Political Leadership, Nations and Charisma

Vivian Ibrahim, Margit Wunsch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136341441
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This ground-breaking and innovative book examines the influence of charisma on power, authority and nationalism. The authors both apply and challenge Max Weber's concept of 'charisma' and integrate it into a broader discussion of other theoretical models.

Using an interdisciplinary approach, leading international scholars draw on a diverse range of cases to analyse charisma in benign and malignant leaderships, as well as the relationship between the cult of the leader, the adulation of the masses and the extension of individual authority beyond sheer power. They discuss idiosyncratic authority and oratory, and they address how political, social and regional variations help explain concepts and policies which helped forge and reformulate nations, national identities and movements. The chapters on particular charismatic leaders cover Abraham Lincoln, Kemal Atatürk, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Gamal Nasser, Jörg Haider and Nelson Mandela.

Political Leadership, Nations and Charisma will appeal to readers who are interested in history, sociology, political communication and nationalism studies.

1 Introduction:
Weber’s concept of charismatic domination

John Breuilly

Understandably, in a book on nations and charisma, there are many references to Max Weber and his ideas about charismatic leadership. Here, I consider the different ways in which the term charisma is used by different contributors, relate these to Weber’s arguments and suggest that a number of distinctions be introduced into the use of the concept. This is not intended as an exercise in establishing ‘correct’ usage or what Weber ‘really’ meant, but rather to clarify the range of meanings the concept can bear and what useful analytical work it can do.¹

Weber defined charisma as one type of legitimate domination.² By legitimate, he meant some quality of authority extending beyond sheer power. Power he defined as the capacity of A to issue commands to B which were routinely obeyed. This might rest on coercive, economic or ideological power that B felt unable to resist or it might be that B obeyed out of habit or inertia. However, legitimate authority referred to cases where B acted as if A had the right to issue such commands, not merely the power to punish disobedience. Weber identified three ideal types of legitimate authority: traditional, legal–rational and charismatic.

Weber formulated these ideal types as part of what he called the ‘sociology of domination’ (Herrschaftssoziologie). The relationship of A to B was a social relationship. It is important to see what this excludes or marginalises. Legitimacy was not defined in terms of beliefs except in the vacuous sense that regarding, say, traditional authority as legitimate entails a belief in the authority of tradition. Nor was it defined in psychological terms except in a similarly minimal sense. We can never know much about the beliefs or psychology of a courtier in the Versailles of Louis XIV or an official in a modern bureaucracy or a member of the Nazi party, although we can expect there to be great variety between individuals.³ However, we do know a lot about how a courtier or official or party member was expected to behave in their respective roles and the sanctions that would apply if they failed to do so. As Weber phrased it, such followers acted ‘as if ’they believed in the right of the king or departmental head or Hitler to issue commands to them. MacGregor Knox stresses in his chapter that it is the actions of Nazi followers that mattered and that constituted Hitler’s charisma, not some separate effect of propaganda (belief) or indoctrination (psychology), even if that was also involved. It was the ‘success’ of these organised forms of action that established and sustained authority.

Such authority refers to the social relationships between the leader (whether office holder or extraordinary individual) and the members of the movements or institutions that implement the leader’s commands. (Weber referred variously to the ‘following’, ‘staff’ and ‘administrative apparatus’.) As for the generality of the population, whether as support mobilised by an oppositional movement or subjects ruled by a state, it is impossible to identify any specific and determinate social relationship between them and the leader. Notions of legitimate domination applied to this larger population take on a different and necessarily broader form. Many accounts of charismatic domination are about this subject, usually focusing on how images of the leader are projected and their presumed effects on the beliefs or psychology of mass audiences. It is important not to confuse these two aspects of charisma and, henceforth, I will refer to relational and projected charisma to make the distinction clear.

Weber’s three ideal types do not refer to values, interests or groups. He rejected the idea of defining legitimacy on the basis of a rhetoric of class or nation or god. The many forms that such a rhetoric could take mean they could not provide the basis for a parsimonious typology developed to enable comparative analysis of a large number of cases.⁴ Furthermore, a sociology of domination would still have to translate such rhetoric into social relationships. Appeals to sacred values, groups or deities are framed as beliefs, not social relationships, and it is difficult, indeed arguably impossible, to equate the success of such appeals with distinct social relations. (That is what believers do and precisely what detached analysts must avoid doing.) In any case, that is not necessary; one can subsume such appeals within the Weberian framework. The rhetoric (and possibly genuine belief) attached to the authority of a traditional monarchy includes appeals to beliefs, e.g. concerning divine right monarchy or a ‘great chain of being’. Legal–rational authority is justified by appeals to liberal and democratic values, arguing for example that one needs rules and procedures to maximise individual freedom, or to treat individuals as equal or to enable effective participation by all citizens. Modern charismatic leaders always claim to embody some valued quality such as national character, religious piety or insight into Marxist–Leninist doctrine. It is how the belief is deployed that defines charismatic leadership, not what the belief is about.

