Charisma and the Con-Man: Virtual Power and Knowledge

Bill J. Harrell

[1] Sociologist Max Weber has made a fundamental contribution to social and cultural theory in the twentieth century.  Among his more important contributions was the conceptualization of social structure as the organization of dominance.  This view was most systematically expressed in his types of authority: charismatic, traditional, and rational-legal.  Weber defined authority as legitimate power or the social situation in which one has not just the power but the right to make demands on others and  others have a responsibility to obey.  A basic conundrum of social theory is just what process is involved in transforming raw power to legitimate power or authority.  The idea of "charisma" plays an important part in Weber's effort to solve the puzzle though it is still in need of a great deal of refinement. I intend in this paper to suggest some ways in which charisma may work and how "authority" is socially constructed. The effort is organized around the diagram in figure 1, "Weber's Continuum of Dominance" which summarizes movement from unstable raw power to stable authority (left to right)  and from unstable charismatic authority to stable authority (right to left).
 
 

[2] Before turning to charisma and charismatic authority just a brief description of the two "stable" forms of authority: traditional and rational-legal.  Traditional authority is obviously a very broad, almost residual category. Under this type, Weber had in mind mostly those pre-modern, relatively complex state societies in which authority was sustained by long practice and was basically habitual.  Weber's formulation of rational-legal authority attempted to capture the core beliefs and behavioral tendencies in Western bourgeois and modern culture.

[3] Legitimation within rational-legal culture tends to rest in established and clearly defined procedures which attempt to self-consciously identity salient facts and apply relevant rules. This captures the central tendency in a range of social institutions: from a legal system which presumes "a society of laws and not men" where justice is best when "justice is blind",  to the organization of modern bureaucracies.  Weber has had a major influence on our thinking about the historical emergence of modern culture in general, and shaped in very specific ways early research and thinking about modern complex or bureaucratic organization.

[4] The concept of charisma was introduced by Weber to counter tendencies  dominating social and economic thought at the turn of the century, namely the assumption that human behavior was strictly determined by external material and social conditions.  Weber made his case using the idea of charisma (among others) that human behavior, human institutions, and social change, could not be interpreted without consideration of non-rational, non-material, voluntary, and "creative" forms of personal and social action. He was part of a general turn of the century intellectual resistance to positivist and strictly materialist views of the world.¹

[5] Weber borrowed the term "charisma" from  ancient Greek-Christian theology where it referred to an extraordinary state of grace or spirituality often including the ability to cure or heal the sick.  Weber defined charisma as follows:

… a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities.²

[7] Weber would certainly embrace this notion since his view of charisma in history is not unlike an evolutionary biologist's view of "mutation."  Both charisma and mutation are presumed to be unpredictable and only have an historical effect if selected by the environment. Of course there are environments in which the rate of mutation is known to be higher and, similarly, Weber would argue that there are social environments in which the rate of charismatic action is likely to increase. Selection presumes some "fit" between the new element and the environment.

[8] The general nature of this fit in evolutionary biology, this "fitness", can be described in a specific environment in some satisfying detail.  Charismatic movements can often be described in satisfying detail too,  but the mechanism involved is not at all clear. An adequate view of charisma will require  a formulation which recognizes the social and psychological aspects of a historical situation and the way in which these factors interact and shape one another. With this in mind, I propose a working definition of  charisma as virtual power and knowledge.  The objective of this definition is to provide a kind of Janus faced conceptual vocabulary which simultaneously looks inward to the subjective or psychological qualities of the leader, and looks outward to the external social/material conditions which act on her and on which she acts in turn. Implicit in this exercise is an examination of how signs rhetorically and realistically interpret the world and shape culture.

[9] Sociologist Edward Shils has argued that not only is charisma a source of non-rational belief which supports the institutionalization of authority, but that raw power itself has charismatic qualities which may support its eventual legitimation. He reasoned that the source of this projection is a human "need for order."⁴ The need for order is instrumental, involving a knowledge of how the world works and an ability to manipulate it, but it is also moral in the sense of a need "… for things to fit into a pattern which is just as well as predictable."⁵  In addition, "Great power announces itself by its power over order; it discovers order, creates order, maintains or destroys it. Power is indeed the central, order-related event."⁶

[10] The idea that  raw power may create a sense of awe and the perception of charismatic qualities does not necessarily contradict Weber.  He agreed with the common observation that raw power is unstable because it requires that persons with superior force keep their subjects under constant surveillance and have the ability to administer immediate and punishing retribution against deviation, resistance, or challenge.  Or, at least, subjects must believe the powerful have these resources and capabilities.  The first task of the powerful is to encourage this belief, and the second is to establish the conviction that they have a right to their position of dominance. Shils points to a process which may achieve this end -– the process which moves from left to right on the diagram. The charismatic leader may not be the only source of values and meaningful interpretation of the world which serves to legitimate power, power itself  which can manipulate the social, political, and economic order may create its own legitimacy.  The powerful can manipulate the social world as they see fit but are also likely to provide in the process a theoretical and moral case for why it should be so. To the degree that the powerful can use their coercive resources to create the conditions which are predicted and prescribed by their theoretical/moral position, the latter gains plausibility. The result is not merely the paradoxical fact that persons participate in their own oppression but that the world as its exists at some point in time and space is perceived to be "natural", "objective", "law-like" and therefore inevitable and timeless.

[11] Shils attempts to provide a motivation, an "interest", for a population which would account for its participation in its own subordination. Weber simply argued that both superordinate and subordinate, human beings, have a "need for meaning" and that this interest is engaged by all participants in the creation of authority out of raw power. Shils suggests a more fundamental process of how meaning is generated and how its may motivate the acceptance of raw power but also identifies a process which may be incorporated into a virtual interpretations of the world and consequently attract a following. Shils writes of  a "need for order" which is close to Weber's "need for meaning" in that any very coherent system of meaning provides an orderly view of the world. "Need for order" suggests a narrower more concrete assurance that there will be food in the market next week or  the trains will run on time. I prefer the idea "need for control" over "need for order" in that I think it can do the same theoretical work as Shils' term in the effort to understand legitimate power but can identify the process at a more fundamental and mundane level of social interaction.

