The Charismatic Principle in Social Life

Luigino Bruni, Barbara Sena

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135132958
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Max Weber laid the foundations for the meaning of 'charisma' in modern secular usage. This new volume argues for the importance of the 'charismatic principle' in history, economics and society.

This volume brings together a number of contributors at the cross section between economics, theology, sociology and politics in order to set a research agenda for the following issues:

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• What does it means to have a 'charism'? How does it work in society? How might one distinguish a 'charism' from a talent? Are 'charism's given only to "special" people, or are they also present in ordinary people? Is a 'charism' necessarily associated with religion, or, is it, as we submit, possible to imagine 'charisms' at work within a secular perspective?

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• Which are the principle perspectives of the role of 'charisms' in social history? How have the 'charisms' of noted personalities (e.g., Benedict, Francis, Gandhi) changed economic and social history?

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• What insights might be drawn from 'civil charisms' such as the cooperative movement, non-profit organizations, social economy, and values-based organizations?

This book seeks to answer these questions through the employment of an interdisciplinary perspective, which examines the theme of the charismatic principle in social life in different fields of application.

1 Economy of life

Charismatic dynamics and the spirit of gift

Adrian Pabst

Economic life undoubtedly requires contracts, in order to regulate relations of exchange between goods of equivalent value. But it also needs just laws and forms of redistribution governed by politics, and what is more, it needs works redolent of the spirit of gift. The economy in the global era seems to privilege the former logic, that of contractual exchange, but directly or indirectly it also demonstrates its need for the other two: political logic, and the logic of the unconditional gift.

(Pope Benedict XVI, 2009: sec. 37 [original italics])

Introduction

The dominant mode of globalization has mostly reinforced the disembedding of states and markets from the social practices and civic virtues of civil society writ large. In this process, abstract economic values linked to instrumental reason and procedural fairness have supplanted civic virtues of courage, reasonableness and substantive justice. As such, the global “market-state” reflects the centralization of power and the concentration of wealth that is undermining democratic politics and genuinely competitive economies.

However, the growing economic interdependence around the world also offers new opportunities for reciprocity, mutuality and fraternity among communities and nations. To promote an ethos of responsible and virtuous action, requires the full breadth of political and economic reason. Christian social teaching offers conceptual and practical resources that are indispensable to the search for broader notions of rationality. Among these resources are non-instrumental conceptions of justice and the common good in the social doctrine of the Catholic Church and cognate traditions in Anglicanism and Eastern Orthodoxy.

Closely connected to this is the idea of “civil economy” (Bruni and Zamagni, 2007). As Pope Benedict XVI has suggested in his encyclical Caritas in veritate, “civil economy” embeds state-guaranteed rights and market contracts in the social bonds and civic virtues that bind together the intermediary institutions of civil society (Benedict XVI, 2009). In this manner, it links the “logic of contract” to the “logic of gratuitous gift exchange”. The spirit of gift exchange translates into concrete practices of reciprocal trust and mutual assistance that underpin virtues such as reciprocal fraternity and the pursuit of the universal common good in which all can share. As such, “civil economy” reconnects activities that are primarily for state-administrative or economic-commercial purposes to practices that pursue social purposes.

Charisma, Calvinism and capitalism

Contemporary social sciences owe the dominant modern understanding of the term “charisma” to the work of Max Weber. In his 1919 lecture on “Politics as a Vocation” (Politik als Beruf), he describes charismatic authority as “resting on devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person, and of the normative patterns or order revealed or ordained by him” (Weber, 1994: 309–369). Likewise, in his seminal book Economy and Society (Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft), he defines the nature of charismatic leadership as

a certain quality of an individual personality, by virtue of which one is “set apart” from ordinary people and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These as such are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as divine in origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader.

(Weber, 2006: chapter III, §10)

In Weber's typology of different forms of domination or rule (Herrschaft), charismatic authority exceeds and supplants both traditional authority (based upon informal habits and customs) and rational-legal authority (grounded in formal rules and state law). That is because charisma for Weber is truly extraordinary, originating in the divine “gift of grace” bestowed on the elect few.

What is striking about Weber's account of charisma in both texts is the same emphasis on divine predestination as there is in Calvinism, which he rightly associates with the birth of capitalism. However, by focusing on the Protestant work ethic Weber's thesis about the origins of the capitalist economy is at once too broad and too narrow. It is too narrow because he neglects the Counter-Reformation Baroque scholasticism of influential Catholic theologians like Francisco Suárez that sunders “pure nature” from the supernatural and thus divorces man's natural end from his supernatural finality (Boulnois, 1995: 205–222; Pabst, 2012: 308–340). As a result, human activity in the economy is separated from divine deification, and the market is seen as increasingly autonomous. Weber's thesis is also too broad because he fails to recognize the more specific, historical origins of capitalism in Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries and the English “enclosure movement” that started the process of repeated “primitive accumulation” and provided the surplus capital for financial investment in non-reciprocal, piratical trade (Tawney, 1998: 79–132; Polanyi, 2001; Brenner, 1976: 37–74; Brenner, 2003).

