The word corisma allows us to talk about something that has religious resident, supernatural residence. We're not actually claiming that a carosmetic figure is really supernatural but that still has some sort of aura of the supernatural around him or her. A washington is a very good exampleof of a degree of success with that,. The american presidency was very much shaped by george washington, the first president, and it still retains something of this oura as a parenthesis.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the idea of charismatic authority developed by Max Weber (1864-1920) to explain why people welcome some as their legitimate rulers and follow them loyally, for better or worse, while following others only dutifully or grudgingly. Weber was fascinated by those such as Napoleon (above) and Washington who achieved power not by right, as with traditional monarchs, or by law as with the bureaucratic world around him in Germany, but by revolution or insurrection. Drawing on the experience of religious figures, he contended that these leaders, often outsiders, needed to be seen as exceptional, heroic and even miraculous to command loyalty, and could stay in power for as long as the people were enthralled and the miracles they had promised kept coming. After the Second World War, Weber's idea attracted new attention as a way of understanding why some reviled leaders once had mass support and, with the arrival of television, why some politicians were more engaging and influential on screen than others.
With
Linda Woodhead
The FD Maurice Professor and Head of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at King's College London
David Bell
The Lapidus Professor in the Department of History at Princeton University
And
Tom Wright
Reader in Rhetoric at the University of Sussex
Producer: Simon Tillotson