Charisma: A Blighted Concept and an Alternative Formula

Guided by a quest for comprehending a political leader's popular appeal beyond the typical determinants, the charisma concept offers an obvious challenge. What is the symbolic appeal of an individual political figure? What is the residual factor after all the other ingredients are spelled-out: popularity of political organizations, issue stands, beliefs and ideologies, conditions of the times? Examining published usage of the term charisma indicates that it has a minimum value for analysis of political processes and historical developments in macroscopic political situations. In its more extreme form, the term has been applied to "virtually every situation in which the popularity of a political or any public personality is involved."' But when utilized by serious scholars, the result has commonly been misleading. Dramatic consequential historical developments, such as the Bolshevik Revolution and the rise of Nazism, have been blithely explained via the personal appeal of charismatic leaders. As examples of exaggerated emphasis on the subject, two recent scholarly volumes by Ruth Willner and Arthur Schweitzer assessed in elaborate detail the historical significance of many political figures entirely in terms of stipulated charismatic qualities, in some cases involving people hardly known or long-forgotten.2