Thus, Weber is right to highlight the Calvinist gospel of prosperity that conflates the elect with the wealthy and sanctifies the pursuit of power and pleasure - a justification for free-market capitalism that cuts across the liberalconservative divide in the Anglo-Saxon West and remains influential to this day.¹ But linked to the divine predestination of the prosperous is the Calvinist separation of human contract from the divine gift of grace and the Lutheran divorce of faith and works (Hénaff, 2002: 351–380). The same dualism between transcendence and immanence underpins the Baroque Catholic sundering of “pure nature” from the supernatural and the concomitant claim that human beings have a natural end that is unrelated to their supernatural finality. Taken together, these dualistic theories view the market either as morally neutral or as positively conducive to human freedom; or else as the “invisible hand” of divine providential intervention converting rival self-interest into mutually beneficial cooperation (Pabst, 2011a: 106–124).

In any case, Weber's theory neglects not just this series of dualisms but also the interaction of shifts in theology and philosophy with changes in political economy. Just as certain theological and philosophical ideas shaped the conception and institution of new political-economic models, so too changes in political and economic conditions led to changes in theological and philosophical thinking. Indeed, modern dualism, which split asunder human natural goods and the divine supernatural Good in God, brought about a market economy that is increasingly disembedded from the social bonds and civic virtues of civil society (Polanyi, 2001: 35–58). So configured, the market was seen as a system that requires little more than a state-policed legal framework. The underlying secular logic marks a departure from orthodox, creedal Christianity, which considers all human arrangements as mirroring — partially and imperfectly — a divine, cosmic order. Thus, the secular turn of post-Reformation Christian theology, both Protestant and Catholic, laid the conceptual foundations for the emergence of capitalism.

Nor was this a purely abstract theoretical change brought about by shifts within theology. On the contrary, new religious ideas were embraced by the English gentry, who massively increased their land holdings after the “enclosure” of common land and the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII and his son Edward VI. Both these events transferred over one-quarter of national wealth to the landed gentry, who seized the full economic benefits of their new assets while ignoring the old social and political duties toward the peasantry and the locality. Thus, private investment was sundered from public charity, not in the sense of handing out alms to the poor but rather as a kind of asymmetric mutual assistance in a spirit of free self-giving and in the hope of receiving a counter-gift that is itself given, received and returned. Separating investment from charity foreshadowed the growing abstraction of finance from the real economy that has brought about virtually all financial crises in the last few hundred years, including the Dutch Tulip Mania of 1637 and the English South Sea Bubble of 1720 (Kindleberger, 2005; Reinhart and Rogoff, 2009).

Indeed, the newly enriched landed gentry mutated into Calvinist agricultural capitalists investing their surplus in the activities of the guild-excluded merchants who practiced non-reciprocal trade and more piratical modes of enterprise (Brenner, 2003: 3–37; Milbank, 2011: 27–70). Coupled with new lending practices and state intervention, this consolidated the nexus between finance and government. In this process, material landed assets were stripped of their social, cultural, symbolic and religious significance and increasingly commodified through their link with maritime fortune — itself closely connected with speculative wealth. From the outset then, capitalism is predicated upon the Calvinist division between earthly matter and heavenly spirit. In turn, this division is based on a literalist, non-allegorical reading of the Fall and our post-lapsarian predicament.

By contrast, creedal Christianity and the episcopally based Churches of Rome, Constantinople/Moscow and Canterbury all refuse such and similar divisions, emphasizing instead that the Incarnation of Christ restored and renewed God's original creation and that divine love is open to all through the event of the Holy Spirit. In the words of St Paul, this event is the advent of “charism”. Just as our material world is always already infused by divine grace, so too wealth is not the product of divine election but rather the fruit of faith and works. Faith is a supernaturally infused virtue that habituates reason to recognize that the origin and end of rationality is the divine logos. Likewise, our capacity to work and excel in some labors and not in others is intimately intertwined with our supernaturally infused natural vocation — exemplified by Jesus' mission embodied and carried forward in the Church. Here “charisma” is not some superhuman quality of the few or a simple character trait of the many but instead the reception of God's universal grace open to all and the unique vocation of each and everyone.

