Reviving Metapersonal Charisma in Max Weber

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.