view of democracy in modern societies. This is best termed as “plebiscitary democracy” (see Mommsen, 1974: 72–94). Weber explained to Ludendorff that what he meant by this form of democracy was that “the people choose a leader in whom they trust. Then the chosen leader says, ‘Now shut up and obey me’. People and party are then no longer free to interfere in his business”. It is no surprise that Ludendorff replied to Weber that he, “could like such a democracy”. Perhaps Ludendorff was not fully in agreement with Weber’s view that, if the leader made mistakes then, Weber asserted, “to the gallows with him!” (Gerth and Mills, 1993: 41–2; Eliaeson, 2000: 146–7).² Weber’s conception of democracy was very like that which has been intermittently practised in the USA, although there it is democracy tempered by assassination.

Tom Bottomore and William Outhwaite have argued that there are two Webers: the one is the liberal individualist and the other the “ardent nationalist”. However, the idea of charisma provides “one frail bridge between these seeming antithetical intellectual orientations” (Bottomore and Outhwaite, 1982: 15). For Weber, only absolutely ideologically-driven groups or individuals can achieve major social change (although the application of reason to human affairs can set incremental change in motion). This is linked to his ethic of personal responsibility and commitment to individualism. On the other hand, they believe that his view was that it was “charismatic domination and ‘plebiscitarian leader-democracy’ … which would produce the dynamic and effective leadership necessary for the promotion of national interests” (op. cit. 16). Thus, Bottomore and Outhwaite’s conclusion is false because charisma is not a “frail bridge” which feebly conjoins Weber’s individualism with his power politics but is a highly elitist form of individualism which is all of a piece with his form of “ardent nationalism”. The nation is in significant part defined by its capacity to be the crucible of charismatic leadership – a view which is close to that of Carlyle.³

Thus, the second episode is obviously Weber’s part in the creation of the Weimar constitution. Article 41 of this constitution stipulated the direct election of the president by the people. Weber’s decisive influence here is well known and uncontested. It is less certain whether he also swung his weight behind Article 48, which awarded the president wide-ranging powers at times of crisis (Eliaeson, 2000: 142). Mommsen (1959) has, of course, famously argued (although later retracting this somewhat) that Weber’s intervention had helped prepare in some significant measure the ground for Hitler’s rise to power. There is little doubt that Weber would have despised or disdained Hitler. Unfortunately, this does not mean that he would have disowned in principle Hitler’s right to take dictatorial powers in a time of crisis. (Article 48 did require that, upon the taking of extraordinary powers by the president, Reichstag elections were to be held within 60 days. In the event, this stipulation was very easily circumvented (see Kershaw, 1998: 324).)

The third episode is, perhaps surprisingly and perhaps somewhat contentiously, Weber’s two famous lectures given somewhere between 1917 and 1919.⁴ Science as a Vocation and Politics as a Vocation were given at the invitation of a group of young thinkers, the Bavarian Branch of the Freistudentische Bund, of which Karl Löwith was a leading member. Löwith’s account was written 12 years later but there is no real reason to doubt its authenticity. The second of these lectures might have taken about two-and-a-half hours to deliver. (Three-hour lectures are still far from unknown in German universities.) However, Schluchter believes that Weber expanded this speech in preparation for its publication as he was not happy with its original form (Schluchter in Roth and Schluchter, 1979: 67). The first was about half this length.⁵ For the first lecture, Weber, looking like an ancient prophet according to Löwith, strode into the packed lecture hall, greeting one of Löwith’s friends in passing. Weber then launched himself into his lecture, speaking apparently without notes and any hesitation (“vollkommen frei und ohne Stockung” (Löwith, 1986: 16)).

Weber did of course prepare (Schluchter, 1979: 67).⁶ So powerful was the impression that Löwith believed that the published lectures were a verbatim note of the lectures without revision. For the audience, “The impression was shocking” for “compressed into the (first) lecture was the knowledge and experience of a whole life”. Löwith describes Weber’s “melancholy glow”, “the powerful impression of Weber’s personality” and his “demonic power”. Weber stripped away all illusions yet “everyone had to realise” that at the heart of this “clear understanding” was the “deepest humanity”. Schluchter (1979) was apparently not including Löwith (1986) when he commented that, “As many contemporaries have testified, Weber was a powerful speaker with demagogic talents, reminiscent of the prophets of the Old Testament, whose rhetoric he described so movingly in his study on ancient Judaism” (Schluchter, in Roth and Schluchter, 1979: 67–8).