The source of charisma: state, market and Church

As the previous section indicated, Weber's influential theory of modern statehood is inextricably intertwined with his account of charismatic leadership. In “The Profession and Vocation of Politics”, he defines the modern state as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (Weber, 1994: 310). According to Weber, political legitimacy can derive from three different sources: charisma, tradition or law. In liberal-market democracies, traditional and legal sources of legitimacy and authority are necessary but not sufficient conditions in order to guarantee the stability of a system torn between the anarchy of the free market on the one hand, and the centralized control of the bureaucratic state on the other hand (Pabst, 2010b: 570–602).

Leaving aside the question whether absolute self-rule of the people is feasible or desirable (it is neither), this constitutive tension between state and market requires a further source of authority and legitimacy beyond tradition and law. That is why in 1919 Weber called for a “leader-democracy” (Führerdemokratie) that is based on strong, charismatic leadership. The potentially authoritarian outlook of this conception gives credence to Jürgen Habermas' well-known critique that the controversial jurist Carl Schmitt, who further developed the idea of “leader-democracy” in the 1930s and early 1940s, was in fact “a pupil of Weber's” (Habermas, 1971: 66).

However, Habermas' critique ignores Weber's own emphasis on the importance of associational life and corporatism. For Weber, charismatic leadership is not merely fueled by electoral competition for state power but tends to be nurtured and nourished by involvement in the public, localized life of associations. Such participation is conducive to the formation of character and instils a sense of professional and civic ethos on which a vibrant democracy and market economy depend (Weber, 2002: 199–209). Similarly, in his book The Concept of the Political, Schmitt endorses the importance of professional, religious and cultural organizations and corporations to guard against a “total state” that subordinates all intermediary institutions to its administrative and symbolic order and seeks to absorb the economy and society as a whole (Schmitt, 1996).²

Yet at the same time, both Weber and Schmitt ultimately privilege the primacy of central state authority over the relative autonomy of intermediary institutions and the freedom of individuals. Paradoxically, this is done in the name of counterbalancing liberal individualism. The trouble is that both the state and the individual are part of the same voluntarist and nominalist poles upon which the liberal tradition is founded (Manent, 1987; de Muralt, 2002): first, the voluntarism of collective state power and the voluntarism of self-governing, negatively choosing individuals; second, the nominalism of “the sovereign one” linked with the political “right” and “the sovereign many” connected with the political “left” since the secular settlement of the French Revolution. These double poles reinforce each other to the detriment of the autonomy of the “radical middle”, composed of human relationships within groups, associations and communities. By entrenching the voluntarism of central state power, Weber and Schmitt disregard not only theories of state pluralism put forward by G. D. H. Cole and Harold Laski but also the best elements of the shared Anglo-Saxon and Continental European tradition of non-statist corporatism and guilds-based associationism — as detailed in the work of Otto Gierke, Frederic William Maitland and John Neville Figgis.

Common to these thinkers is the argument that corporate bodies such as associations, communities and fraternities form a “complex space” of overlapping jurisdictions and multiple membership wherein sovereignty tends to be dispersed and diffused horizontally and vertically (Milbank, 1997: 268–292). In consequence, such and similar economic, political and religious “intermediary institutions” are not — and should not be — creatures of the modern central state or, for that matter, the modern “free” market. Far from being opposed, state and market (or, more precisely, the nexus between finance and the executive branch of government) centralize power, concentrate wealth and usurp the sovereign legitimacy of parliament and corporate bodies (Agamben, 2005: 1–40). The old guilds-based system of intermediary institutions, which characterized politics in Europe since the Middle Ages (Black, 2002), has been sidelined by the complicit collusion of state and market. That is why much of contemporary “civil society” represents little more than an extended arm of the new “market-state”.³

Thus, the imperative now is to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge frontiers of political economy
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables and figures
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword: the role of charism in social life
• 1 Economy of life: charismatic dynamics and the spirit of gift
• 2 The role of charisma, ethics and Machiavellianism in economic and civil life
• 3 The charismatic principle in an American and democratic context
• 4 Dr Martin Luther King and the American civil rights movement: charismatic and institutional perspectives
• 5 Charism and institution: an organizational theory case study of the Economy of Communion
• 6 Benedictine tradition and good governance
• 7 Opus Dei: prayer or labor? The spirituality of work in Saints Benedict and Escrivá
• 8 Values-based enterprises: the good practices of Italian SMEs, passionately committed to people, environment and community
• 9 The role of the charismatic economist E. F. Schumacher in economic and civil life: CSR and beyond
• Index