[12] By "need for control" I do not intend a direct reference to some inborn biological or psychological drive like "thirst," but to a cognitive consequence of a dependent organism's experience in the world.  In order to live in the world and satisfy needs like thirst one must learn how the natural and social worlds work and what to do in order to get them to respond in favorable ways.  An infant cries out of discomfort, she is hungry or wet, and soon learns that a cry causes an agent to appear which relieves her discomfort. The control this provides is incorporated into rudimentary categories of order which shape in fundamental ways the cognitive categories used to interpret the world.

[13] Shils' article provides an important corrective to the usual examination of charisma and legitimate power which usually proceeds from right to left as indicated on the diagram. Understood as a "need for control" it not only provides a way of understanding how power itself may have charismatic qualities, but it also identifies a fundamental cognitive process which is eligible for virtual expression and use by charismatic leaders or movements.

[14] Again, the idea of charisma is ordinarily applied moving from right to left on the diagram. The initially powerless charismatic leader is involved in creating a new and sometimes even revolutionary social arrangements. The charismatic leader is likely to emerge from and appeal to a population experiencing social and cultural disorganization or lack of control.⁷  The sociological literature has been more interested in the social characteristics and experience of recruits to social movements rather than  attributes of  a charismatic leader.  Students primarily interested in charisma have tended to emphasize the personal and psychological qualities of the leader. Studies which have attempted to consider both have been particularly valuable. For example, Erik Erikson in his well known studies of charismatic leaders, Martin Luther and Mahatma Gandhi, effectively integrates the subjective dilemmas of the leaders with existing tensions in the  cultural and social setting to account for the origin and impact of the social movements which they led.⁸

[15] My suggestion is that the charismatic leader provides or least animates a perceived  solution to a problem of control in a particular social environment. The charismatic, who is in the beginning objectively powerless, does this by creating a situation of virtual power and knowledge.  This is more than merely a conceptual  (utopian) scheme addressed to the problem of control, but a scheme rendered plausible by art, rhetoric, example, and limited experiential success. Charisma is what Suzanne Langer would call "virtual form."  Whatever makes someone respond to a charismatic leader has certain similarities  to what stimulates a response to a  work of art.

[16] Langer in her philosophy of aesthetics, Feeling and Form⁹ speaks of a semblance in which the virtual object is not a reflected image but an illusion, a dream "… [I]n a dream there are sounds, smells, feelings, happenings, intentions, dangers – all sorts of invisible elements – as well as sights, and all are equally unreal by the measures of public fact."¹⁰ Or Schiller's notion of schein, a vivid semblance of events , vivid as any reality.  Schein in art liberates perception and with it the power of conception "… from all practical purposes, and lets the mind dwell on the sheer appearance of things.  The function of artistic illusion is not 'make-believe,' … but the very opposite, disengagement  from belief – contemplation of sensory qualities without their usual meanings of 'Here's that chair,'…"¹¹

[17] Of course, this separation of sensory qualities from their usual meanings is required if these qualities are to be manipulated and re-configured in some new, sensually powerful way.  Langer argues that the distinction between abstract and non-abstract, i.e. "realistic" art, is not very cogent.  Breton Magritte's painting of a pipe has a certain otherness or separation from an actual pipe (Magritte's declaration, "This is not a pipe", is redundant) which permits us to consider and appreciate its distinctly sensual qualities.  This separation is required if  the appearance is to be reconfigured in a new sensual experience or potential reality.  Great music does not ordinarily reproduce the aural world or any "natural" sound but it does create sensual slowness or speed, compression or expansion, stress and release, anticipation and fulfillment, etc. by the manipulation of sound.  The sensual and funeral experience of the second movement of Beethoven's seventh symphony has nothing to do with a specific reference to rites of the social world but the manipulation of time and mood through the configuration of sound separated from otherwise actual experience. The painter does not create a "real" third dimension on the canvas, she creates a virtual third dimension.

[18] In something like the same way, I see the charismatic leader creating virtual power and knowledge.  By creating a plausible explanation of the world as it is  (to some audience) the leader provides an equally vivid sense of the alternatives.  Minimally, the charismatic leader in providing an alternative conception of social reality, identifies some motivation to act because it helps create  a consciousness that that which exists at the moment is  not natural, necessary, or inevitable.  The charismatic leader is sometimes an important catalyst to human agency in the social construction of reality.

[19]  This convincing sense of an alternative reality is part of a dialectical process and must, therefore, be tested against the actual world.  The routinization of charisma (see diagram) raises a number of problems of practical constraint both internal to the alternative community and externally with respect to the communities relationship to the outside or "other" social world. Difficulties with constraint from the "other world" sometime motivate charismatic movements to withdraw and isolate themselves setting in train a new and different set of social processes.  A principal problem, internally, is the routinization of charisma which involves some social mechanism which achieves a transfer of the leader's (or movement's) authority to disciples or other associates and ultimately to offices and institutions devoted to and sustained by the leader's vision – there must be a delegation of charisma.  The values of the movement must be translated into concrete normative arrangements and expectations where the principles of the moral community are articulated and expressed  in terms of everyday routines and activities.  Social and religious movements which are catalyzed and directed by charismatic leaders often do not get beyond an emotional, inspired, and cathartic outbreak as they wither before external hostility and difficulties of routinization.  Even so, such "failed" movements often have a real impact on their time and place, stimulating new questions about existing personal and social arrangements.