Weber, because of his moral authority, was regarded by Löwith as without peer in the German university system. (Jaspers, whom I have quoted above, seems to have shared that high opinion.) Löwith was convinced that, if Weber had lived until1933 and beyond, he would have stood out steadfastly “to the very end” against the “despicable” Gleichschaltung⁷ of German academic life. History, in that case, Löwith believed, might well have been different.⁸ There is a legend that Weber was prepared to assume the highest office but the call never came. Scaff’s remarks seem to condemn that hope as sadly misplaced:

[Weber] never really recovered from the illness that struck at the age of thirty-four … For that reason alone, if not for political considerations, it seems wildly improbable that he might have played a central role in politics after 1918, as friends from the Heidelberg Circle wanted to believe. As Weber himself recognized, he was excitable, unreliable, and lacked the ‘calm nerves’ necessary for public office. His reputation as a lone wolf, a troublemaker, and alarmist was not undeserved, and if the humourless and stark criticism of his political essays is any indication of intentions, Weber certainly wanted it that way … Everything considered, Weber’s life and work present a troubling panorama, a disunified collage of frustrated ambition, renunciation, disappointment, and prodigious mental exertion. (Scaff, 1989: 2)

On the other hand, “a disunified collage of frustrated ambition, renunciation, disappointment, and prodigious mental exertion” seems to be a very apt description of a charismatic leader in waiting (cf. Kershaw, 1998). In addition, what the representative attitudes of Löwith and Jaspers show is the importance of the charismatic intellectual for German university life. Weber’s performance and its reception prove that charisma was an important part of that group’s cultural vocabulary. The historian Ranke’s influence was by no means at an end. Heidegger, with his unfashionable Hitler moustache, was perhaps the most notorious of those intellectuals who were later more than willing to bathe in the glow of Hitler’s charisma.⁹

There is no doubt, then, that Weber had turned in a charismatic performance and these lectures also coincided with a “phase in which Weber stood on the verge of offering himself as a political leader” (Eliaeson, 2000: 133). It would be naïve to suppose that this stunning performance and tremendous effect were effortlessly and artlessly achieved, especially in the light of Weber’s earlier mental illness and his very brief tenure of his university chair. Nevertheless, Weber himself seems to have supposed that conscious pursuit of the mantle of charisma called into question the authenticity of charisma.¹⁰ It is hard, otherwise, to understand the qualification by him of some manifestations of charisma as “genuine”. However, although he suggests that Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, “may have been a very sophisticated swindler” (Weber, 1978: 242), nevertheless, “Value-free sociological analysis will treat all … on the same level as it does the charisma of men who are the ‘greatest’ heroes, prophets and saviors according to conventional judgements” (Weber, ibid.). Regrettably, what this reference to a possibly manipulative aspect to Joseph Smith’s charismatic leadership does not do is prompt Weber to think about the ways in which the leader can learn to be charismatic.¹¹

Conflict between Life Worlds

Weber is sometimes described as a conflict theorist. In the way that that expression is conventionally used, Weber would probably have regarded the description as a childish one. However, he would have readily acknowledged that what is central to his thought is a particular form of conflict:

Reduced to its most essential features, Weber’s standpoint … holds that the world as we experience it is separated into different, even radically opposed ‘orders of life’ or ‘spheres of value’ that operate according to their own internally constructed, law-like and autonomous principles. Weber uses these two nouns interchangeably – literally, ‘life-order’ and ‘value-sphere’ – to identify a level of suprapersonal social forces or ‘rules’ that tend to define the kinds of actions, choices, roles, and norms available to us as participants in a particular form of life. As we enter these orders or spheres and act within them, with full consciousness and consistency of purpose, we find ourselves constrained by their requirements – their distinctive ‘means’ and ‘ends’. We also find ourselves compelled to choose among the orders themselves: either science or faith, moral goodness or worldly power, eros or asceticism, art or life – or, at the symbolic extreme, either ‘god’ or the ‘devil’. (Scaff, 2000: 107–8)

