Carismatic and pentecostal movements within christianity. Can you draw a line, straightline, between babe's idea of carismatic authority and the irrational? Well, tom as talking about vaba three kinds of authority. Those, traditional authority that appeals to ritual and custom and practice; then there's bureaucratic authority which appeals to reason and rationality. Matic authority doesn't have an apparatus of coercion behind it. It directly inspires or seduces people. And actually those are the really powerful things that drive us. So in that sense, caismatic authority is more powerful than traditional authority or bureaucratic authority.
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