[20] Susan Langer's idea of virtual form is a useful and insightful way of studying signs and how they force in us certain responses, supporting and constructing a view of the world.  This virtual and usually self-referential reality defined by art has important similarities to the realities defined in culture and the social world which we associate with "right" and "authority."  John Searle, in his typology of speech acts identifies declaratives as those  speech acts which by virtue of the fact they are made make the word and the world match.  These are speech acts where a properly constituted authority says "Play ball!" or "I  pronounce you husband and wife" and the game begins or the couple are married. "Authority" is a major instance of declarative speech acts and, if nothing else does, distinguishes human behavior and culture from that of other creatures.¹²

[21] In Searle's typology, scientific statements are assertive speech acts in which the direction of fit is from the word to the world.  The descriptions of the natural and physical sciences apparently refer to objects external to themselves which constrain what we come to accept as an adequate description.  If art, culture, and social institutions are not merely arbitrary and accidental arrangements then they must also have objects in this sense as something which constrains an interpretation of the world. That is to say, there are general limits on what utterances are potentially and successfully declarative speech acts.  The consideration of charisma as virtual form  provides a means of exploring this question. With this end in view, I will explore some of the implications of the continuum of dominance diagram: the move from power to authority, from charisma to authority, and the nefarious use of the properties of virtual power and knowledge by the confidence man. One of the interesting effects of this exercise is the discovery of how difficult it can sometimes be to make and sustain the distinction between these three activities.

Virtual Reality

[22] What is taken to be virtual reality or virtual form will depend upon the frame of reference we are using to interpret the world.  For example, it would be an interesting exercise to systematically explore the idea of virtual reality within each of  Stephen Pepper’s "world hypotheses."  Since there is neither time nor space to do that I will simply identify the frame of reference employed here with Pepper’s fifth world hypothesis, "selectivism."  The root metaphor of this view is "the purposive act" which generates its categories and provides for its criteria of warranted statements.¹³  Langer’s theory of art is motivated by a desire to account for aesthetic experience in its own right and not to reduce it to some external, biological, psychological, or sociological determinants.  The feelings which are the abstracted source of the forms are not merely at the service of instrumental needs or goals, but have a vitality of their own.  Feelings are the source of value and therefore the selective mechanism in art:

The basic concept is the articulate but non-discursive form having import without conventional reference, and therefore presenting itself not as a symbol in the ordinary sense, but as a "significant form," in which the factor of significance is not logically discriminated, but is felt as a quality rather than recognized as a function.

Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling. ¹⁴

[24] Pepper takes as one example of the purposive act  a person waking in the middle of the night and feeling thirsty, checks her night stand  for a glass of water, not finding water gets out of bed, goes to the kitchen, finds a glass and fills it at the tap. She drinks until satisfied and returns to bed. When she awoke she was under the influence of a drive – thirst.  This immediately evokes a reference to water. Pepper calls this an anticipatory reference or anticipatory set because it involves not only a reference to water as a source of satisfaction but a series of instrumental acts. It is a cognitive reference because it is learned and consequently may be in error.  The conditions which  satisfy the drive  are inherent and cannot be false.  Purposive goals involve two classes of reference: cognitive reference (CR) and inherent drive reference (IDR).  The IDR is an ultimate terminal goal, an act of qualitative satisfaction to the drive.  CR is an instrumental goal expected to bring about the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is not the water, but the qualitative satisfaction – slaked thirst.  Water as a means of slaking thirst may be in error, the thirst and/or its satisfaction is categorical and may not be in error (thirst is either satisfied or not satisfied), it provides the criteria by which we choose water in the first place.

[25] The drive which motivates the terminal goal is the same one which motivates the terminal act.

When we want the means for an end, we want the means because we want the end.  Our wanting of the end goes on all the time that we are wanting the means, and it is the continuous wanting of the end that keeps us wanting the means.  So the wanting gets split between the end and means for attaining the end.¹⁵

[26] The advantage of this example is that it clearly identifies the categories operating in the root metaphor, the purposive act. The crucial distinction illustrated by the example is between the cognitive reference and the inherent drive reference.  The CR categories present no general problem but the IDR clearly does. "Thirst drive" and that class of biological phenomena are not problematic, it is the implied generalization of this disposition to all the domains of motivated action that presents difficulties.  Pepper, of course, was aware of this and points out that even at the level of biological need dispositions the satisfaction of removing a state of pain, or nausea, or physical weakness may be very subtly related to the conditions which determine it and the instrumentalities which will cure the disorder (e.g. diabetes, high blood pressure).  The problematic sense of IDR arises with the attempt to use categories generated by the purposive act to refer to an ultimate goal (sometimes termed "interests") which is a source of meaning within a culture like "status", "salvation", "success", or "authority."

[27] This strategy, of course, is not unprecedented.  Talcott Parsons, Peter Winch  and many others  have postulated a "core" or "non-rational" set of values or rules which are historically given), categorical, and may not be in error (though, like some biological IDRs, not always obvious or easy to identify).¹⁶    For example, a core value in a particular culture like "the right of private property" may be shown to be present or absent. It would be false to say it was present when, in fact, it was absent.  There is no warrant to say if the value is not present that is should be present, or if it is present it is false.  Of course, if there is an actual argument in an actual social situation within the framework of selectivism, the theoretical status and reality of the value may be challenged. If the "right of property" is re-identified as a CR, a means, then it can be rationally criticized in terms of its instrumental satisfaction of some other ultimate end. John Dewey also argued that if there are no existing or likely to exist means to achieve ultimate ends, it would warrant the abandonment or revision of the ultimate end.¹⁷

[28]  The basic point, however, is that "core values" represent the theoretical equivalent of a drive satisfaction such as the satiation of thirst. It provides as an IDR the discrimination needed to make a choice, a selection, for the purposes of action.  If social and cultural attributes cannot be convincingly reduced to individual biological or psychological need dispositions (and I don’t believe they can), then socially generated IDRs must be identified. "Democracy" as a modern core value attempts to avoid the identification of other substantive IDRs by discovering methods by which people can collectively settle on core values.  If the conditions of democratic participation are met, then whatever core values are collectively determined are, by that fact, warranted.  In this context, the central questions are about the existence and adequacy of means, methods, participation. "Democracy" itself, needs no warrant.  Of course, in modern democracies important questions about means,  participation, information, etc. are still on the table, as well as the status of democracy as IDR or CR.

