Abstract
Working beyond the inclination to inaugurate alternative theoretical traditions alongside canonical sociology, this article demonstrates the value of recovering latent gender theory from within classic concepts—in this case, Weber’s “charisma.” Close readings of Weber reveal, (a) tools for theorizing extraordinary, non-masculinist agency, and, (b) clues that account for the conventional wisdom (popular and scholastic) that charisma is “not for women.” While contemporary movements may be tempted to eschew charismatic leadership per se because of legacies of dominance by men, there is value in Weber’s formulation, which anticipated the performative turn in social theory that would destabilize biologistic gender ontologies. Value in this exchange also flows back to Weber: by confronting his intermittent tendency to describe charisma in terms that we now recognize as “customs of manly power,” we reveal heretofore unseen imperfections (i.e., traditionalist modes of legitimation) in his ideal-type. This engagement thus demonstrates an empowering mutuality between contemporary gender theory and “the classics.” The article ends by theorising the nexus of gender and charisma in the case of Trump, pointing to possibilities for vitiating Donald Trump’s charisma, as well as for anti-Trumpian charisma.
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Notes
As Lewis Coser (1981, pp. 181–182) noted long ago: “Were sociology a cumulative discipline, as say physics, it would be hardly necessary for practicing sociologists to study the classics.... But such cumulation has not yet occurred in sociology; moreover one may legitimately doubt that it will occur in the foreseeable future or ever.... As long as this is the case ... recourse to the classics will continue to be necessary.”
It must also be noted that two of the three members of the aforementioned trinity (Durkheim and Marx) were Jews in a largely Christian and anti-Semitic Europe. As such, we should not be so surprised if we were to find indications of sensitivity, even within the classics, to what we would today call “positionality.”
Referencing this legacy within the civil rights movement, Harvard political scientist Brandon Terry (2018) recently leveled criticism at Martin Luther King himself, noting that, “King’s blindness to the gendered dimensions of charismatic authority and hierarchical leadership within protest organizations—and the black church—is surely reason enough to be critical of his example.”
These include: Mormonism founder Joseph Smith, Bavarian revolutionary Kurt Eisner, Napoleon, writer Stefan George, Israelite Kings Saul and David, the Israelite Judge Jephtah, prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah, Daniel and Enoch, Irish legend Cuchulain, Homer’s Achilles, Francis of Assisi, Jesus, mathematician Karl Weierstrass, journalist and financier Henry Villard, and Caliph Omar.
This is a military form of cohabitation found in many cultures.
As Bendix (1960, p. 300) noted, charisma implies “a degree of commitment on the part of disciples that has no parallel in the other types of domination.”
The term is thought by some to mean “bear-fighter” and in Germanic/Norse tribes the fighter would either be bare-chested or be draped in bear skins as they rushed into battle.
Nietzsche’s influence on Weber, which is explicit here, is discussed below. The “blonde beast” is Nietzsche’s expression for a predatory, lion-like “hidden core [that] needs to erupt from time to time, the animal has to get out again and go back to the wilderness.” Contrary to later racialist interpretations, Nietzsche is careful to state that “blonde” does not refer in any way to racial difference, but rather to the lion-like energy that threatens to erupt from any culture: “the Roman, Arabian, Germanic, Japanese nobility, the Homeric heroes, the Scandinavian Vikings,” Nietzsche writes, “—they all shared this need” (Genealogy of Morals, pp. 476–477).
Nietzsche offered fierce critiques of the modern bureaucratic state, along with the moral systems espoused by Schopenhauer, Buddhism, and Christianity, which he thought were nihilistic and life-denying. For a fuller discussion of Nietzsche’s influence on this passage, which Parsons’s translation completely misses, see Kent (1983).
Nietzsche himself viewed Goethe as an approximation of the Ubermensch (Twilight of the Idols, p. 49; Kaufmann 1974, p. 316).
Compare this passage, for example, with Nietzsche’s similar laments in The Gay Science, section 206.
See Beyond Good and Evil: “Above all, a living thing wants to discharge its strength—life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent consequences of this” (1886, p. 211).