Scaff believes that Weber’s “general intention is to show that … a ‘unity’ of action and experience among science, art, morality and politics has been shattered by the powerful forces of rationalization and differentiation” (Scaff, 2000: 108). According to Scaff, Weber suggests in Science as a Vocation that “self-clarification” and “intellectual integrity”, achieved through dedication to science or the pursuit of knowledge, have the capacity to inoculate “against the enchantment promised by the Augustinian plea: credo non quod, sed quia absurdum est – I believe precisely because it is opposed to reason” (ibid.). But Weber, writes Scaff, is acutely aware of the limitations of science and its incapacity to answer the decisive questions about and between human values.

However, the attraction of charisma in modern societies, if we accept Weber’s analysis, is that it sutures together the different life-orders and forcefully, if briefly, supplies the answer to, “What shall I do and how shall I live?” Weber despairs that “because death is meaningless, civilized life as such is meaningless; by its very ‘progressiveness’ it gives death the imprint of meaningless” (Gerth and Mills, 1993: 140). However, the mark of the charismatic leader is that their mission is pursued at the risk of or to the point of annihilation. Their death, and the deaths of their close followers, if they occur in the course of their common mission, is not experienced as meaningless and their lives are therefore not “civilized” in the sense Weber uses it here. For a consistent Weberian thinker, charismatic leaders and their followers would have to be seen as being able to re-enchant the world for themselves and challenge its demystification. That is their central and essential meaning in the Weberian system of thought.

Charisma and Weber’s Ethics

There is a further problem with Weber’s notion of charisma that might well have put it into a kind of psychological or intellectual quarantine for Weber. This is because his endorsement of charisma is not consistent with Weber’s own considered ethical position. At the end of Politics as a Vocation Weber attempts to reconcile what he had earlier distinguished as two very distinct ethical positions. These are the ethic of absolute conviction or pure intention and the ethic of responsibility. Despite siding with an ethic of responsibility, Weber concedes that without some absolute convictions and therefore the striving for the apparently impossible, a politics restricted to the art of the possible withers to mere administration. Yet charismatic leadership and rule are nothing else but the absolute commitment to one set of values. This is not without calculation of the often immense cost of their realisation, but this responsibility is blithely accepted. Weber’s view of what constitutes maturity and personal integrity is the toleration of ambiguity, paradox and incompatible values. Therefore, charisma is immature and childlike. This also calls into question Lassman’s interpretation of charisma as a kind of liberation. It is a very peculiar idea of freedom, from most perspectives, to be bound to the fulfilment of a mission even at the price of one’s life.

Weber is not the simple methodological individualist that he sometimes made himself out to be, but unfortunately some of his followers have colluded in this delusion. One of the reasons that we might argue that Weber is not a methodological individualist par excellence is because of what he wrote about ideologies. He claimed that, in what has become one of his most famous comments, ideologies were like railway points that could, with the flick of a switch, change the course of history. Strangely enough, he did not apply this metaphor to charismatic leaders and portray them as the signalman operating these points. Nevertheless, given the general cast of his sociological thought it is almost contrary that his fascination with charisma as a personal attribute and/or social attribution did not drive him to think more critically about charismatic leaders, ideological innovation and the threat of social schism.

Legitimacy and Charisma

Weber distinguishes theoretically between material domination and legitimate domination or authority. The former was of little sociological interest for him even though he accepted the great social importance of force or the monopoly of resources in human affairs. Nevertheless, quite often Weber, and more often his interpreters, assume that material domination has to be a transient condition and the default position of all societies is one in which a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Max Weber and the Problem of Charisma
• 2 Jesus, Christ and the Mythology of Charisma
• 3 Utopian Communities, Charisma and Moral Despotism
• 4 Charisma as a “Career”
• 5 Joan of Arc: A Case of Subordinate Charisma
• 6 Hitler’s Charisma: The Worst Case Scenario and the Paradigmatic Case
• 7 Nelson Mandela: Charismatic Agent of Passive Revolution
• 8 Crises within US Capitalism and the Search for Corporate Charismatic Leadership
• 9 Patronage and Political Charisma
• Bibliography
• Index