However, there is a particular problem concerning the relationship between charisma and nationalism. Nationalism, more than any other modern ideological–political movement, appears to be associated with charismatic leadership, both in opposition and in power. There are modern charismatic leaders of religious and socialist movements, but they are more often than not bearers of what Weber called the ‘charisma of office’ (e.g. as Pope or Ayatollah or General Secretary of the Party) rather than unique individuals who claim to embody the national. Is there something about modern nationalist movements and regimes that especially favours charismatic leadership?

To help deal with both the general subject of modern charismatic leadership and this particular problem, I propose a modification of Weber’s typology. His three ideal types consist of different combinations of two pairs of concepts, as outlined in Table 1.1.⁵

Table 1.1 Re-interpreting Weber’s typology of leadership

	Personal	Impersonal
Ordinary	Traditional	Legal-rational
Extraordinary	Charismatic	?

Weber treated charismatic authority as both extraordinary and embodied in an individual. He also assumed that a charismatic leader must be extraordinary. I contend that neither of these points is essential to the use of the concept, and indeed they undermine its use as Weber envisaged. If the central concern is with social relationships, what matters is how the following behave in relation to the leader and not, in the first instance, any individual qualities that individual might possess. As we can see with the notion of ‘charisma of office’, it is possible to project charisma on to an individual in relation to the extraordinary authority that attaches to an institution such as the Catholic Church or the Communist Party. The Pope as Vicar of Christ or the Communist leader as the fount of Marxist–Leninist insight is the organizational, rather than the personal, embodiment of this charismatic authority.⁶ As we can see from Table 1.1, in principle, one could construct a fourth type of legitimate domination, which I will call impersonal charisma. I suggest that, in terms of a sociology of domination, almost all modern charismatic leadership takes this form, with the very important exception of certain kinds of modern nationalism, which are, however, highly unstable and short-lived. In contrast, the broader projection to and reception by mass audiences of leadership images as charismatic has become a standard feature of modern rule. I will tentatively conclude by suggesting a close relationship between the decline of personal relational charisma and the rise of personal projected charisma.

In terms of relational charisma, it is important to focus on the various ways in which this is handled by the contributors to this book. I begin with charismatic leadership in opposition movements, and move on to charismatic leadership in regimes. In relation to opposition, one must distinguish between charismatic movements that take and those that fail to take state power. In relation to regimes, it is also necessary to explore the differences between cases where charisma had played a central role in the taking of power and those where it had not.

I identify two uses of the concept of projected charisma, mainly in relation to nationalist regimes. First, there is the historical–mythical use of posthumous individuals by a nationalist movement or regime. When De Gaulle or Petain appealed to an imagery of Joan of Arc or Hitler to one of Frederick the Great or Bismarck, clearly it would be nonsense to say that Joan or Frederick were themselves charismatic leaders. Whether they wielded charismatic power in their own world is a separate and secondary issue compared with the question of how images about them are deployed much later. Being a second order issue, it is quite possible that, even if they had exercised charismatic domination, such extraordinary individuals could subsequently figure in the projections of non-charismatic forms of authority. I include in this section the posthumous uses of the very people taken as the subject of some chapters. Lincoln, Nasser and Haider (and arguably, since his withdrawal from active politics, Mandela) have a different relationship to power after their death than before.

Second, there is what I call ‘regime charisma’. Most of the individuals considered in this book did not take power as charismatic leaders of opposition movements. Only Hitler and Mussolini fit that description. Therefore, leaving aside the question of whether previously non-charismatic leaders can construct a charismatic following once in power, there is the question of how state power is used to project a charismatic image and what this tells us about the authority of the leader. My key argument will be that the power this sustains is fragile and is more a function of other kinds of power than an important form of power in its own right.

There are two other questions I wish to address. One is the unique case of Gandhi. There is no chapter on Gandhi in the book, but I consider him because I see him as a rare, and by far the most significant, example of a modern political leader whose authority was grounded in pre-modern forms of charismatic domination. This pre-modern charismatic power enabled him to impose his will on a modern political institution, the Congress Party. The case of Gandhi is the extraordinary exception to the rule of modern charismatic political leaders, which proves that rule.

