Reviving Metapersonal Charisma in Max Weber

• Published date: 01 June 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221129632
• Author: Mauro Barisione
• Date: 01 June 2023

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221129632

Political Theory

2023, Vol. 51(3) 530 –556

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917221129632

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Article

Reviving Metapersonal

Charisma in Max Weber

Mauro Barisione1

Abstract

More than a century after Max Weber’s Vocation Lectures, the idea of

charisma is still commonly associated with a leader’s personal qualities. This

personalistic and—as I argue—simplistic understanding of the Weberian

theory of charisma was perpetuated, especially in leadership studies, during

the twentieth century by political scientists, social psychologists, and

sociologists. Generally overlooked is the fact that the Weberian notion of

charisma comprises diverse and fundamental metapersonal meanings that

transcend individual qualities and revolve, among other things, around a

specific combination of public positions, temporal contexts, and collective

expectations. After framing the ambivalence of the concept of charisma within

more fundamental and fertile ambivalences of Max Weber’s epistemological

approach, this article demonstrates that metapersonal understandings

of charisma actually prevailed in Weber’s writings prior to his late—and

pedagogical—Vocation Lectures and series of newspaper articles. In the final

part, I deduce from Weber’s writings a repertoire of metapersonal forms

of charisma in politics, and I conclude that, when contemporary political

leaders seek to activate such charismatic processes in order to pursue

essentially charismatic forms of legitimation, important implications can

arise regarding the unstable balance among liberal democracies, populisms,

and authoritarianisms.

Keywords

Weber, theory, charisma, leadership, politics

1University of Milan, Milano, Italy

Corresponding Author:

Mauro Barisione, University of Milan, Via Conservatorio 7, Milano, 20122, Italy.

Email: mauro.barisione@unimi.it

1129632PTXXXX10.1177/00905917221129632Political TheoryBarisione

research-article2023

Barisione 531

Introduction

More than a century after it was analyzed by Weber (1919a, [1922a] 1978),

and despite the numerous authoritative comments and passionate discussions

that followed, charisma continues to be both a stimulating concept and an

intricate enigma for modern social sciences in general and, in particular, for

political theory.

Although Max Weber saw the social world of modernity as dominated by

processes of rationalization, bureaucratization, intellectualization, and disen-

chantment, he offered a secularized account of charisma as a residual element

of irrationality and “enchantment” that had characterized premodern societ-

ies. However, problems arise when the notion of charisma, given its original

religious meaning of “gift of grace”.1 is applied to an individual such as a

prophet or a warlord, and—more blatantly—to a political leader. This both

introduces the “sacred” into the scientific explanation—as in the case of mys-

ticism, which loses sense when it is transposed from “myth and fiction to . . . .

fact and reason” (Kantorowicz 1957, 3) and assumes some form of “inna-

tism”—that is, the idea that extraordinary qualities are inborn in gifted indi-

viduals who are called upon to “make history.” More generally, such a

conceptualization of charisma propounds a philosophy of history that strongly

emphasizes the personal dimension in the explanation of political and histori-

cal events to the detriment of the more processual and context-oriented

approaches prevalent in contemporary social sciences.

It is this largely personalized and—as this article argues—seriously flawed

(because it is partial and one-sided) understanding of the Weberian theory of

charisma that was perpetuated during the twentieth century, especially by

scholars of political leadership, whether they were political scientists, social

psychologists, or sociologists (e.g., Barber 1972, Sennett 1978; Blondel

1987; Lindholm 1990; Cavalli 1995; Greenstein 2000). According to this

reductionist perspective, a charismatic leader is essentially defined by those

personality traits and leadership skills that pertain to, typically, a president as

an individual. A conceptual drift of this approach has led charisma “in the

vernacular” to first become a synonym for popular (Derman 2012); then, in

the era of televised political communication, for telegenic (Barisione 2009);

and, in the more recent digital age, for the status of influencer (Hong 2020).

On the contrary, a much more relevant idea has been totally removed from

1. Because “grace” is the etymological meaning of the Greek word χάρις, charisma

was first used within the early Christian Church, namely by St. Paul, in the sense

of “a gift of grace” (Falco 2010).