[29] Charismatic movements and charismatic authority are basically about how people collectively identify and decide about ultimate values, the social and cultural equivalent of an inherent drive reference.  The identification of charismatic authority with virtual power and knowledge, rather than a non-rational and essentially mysterious agency for the creation of ultimate goals, or as one among many labels applied to what is otherwise an ad hoc description of social gestation, provides the beginning of a comparative framework for the interpretation of  social movements and social change directed toward the redefinition of authority. A framework within which to consider the rhetorical, rational, and active shaping by a population of its ultimate ends. If virtual power and knowledge uncover "control" as an IDR then it provides a means for interpreting both the submission and resistance to authority.

[30] If a case can be made that charisma is virtual power and knowledge then we counter, for the most part, the Weberian idea that it is merely a mysterious quality of an individual personality.  It means the charismatic person (or movement) is appealing to others not merely out of blind faith with the intention of contagiously infecting others, but is making an appeal based on reasons. These "reasons" identify the means by which one gains the felt quality and satisfaction of personal control. The charismatic leader is attractive because she convincingly promises social and historical control where it apparently does not exist. A promise which, if realized, is a source of personal identity and control.  The person of power is charismatic because she already has control but it is unclear how the power of the despot is a potential source of personal control in her subordinates. Thus, the "core value" or "rule" operating in the historical definition of authority is the felt quality of personal control. This value is amplified by its strong association with other satisfactions which it promises to provide. I will explore this hypothesis through examples which  move from power to potential authority on the one hand, and from virtual power to potential authority on the other.

Power to Authority

[31] The legitimated control of the many by the few is not unique to complex, state societies but it is certainly most dramatically expressed in those social formations. There is no general social formation in which the difference in material wealth, social status, and power is more extreme.¹⁸  In large part, the explanation of how state societies evolved is a question of how local control over cultural, social, and material resources is overwhelmed by and integrated into regional or national powers.  Ronald Cohen points out that proto-state societies ("chieftaincies") can get large and fairly complex but they are highly fissiparous.¹⁹ These societies are made up of social units (e.g. clans, lineages, etc.) which are organizationally similar and rough self-sufficient. Sustained conflict over virtually any important issue or interest may lead to one or more of the units breaking away from the mother group.  A state society must overcome this tendency toward fission – it must overcome local self-sufficiency. The literature on the formation of early states is largely focused on just how this might have taken place.

[32] Of course, the classic  explanation of the state’s authority is as a "third person" which mediates and resolves conflicts among other parties.  It may be presumed also that this third party receives its authority and is constrained by a common culture and set of moral beliefs within the third party’s jurisdiction.²⁰  Current theories  recognize that a principal function of the state is just such a mediating role, but as a factor in the explanation of its origins, is more likely to be a consequence of its effort to integrate and dominate diverse social and ethnic groups than a selfless desire to maintain social tranquillity.  Of course, over time this function may fall to a specially trained professional class which will insist on its role as independent arbiter and provide both substantive and rhetorical support for the state as the legitimate seat for such an important activity.  Most twentieth century efforts to explain the origin of the state emphasizes how local control is compromised by external threat or balanced against gains won by subordination to a regional authority.  This gain may be the continuing ability to participate in an irrigation network, an exchange or market system, insurance against the effects of natural disasters, earn protection from internal social antagonists, or the aggressive marauding of external groups including other states.

[33] While admittedly oversimplifying this process of state making, Charles Tilly draws a convincing parallel with organized crime’s retailing of protection or "the offer you can’t refuse."  If a racketeer is someone who creates a threat and charges for its reduction or removal, then there is a parallel to that when governments protect citizens from threats which are either imaginary or the result of its own activity:

Since governments themselves commonly simulate, stimulate, or even fabricate threats of external war and since the repressive and extractive activities of governments often constitute the largest current threats to the livelihood of their own citizens, many governments operate in essentially the same ways as racketeers.²¹

[35] According to Tilly, States basically do four things: 1) war making, the elimination or neutralization of rivals outside of their territory; 2) State making, the elimination or neutralization of rivals within their territories; 3) Protection, eliminating or neutralizing the enemies of their clients; and 4) Extraction, acquiring the means to carry out the first three activities. The relative balance achieved among these objectives, influences the organization of the states that will emerge. To the extent that war making took place with relatively little extraction, protection, or state making then military forces take a larger and more autonomous part in national politics. Modern Spain is a good European example of this historical effect.  If protection predominates over war making, extraction, and state making, as in Venice or Holland, oligarchies of the protected classes tend to dominate subsequent politics. Tilly works this out in more and interesting detail but this summary is sufficient to indicate that this view counts authority as the acceptance of some holders by other power holders.  The working out of these coalitions and client relationships organize life, determine mutual expectations, and shape the conditions, ceteris paribus, to which people must respond.  "The people" are sometimes a pawn in this game, recruited or supported by one member of the existing coalition to leverage a more advantageous relationship.  There is little sense that some over-arching set of values is the source of legitimation.

[36] Does this make a sufficient distinction between raw power and legitimate power to credit any view of authority at all?  It appears to make the relationship to power a strictly strategic or instrumental one.  The idea that power itself is charismatic suggests this may not be the case but it should not be asserted. Shils needs further interpretation.

[37] Charisma as defined here is a matter of persuasion and therefore is in the domain of rhetoric. A domain broader than the traditional boundaries of rhetoric falling within what Kenneth Burke calls an intermediate area of expression:

It lies midway between aimless utterance and speech directly purposive. For instance, a man who identifies his private ambitions with the good of the community may be partly justified, partly unjustified. He may be using a mere pretext to gain individual advantage at the public expense, yet he may be quite sincere, or even may willingly make sacrifices in behalf of such identification. Here is a rhetorical area not analyzable either as sheer design or as sheer simplicity.²³

… as they say in other countries, "There are five or six cunning men in England that have skill; they do all these things."  Oh what blasphemy is this! Because men that are without God in the world, and walk not with Him, know not what it is to pray or believe, and to receive returns for God.²⁴

[39] From  a Marxist view this would be a classic instance of mystification.  But Burke remarks that Churchill may have had in mind the phrase "five or six cunning men in England" when he said, "a handful of very able men who now hold 180 million Soviet citizens in their grasp."  And that Stalin would no doubt reply that this remark was not "blasphemy" but mere "enemy propaganda" and that the revolution was not necessary because of God’s will but because of the objective forces of history.