See Falco (1999) for a helpful discussion of thematic mutuality between charisma and tragedy.
See Weber’s description of the “family-less organization” of the ancient Benjamites and Bedouins, which grows not by domesticating men, but rather through “marriage by abduction”—something that is, for Weber, “pure charismatism” (1952, pp. 43–44). “Homemaking” themes seem salient also in Weber’s remark that, “[e]very charisma is on the road … to a slow death by suffocation under the weight of material interests: every hour of existence brings it nearer to this end” (1922a, b, p. 1120).
For a discussion of Weber and Gramsci’s similarities on this point, see Zelditch 2001.
In a recent example of Mommsen’s continued ability to project a prejudicial hostility toward “charisma” in contemporary scholarship, Zeitlin (2019, pp. 146–149) relies on four block quotes from Mommsen to level his own critique, without citing any of Weber’s own writing on charisma. At the same time, he inexplicably tells the reader that “a careful examination of Weber’s writings reveal that he viewed charismatic leadership in a purely positive light” (p. 147). In fact, Weber expends great effort to distance himself from such a position (Joosse 2014, p. 274).
The socialist leader of the ill-fated Bavarian revolution of 1918.
Weber’s support for Georg Simmel also indicated his opposition to anti-Semitism (see Gerth and Mills 1946, p. 43).
This is not to equate sexlessness with progressivism.
Weber uses the term “unmusical” twice to describe those who are not subject to charismatic fascination in The Social Psychology of the World Religions (1946a, pp. 287, 289). The term was used most famously, however, when Weber referred to his own irreligiosity in a letter to Ferdinand Tӧnnies: “For I am indeed absolutely ‘unmusical’ and have neither the desire nor the capacity to erect some such spiritual ‘edifice’ of a religious type in me—that simply is not possible, indeed I reject it.”
Nietzsche’s fascination with “philosophers, artists, and saints” (Nietzsche 1876, bk. 3, sec. 5) was emotional, visceral, and tempestuous, as evidenced by his worshipful-then-contemptuous feelings toward Richard Wagner (Nietzsche 1872, pp. 31–32, sec. 16–25, pp.99–144; 1888), Schopenhauer, Socrates, Napoleon, and Goethe, and others.
Also, see the excellent collection of studies assembled by Van Osselaer et al. (2020).
When speaking of the “‘greatest’ heroes, prophets, and saviors,” he is careful to add the caveat that these are only such “according to conventional judgments” (ibid., 242, emphasis added).
See his similar use of “‘natural’” to distinguish his position from essentialist notions of ethnicity (1922, p. 386).
In Bourdieu’s broader corpus, his concept of habitus denotes an “embodiment” that seeks to explain how our basic habits and personal practices cohere as a “system of structured, structuring dispositions” (1980, p. 52). As such, one might seek to draw from a Bourdieusian approach to theorize the biological, psychological, and antinomian factors described in this article and indicated by Weber; accounting for the radically divergent aspects of charismatic expression while still explaining its rise in a historically contingent way (see Bourdieu 1977, 1980, 1998; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). We find Bourdieu’s take on charisma to be irreconcilable with Weber’s vision, however. Where Weber makes room in his theory for agency in the most individual and arbitrary sense, Bourdieu contends that charisma is always moored to some content-laden a structural foundation—it is “structure all the way down.” We will put aside grand questions about whether Bourdieu’s attempt to overcome structure-agency dualism invites participation in tautology and infinite regress (but see Alexander 1995, pp. 136–149). Instead, and more specifically, in light of Weber’s account of charismatic processes and in light of our own empirical research into charismatic phenomena (Joosse 2006; 2007; 2014; 2017; 2018a; 2018b; 2019), we simply agree with others (Smith 2013; Turner 2011; Verter 2003) that the Bourdieusian approach inclines one to be impercipient of precisely what Weber was after in his descriptions of charisma; namely to sketch the actual limits of structure as an explanans for social process. For Weber, charisma is dynamite—a form of anti-structure, rather than a form of opposing structure or a feature of the endless possibilities that inhere structural hybridity. While making ample room in his theory for structural causation (via the rational-legal and traditional forms), Weber seems to know and acknowledge what Bourdieu seems to be constitutionally unable to see: that social life contains stubborn individuals who are always capable of surprising us and whose actions cannot always be explained by way of cultural-structural lineage—even as they go on to have cultural-structural effects.