Finally, there is the question Weber raised of the impossibility of sustaining charismatic power. I will suggest that personal charisma cannot be passed on and cannot be converted into charisma of office. Rather, charismatic rule can only be routinised when already firmly grounded as impersonal charisma, as in the cases of Catholicism and Bolshevik Communism.

Charismatic leadership and oppositional movements

Five figures considered in this book were arguably charismatic leaders of movements opposed to existing states: Garibaldi, Haider, Hitler, Mussolini and Mandela, although I will argue that this is not the case with Mandela. In just two of these cases, those of Garibaldi and Haider, the leader did not take state power (if we leave aside the brief period during which Garibaldi was dictator in Sicily, and Haider’s governorship of a region). In Lucy Riall’s account, we can see instances of both relational and projected charisma. It begins as projection; Riall has shown how in many ways Garibaldi was an invention of Mazzini.⁷ The success of this projection has to be related to emergent structures and cultures of communication. The structures include the growing importance of popular print media and the mass production of visual images through lithography and other techniques. There was also an important role played by radical and labour associations and clubs, not so much in creating a following but in providing the (non-charismatic) organisational basis for projecting the image. The huge demonstration that greeted Garibaldi when he visited London in 1864 was only possible given the efforts of the dense network of radical and labour clubs in the city.⁸ In terms of the culture of communication, the effective cultivation of the heroic image of Garibaldi must be related to the specific forms of romanticism in contemporary European public culture. However, there were other, often apparently contradictory, cultural ingredients; the radical cult of Garibaldi was in part a celebration of anti-clericalism, yet at the same time it resembled the charismatic projections of Pope Pius IX. In his work, Alberto Banti has also argued that the reception of a nationalist ‘canon’, including leadership imagery, must be related to long existing values about religious hierarchy and family solidarity.⁹ Haider’s rise to provincial power appears with the projection of his image as a man who could do something about problems that the government was helpless to solve, which was crucial to his subsequent popularity.

As for a charismatic following, in Haider’s case, this seems to be linked to both his early sectarian political career and then the very different following of sectaries fetishising his image after his death. In the case of Garibaldi, this came about with the relocation and militarisation of conflict on the Italian peninsula. Exile politics finds it difficult to cultivate a charismatic following beyond small sects, given fragmentation, suppression, lack of resources and endemic quarrels. However, once Garibaldi was able to lead paramilitary groups in Italy, then he could construct a following – most notably the famous 1,000 or Red Shirts who invaded Sicily under his leadership. In many ways, this was a pre-modern form of charisma based on personal ties and beliefs in extraordinary powers and deeds. (The stories of Garibaldi’s courage and miraculous survivals are legion, and many of them are true.) However, this was a sectarian rather than a mass movement, and it fragmented with the growth of power. State power could only be wielded under a very different set of relationships, which involved reproducing older forms of traditional local power and uneasily fusing these with the extension of the bureaucratic power of the Piedmontese state over the south of the peninsula. Eventually, this combination of Piedmontese bureaucratic state power and local notable power displaced Garibaldi and his brand of radical nationalism. All that remained was a radical nationalist critique of Italian nation-state formation that could use the heroic figures of Mazzini and Garibaldi to condemn the Savoyard monarchy, whereas holders of state power in turn sought to recruit their own mythic versions of these heroes as props of the regime. Garibaldi and Mazzini had been converted into founding fathers; their uses both to justify and to condemn being similar to those of many other such founding fathers, whatever the type of regime involved. As for Haider, his charismatic appeal seems to have been even more fragile. Emo Gotsbachner’s chapter indicates that, at mass level (as projected), it failed to sustain any appeal once the party was sucked into governing coalitions. As relational charisma, it seems to have shrunk to a coterie that was immune to criticism.

Nelson Mandela fits into a special category. Some of the points Elleke Boehmer makes about Mandela – above all his remarkable self-discipline and subordination of self to the cause in ways that remind one of Gandhi – are typical of the way pre-modern charismatic figures such as ascetic holy men secure personal authority over a small network of followers. However, under modern conditions, it is difficult to extend such authority beyond that small group. State repression, along with imprisonment, exile or underground activity, inhibits the wide-scale projection of such personal imagery. The committed and extended nature of a movement such as the African National Congress (ANC) throws up various and different kinds of leaders: the exiled politicians, the guerrilla leaders, the urban underground, the political operators such as the Communist Party leadership. These different and strong personalities are disinclined to follow one particular leader and that was true of the ANC. It was Mandela’s isolation from everyday political engagement through imprisonment, coupled with the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• List of Contributors
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction Weber's concept of charismatic domination
• Part I Nations and charisma
• Part II The cult of the leader, the role of the masses
• Part III Charisma in the present day
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index