If the regime in Russia is but the work of a handful of cunning men, then it cannot succeed as the most devout Stalinist would assure you, the course of history must be behind it. Or, in Cromwell’s terms: ‘If this be of human structure and invention, and if it be an old Plotting and Contriving to bring things to this Issue, and that they are not the Births of Providence, -- then they will tumble.’ ²⁵

[41] Max Weber’s famous thesis in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism identifies a similar rhetorical movement.  Calvin’s theology while encouraging the worldly effort to build a prosperous and holy city expressly opposed any idea that works would win grace – thus the doctrine of predestination. Yet, worldly success was almost immediately sited by Calvinists as evidence of God’s grace.²⁷   In this case, good fortune seeks its defense, but the opposite is true as well. Those who fail in the material world and are poor are apparently being punished and seek their offense.

[42] In yet a different but similar vein, Daniel Rodgers explores the political use of work rhetoric in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.²⁸ As the United States industrialized and large corporate enterprises emerged, the labor theory of value became an important part of political dialogue. The labor theory of value is deeply embedded in Anglo-American thought and culture.  For example, both John Locke and Adam Smith championed the right of private property but they presumed the right was grounded in the value given the property by the labor of its owner.  In the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln said:

There are two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle.  The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings.  It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself.  It is the same spirit that says, ‘You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it." [Loud applause].  No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.²⁹

[44] This is related to a similar form of reasoning in response to objective conditions a person cannot control.  Sennett and Cobb in their study of working class people in the United States document the fact that  workers are likely to blame themselves for their class position and the failure it implies:
"These feelings amount to a sense that the ‘lower’ a man defines himself in society in relations to other people, the more it seems his fault." A janitor says, "[if I had been] a better person, like if I made something of myself, then people couldn’t push me around… Look, I know it’s nobody’s fault but mine that I got stuck here where I am.  I mean … if I wasn’t such a dumb shit … no, if ain’t that neither … if I’d applied myself, I know I got it in me to be different, can’t say anyone did it to me."³¹

ABDUCTION

[45] The form of the janitor's argument suggests Charles Peirce’s idea of abduction.

The surprising fact, C, is observed;
But if A were true, C would be a matter of course,
Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true.

Now this reason for suspecting "A" is true is not proof that it is true but just a good reason for believing it might be. We do not generate hypotheses about the world at random.  If we did the chances that any single hypothesis turned out to be true would be one in millions, we would never learn anything about the world.  Abductions are important not only in science but in common sense. As necessary as they are there is, of course, the great danger that a plausible hypothesis left unchallenged (by experience, others, reflection) will be accepted by default. This can happen in our understanding of the natural world but the social world is especially vulnerable to this mistake.

[46] I may observe what is to me a very surprising fact that George converted to Christianity and since then is very peaceful and happy.  If it is true that Christ is the son of God and died to  save us from our sins, then it is plausible that Christ exists and causes us to be happy.  Religious doctrine and practice is rhetorically "designed" to sustain that hypothesis through further argument, ritual experience, and prescribed social behavior.  An equally plausible hypothesis is one suggested by Durkheim’s theory of religion that if one who believes "X" exists, shares this belief with others and interacts with them in ways prescribed by this common belief, they will be peaceful and happy. One is a religious theory of experience, the other a sociological theory which, at face value, are equally plausible. My point is that the appeal of a rhetorical argument is not grounded in wild irrational gyrations but in the same forms of common sense reasoning which support the development of any other way of understanding the world. [I do not intend to suggest here an argument commonly put in support of relativism, namely that since both religion and science proceed on the basis of abductions they both are merely a matter of belief, i.e. there is nothing which limits the idea external to the cogitation. This is neither true of religious belief, nor the substantive conclusions of the social and natural sciences. The idea of abduction is to identify the importance of the process and conditions of hypothesis making in the formulation of ideas and the development of warranted knowledge, what counts as evidence after that is another question.] This includes, of course, the appeal by the person of power to that very power as evidence of its legitimacy. This is not due strictly to the fact that a person is powerful but she is also able to provide or withhold material, social, and status resources which are important to her subordinates.  She can indeed order the world. [ K. Burke’s rhetoric and charisma]

[47] Of course, the powerful never start from scratch but are likely in Weber’s terminology to "usurp status." This means that the powerful seek to associate themselves with values and institutions which are known to have the allegiance of a subordinate population. In the twentieth century even the most brutal military dictators justify the regimes by asserting the "will of the people" in more or less the same way that Cromwell asserted the "will of God."  This usually entails also a promise of elections when the enemy has been thoroughly routed and the ground has been properly prepared.  The growth of  the state and the church in Western society has been to an important extent a dialogue of status usurpation. A particularly interesting example of such an agreement is one in the eleventh century between Pope Gregory VII and Robert Guisand and Roger, the Norman conquerors of Sicily and the south of Italy.  The Pope needed the military might of the Normans to press his claim against Henry IV. A claim if realized would legitimate the political independence of the church and, specifically legitimate its revolt against the political domination of the papacy by the emperor.  As conquerors of Sicily and the south of Italy, the Norman had no hereditary claim to their rule. The Germanic kings based authority on heredity or election, the Normans could claim neither. However, the papal party had added a third source of royal authority, consecration by the pope.  The Normans gained this legitimation by supporting the independence of the pope from the secular state in all Christian territories except in the Norman Kingdom of Sicily itself. ³²

[48] Rhetoric can persuade others and oneself that a power is legitimate, but the meaning and control gained is always in conflict and tension with the meaning and control lost or postponed. The relationship between the powerful and the powerless is simply a historical fact, the effort to legitimate the relationship is charged with irony.