Similarly, Hochschild (2016, p. 687) writes that “[m]ore than other candidates, Donald Trump fits the classic description of a charismatic leader, as Weber defined it.”
It would be beyond the limits of the format to provide many examples, but to add just one more, such “toughness” was also a feature of Trump’s “take-down” of establishment candidate Jeb Bush (from the GOP debate on December 15, 2015):
Look, look, look. We need a toughness. We need strength…. And if we don’t get it back fast, we’re just going to go weaker, weaker and just disintegrate…. Jeb comes out and he talks about the [US’s southern] border, and I saw it and I was witness to it, and so was everyone else, and I was standing there, [quoting Bush] “they come across as an act of love”—he’s saying the same thing right now with radical Islam. And we can’t have that in our country. It just won’t work. We need strength.
Between 1996 and 2015, Trump was the owner of the Miss Universe Organization. In September, 2015, Trump commented on GOP rival Carly Fiorina: “Look at that face! ... Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next President?! … I mean, she’s a woman, and I’m not s’posedta say bad things, but really, folks, come on. Are we serious?” (quoted in Solotaroff 2015).
But for a good selection, see Darweesh and Abdulla (2016).
Trump would later say he was joking about the request for Russia to “find” the Clinton emails, for example.
The statements about McCain fall into this category, as does, for that matter, the vulgarity of his comments about women.
Trump called this “truthful hyperbole” and described it as “an innocent form of exaggeration—and a very effective form of promotion” (Trump and Schwartz 1987, p. 40).
Trump’s controversial media performances netted him an estimated $2B in publicity prior to March 2016. This was nearly twice the total budgets of Obama and Romney’s 2012 presidential campaigns (Confessore and Yourish 2016).
Note that the notion that one could be "charismatic in [a] traditional sense" is a contradiction in terms that Weber’s tripartite typology is expressly designed to avoid. Butler thus doesn’t recognize Trump as being charismatic, but at the same time goes on to describe several features that conform to the ideal type, as per Weber's descriptions.
This is probably the only viewpoint that Moore would share with, say, Rush Limbaugh (2016), who early on noted: “Everything he’s doing goes against the book…. Everything that any analyst or consultant or professional would tell you not to do, Donald Trump is doing it, and he’s leading the pack [of GOP candidates]. This creates its own set of emotions and feelings and thoughts that run from person to person” (emphasis added).
Castellanos (2018) pursued this theme in most detail: “Washington is debating a different set of laws these days: The laws of physics. Do Newton’s principles affect Donald Trump like other inhabitants of our planet? There is evidence Trump has the power to defy gravity: When this president slips, he doesn’t fall, he floats. It is frustrating the establishment to no end.” Sociologist Todd Gitlin similarly wrote that “[h]is power is such that he is not subject to laws of ordinary grammar” (Gitlin 2017).
For the press conference, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbmUcSqFZyc
Indeed, it seems that part of the shock of Jesus’s ministry was his refusal to take up the mantel of a warrior-king that would have comprised ancient Judaic expectations for a “Messiah.”
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Acknowledgements
This research was funded by a grant from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council entitled, Reimagining Charisma: From Classical Origins to Contemporary Applications (project code: 27610618). The first author would like to thank Ann Mische, John R. Hall, Gary Hamilton, Randall Collins, Seth Abrutyn, Thomas Kemple, Jo Reger, Michael Rosenberg, Joshua Derman, Cheris Shun-ching Chan, Travis Kong, Julian Groves, Xiaoli Tian, and Liping Wang for generous comments and discussions relating to this work. Both authors thank the Editors and reviewers of Theory and Society for helpful comments and direction with an earlier version of this article.
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