[49] Art Efron amplifies this irony in his anarchist reading of Shakespeare’s Henry IV.³³    First, Efron notes the overarching irony captured by the anarchist slogan, "War is the health of the state."  That the institution most associated with law, order, and protection from violent and marauding aggressors is itself grounded in violence, aggression, and pillage.  The everyday experience of this irony is captured by Shakespeare in the relationship between Falstaff and young Prince Hal.  Efron remarks:

The special pleasures of the non-moral life that Hal and Falstaff spontaneously engage in include these joys as well: the joy of lying, the joy of making base comparisons, and joy of rendering mock homage to the great ideals of culture. Among the latter is preeminently the ideal of courage, which, in the course of this play is reduced to suicidal military courage. (p.28)

[50] That lie, the idea that Falstaff had played being a coward because he would not have wanted to kill the heir apparent, again mocks a cultural ideal of deference to an authority.  The lie is really a lie but is not experienced as a lie; it is a pleasure. It is as if this is what the joy of life is: a feeling that the moral codes are silly little toys and that the real connections between people are not based on such codes but on people’s pleasure in each other’s pleasure. [pp. 29-30]

Charisma to Authority

[51] It is easy to compile a long list of charismatic leaders and studies of charismatic leaders, and good studies have been made which compare and attempt to distill the important elements found in any charismatic leader, but I am going to focus on just one case study: Kenelm Burridge’s study of Mambu, a charismatic leader of a Melanesian Cargo movement.³⁴  I choose this example firstly, because cargo movements greatly interest me and this particular study of Tangu is, in my view, the very best. But more importantly, the Cargo movements, as Burridge says, "… are serious enterprises of the genre of popular revolutionary activities." [p. xv]  They compare most directly with the Ghost-dance cults of North America and the prophetist movements in Africa.  They are not merely reactive to European domination but, if not directly political, are at least pre-political, often  providing the organizational and conscious basis for resisting the external domination of their cultural and material life.  Finally, I believe Burridge succeeds in his aim "… to show how and in what senses Cargo cults reveal moral notions in genesis." [p. xxiii] The understanding of which is the main reason for studying charisma in the first place.

Myth-Dream, Cargo, and Charisma

[52] Cargo movements have taken place throughout Melanesia since the early twentieth century and are native rebellions against domination by white Europeans and the consequent distortion and destruction of traditional culture and ways of life.  These movements involve exotic rituals, ceremonies, and other unusual practices, ostensibly to gain cargo or European manufactured goods commonly found in the West at a general department store. Burridge points out that the participants in these "cults" do indeed want the material cargo but they also want moral cargo.  He distinguishes between the two when necessary by using lower case for material cargo and upper case for moral Cargo. I will adopt the same practice.

[53] Tangu are hunters, gatherers, and gardeners.  At the time of Burridge’s field work in the early 1950s, they numbered about 2000 and divided into four neighborhoods in the hills about 15 miles inland from the northern coast of New Guinea in the Australian Trust Territory.  Tangu are distinct and have a clear sense of identity that separates them from many other native cultures in the region – an identity in which they take great and vocal pride.  At the same time, they increasingly identify themselves as "Kanaka" or as black people in New Guinea in opposition to white people. As a term, it is roughly analogous to "Indian" or more recently "Native American" as a designation of peoples with very different cultures and cultural origins who share an historical identity developed in opposition to white Europeans.

[54] The four neighborhoods of Tangu are a loose organization of households, kinship ties, trade relationships and promises. There is no tribunal or office which has the responsibility and right to hear and adjudicate conflicts among the Tangu. Differences are discussed  and debated according to conventions which are implicitly understood by the participants and sooner or later usually resolved. "Managers" or a "Big-man" may provide the occasion or otherwise mediate disputes, but he has no authority to decide in favor of one disputant over another. The Big-man’s primary qualification is his productive ability, "… the capacity to provide quantities of meat, tubers, fruits, and other kind of food stuffs …. Must be physically robust, in good health, a cunning hunter, and an industrious gardener with a mastery of techniques, mystical and pragmatic which, are necessary to take game and harvest good and plentiful crops." [p. 75 ] Nevertheless, he has no special knowledge or skills, he simply more industriously applies the skills and knowledge all Tangu men have.

[55] There are other important persons who have no personal authority in Kanaka communities but can evoke in limited ways the authority of Europeans. Native representatives in the villages of the administration, Luluai, Tultul, and Doctor boy, report misdemeanors to European officers, assemble villagers to accomplish what are basically European goals, e.g. working the rice fields, cleaning the village, maintaining medical stores, etc.  In addition there are catechists who are trained by the missions as teachers and are responsible primarily to the Christians in the community and the missionary himself.

[56] Among Tangu no quarrel is considered to have "right" on one side.  Each side in the dispute has merely made a claim and the argument will end only when it is felt some condition of equivalence has been reached.  Only by reaching equivalence can the desired state of amity be achieved.

For Tangu the concrete symbol of true amity in the heart is the exchange which both parties deem to be equivalent, and concerning which neither party is swayed by the malicious gossip and pinpricks of others. In a more absolute sense such an exchange, which no one else questioned or tried to mar, would stand as a model for all, the exchange par excellence.  Carried to its logical conclusion the implication is that in the best of all possible worlds, since all exchanges would be equivalent and true amity reign over all, there would no longer be any need to make exchanges. And precisely this is involved in being mngwotngwotiki, truly equivalent. [p. 85]

[58] Disputes over exchange are often and intense.  The public device for airing these disputes in an effort to find equivalence is br’ngun’guni.  There is a formal br’ngun’guni which takes place during feasting and dancing exchanges. Members from participating households make speeches and it is a distinctly political occasion.  Speakers may extol their prowess as gardeners and hunters, comment on the dances taking place, provide invidious comparisons of their own productivity with that of others. This is the social context out of which emerge a big-man.  Everyday disputes also take the form of br’ngun’guni.  The exchange must be skillful, "… the language flickers to sting and annoy, it should not draw blood."  An opponent should be pressed but he should not be backed into a corner, he should be left some room to parry, an "out."  If a skilled adversary pushes his opponent into a corner and hurts him, the tide will turn from admiration to disfavor and aggressor will, in the end, lose.  "The victory is never to be dominant; it goes to the man who knows when to sit down, to the man who can look through his audience and know that nobody is certain who is ‘one-up’." [p. 83]

[59] The relationship of Tangu and Kanaka to Europeans as administrators and missionaries is one in which it is impossible to achieve equivalence. Kanaka understand trade and trade relationships and appreciate skilled and shrewd bargaining in an effort to get the best deal possible.  If  specific transactions with Europeans are strictly commercial they have no general difficulties, they live and learn and can hold their own.  Missionaries and administrators often provide material benefits to Kanakas without any expectation of a material return, but they demand moral surrender.

[60] The rules and regulations imposed on Kanaka by administrators are not well understood but it is abundantly clear that they are not open to discussion and debate. There is no opportunity to achieve moral equivalence and Kanaka take this as a direct affront to their manhood. There is no instance in which a br’ngun’guni can take place where Kanaka, administrator, and missionary can confront the mutual slights, insults, and wounds which characterize their relationship.  This is amplified by the obvious lack of equivalence in European goods, cargo. These goods apparently come to Europeans because of no effort of their own while the few such goods available to Kanaka come only after long hours of back breaking work.  They deeply resent the white man’s attack on their manhood while simultaneously believing this situation must be in part their own fault, caused by some transgression against their ancestors.

[61] These resentments are expressed and solutions to the dilemma are projected in the myth-dreams of Tangu. Myth-dreams are always involved in the stories Tangu tell as they gather to talk, gossip, and amuse one another. If Tangu are asked to explain some aspect of their behavior or of their culture they do so by reference to myth-dreams – narratives which often describe the actions of their ancestors as prefiguring Tangu and the way they live their lives. Myth-dreams then, are actively involved in the interpretation of everyday life and to make meaningful connections between the past, present, and future.

[62] Burridge describes four versions of what he calls "the primal myth" which he recorded among the Tangu.  Each version, using a traditional myth-dream, contains an interpretation of the relationship between Tangu and white men and provides a solution to the moral problems which exist between them. I will provide only the first version and its interpretation and briefly indicate the interpretation of the other three. In  an effort to be brief and still capture the quality of the narrative, the following is not a direct copy but a paraphrase of Burridge’s transcript of the primal myths.

One day the men of the village decided to hunt a pig by burning off a tract of ginger [where pigs are unlikely to be].  Duongangwongar, an odd fellow who had a mother but no father or mother’s brother, went with them. [The Tangu word imbatekas, translated as "odd fellow" is a key word in the culture and is difficult to translate directly or completely.  It describes the essence of a sorcerer and its meanings can range from evil, useless, odd, non-conformist, monstrosity, or of unknown potential. Duongangwongar is imbatekas because he has no father and no mother’s brother – he is virtually unplaceable  in the system of community relationships.  He is a non-conformist, he goes by himself.  Despite or because of his non-conformity he knows something the others do not – where to find a pig. And like a sorcerer he disturbs the status quo in that his non-conformity forces the remainder of the community to rethink a situation and make adjustments.]  When the party arrived at the agreed upon place they would have nothing to do with Duongangwongar. They told him to go away.

So Duongangwongar wandered off on his own. Presently, seeing a pig-run entering a patch of kunai grass [where pigs are likely to be], and following it, he was confronted by a pig. Quickly, he took an arrow from his quiver and with his bow wounded the pig. Hearing Duongangwongar’s cry for help, the others ran into the kunai and killed the pig with spears. Then as each man withdrew his spear from the pig, he plunged it into Duongangwongar. Duongangwongar fell dead. The men placed the body on a small platform and hid it in the exposed roots of a tree [a form of burial not practiced in Tangu today nor admitted to having been practiced except in the remote past when the events occurred].

When the men returned to the village, Gundakar, Duongangwongar’s mother, asked where her son was. They said they did not know. That night Gundakar dreamed her son appeared to her and said he was dead and hidden in the roots of a tree. Next morning, Gundakar went to look for her son’s body.

As she walked out of the village, a little bird, the spirit of Duongangwongar, set on her shoulder and told her the path she should take. She found the body of Duongangwongar, put it in her string bag and returned to the village. There she collected  yams, taros, bananas, mami, and sweet potatoes, put them in the bag with the body and left the village.

The first village she came to she asked if she might bury her son there. The villagers refused. She asked to bury her son at three subsequent villages but was also refused. At  the third she was ordered to go on to Lilau on the coast. At Lilau she rested and then went on along the coast to Dogoi, where a man copulated with her and she was able to stay and bury her son. The man was her helpmeet. He dug  a hole, placed the body of Duongangwongar inside and covered the grave with coconut fronds. Eventually he married Gundakar and she bore sons.

Meanwhile the body of Duongangwongar rotted in the grave.  One day, Gundakar needed water and she went to the grave of her son. She drew aside the coconut fronds and found salt water and fish coming from the nostrils of Duongangwongar. She filled her pot with water and used it to cook the evening meal. Her husband and son (by her present husband) thought it good.

That night Gundakar’s son grew tremendously.  Next day when her husband’s younger brother, Tuman (tuman = younger brother), came to visit and saw how the son had grown, he was very surprised. He exclaimed to his elder brother Ambwerk (ambwerk = elder brother), my sons are still small, what has happened?  Nothing was said.

Gundakar took the skins of her taros, yams, and mami and flung them on the garden plot her husband had just cleared. Wonderfully, the skins took root and grew into real tubers.  Then Gundakar returned to the grave of Duongangwongar and collected water and one small fish which she boiled for her husband and son to eat.  That night the son grew into a man.

Next day, Tuman was so surprised by the transformation he insisted on knowing how it was done. Gundakar told  Tuman’s wife what to do. Go to the grave of Duongangwongar, draw water from his nostrils and take one small fish. She said, you will see other larger fish but do not take them.  Tuman’s wife went to the grave and drew water and also saw a large ramatzka, a long eel-like fish. She speared the ramatzka. At once there was a loud rumbling in the earth like thunder. The water from Duongangwongar’s nostril came out in a seething torrent of foam and waves. The water, which was the sea, came between Ambwerk and Tuman.

Wondering  about the fate of Ambwerk, Tuman directed a leaf toward the village of his brother and threw it on the water. Ambwerk found the leaf and knew his brother was well. He sent the leaf back to Tuman. Tuman saw the leaf and knew his brother was well. He took another leaf, wrote a message on it [clearly a recent addition to the myth] and dispatched it to Ambwerk and Ambwerk answered.

Tuman felled a tree, made a canoe and set off to visit his brother. When Tuman reached his brother’s village, Ambwerk was astounded by the canoe and asked  Tuman, "Who showed you how to make this?" Tuman answered that, indeed, he had made it himself and had thought of it on his own.

When Tuman left, Ambwerk copied his younger brother and made a canoe. He visited Tuman and returned very satisfied. At once Tuman made a boat, learned to use it and went off to visit Ambwerk. Once again, Ambwerk was surprised and his brother told him he had thought of it and made it himself. Ambwerk, not to be outdone, made a boat himself and went to visit his brother who complemented him on his craftsmanship. Ambwerk  returned home contented.

Next Tuman constructed a pinnace. He made an engine, fitted it, practiced and went off to show Ambwerk.  Ambwerk was dumbfounded and immediately began working on a pinnace.  Tuman then made a motor car, a motor bike, a large ship with tall masts, an airplane, canned goods, cloth, and all sorts of things. Each time he made something he went to show it to his elder brother and each time Ambwerk copied him.

At the end of  this recitation, the storyteller turned to Burridge and said, "You see, Tuman could use his head – like you."  The implication was that Ambwerk, like Kanakas, could not.

Mambu and Cargo

[64] Mambu was not Tangu but from Apingam, a village near the coast at Bogia. At a mature age, he was a bachelor and something of an oddity, characteristic of charismatic leaders and among Tangu sign of a sorcerer, he was at the margins of society.  He was a Catholic and a very able man considered suitable for training as a catechist.  In 1937, Mambu had just returned from a year’s contract labor in New Britain.  Early on a Sunday morning he entered the church at Bogia and removed the dust covers from the alter and nearby tables, distributed prayer books for the mass – a task normally done by a missionary sister.  After mass, he was asked by the priest why he had done that but he did not reply.  At that point the Angelus bell sounded and Mambu fell to his knees and prayed fervently.  A few days later Mambu started his activities  in Apingam. But his own people would not permit it and there was trouble. Mambu left and went to Tangu ( a few miles distant).  Speaking in Pidgin he found a few followers.  He succeeded in collecting a sum of money or "head tax" which he said should be given to him rather than the administration.  The resident missionary had been away at the time, but when he returned and got wind of Mambu’s activities  he took immediate action. He recovered the money Mambu had collected, returning it to the donors, and ordered him to leave. From Tangu, Mambu went to Banara. He was welcomed by the villagers and somewhat isolated from both mission and administration he settled to his task.

[65] Mambu said that Kanakas were exploited by white men.  A new order was at hand which Kanakas no longer submitted to the whites.  The ancestors had their welfare at heart and were in the interior of the volcano at Manam Island manufacturing goods for their descendants.  Other ancestors taking the appearance of white men were hard at work where white men lived. In fact, the ancestors had already shipped much cargo to the Kanakas, cloth, axes, khaki shorts, bush-knives, etc. and it had been on the way for some time. But white men entrusted with its transportation were removing labels and substituting their own.  In this way, Kanakas were being robbed of their inheritance and they were entitled to get back the cargo by force. The time was coming, however, when this thievery and exploitation by the white men would stop. The ancestors would come with cargo for all. The ancestors would create a huge harbor in front of Mambu’s house at Sauru Bay, and ships laden with cargo would dock there.  When this time comes all work must cease and pigs, gardens, everything must be destroyed otherwise the ancestors will be angered and withhold the cargo.

[66] In the meantime, until a sign came from the ancestors, things needed to be done.

The administration had no right to demand a tax: instead, this tax should be handed to Mambu himself. If the administration asked for it the people should say that they has already given it to Mambu, "The Black King".  Nor should Kanakas clean up the roads or do any carrying: the administration should do it for themselves. Since, also, the missionaries had made  common cause with the administration to exploit the Kanakas, natives should not attend mission schools, or go to their churches or stations. Those who disobeyed this injunction would not have a share in the glories of the new age. They would be completely outcast.  Any Kanakas who happened to be in a mission church or school when the ancestors came would be burnt up and consumed in a holocaust…. It was not fitting that Kanakas should wear native apparel.  Instead they should wear European clothes, throw away their breech-clouts and grass skirts and bury them.  By doing these things the ancestors would be pleased. And seeing the cast-off breech clouts and grass skirts, they would say, ‘Ha! Our children are truly doing well.’ [p. 185]

[68] Of course, they were wrong, Mambu  remained alive and vital in myth. He had stayed in Tangu only briefly but the myth-dream had been refertilized. Mambu himself had disappeared, the Japanese came and the whites left.  During the war they experienced famine, forced labor, an increase in sorcery, and the roar of guns and airplanes. Then the Japanese went and in their place came white and black troops who were generous, who had many goods, and a great deal of money to spend. The triangle among Kanakas, administrators, and missionaries was reformed and by 1952 the image and myth of Mambu was full of life.  In the myth of Mambu, he stows away on a ship bound for Australia.  When discovered the ship’s captain was to throw him overboard unless going to Australia he might discover the secret of the white man. However, Mambu’s former employer, who also happened to be on the ship, intervened on his behalf and saved him.  When he returned to New Guinea he preached about the same message as indicated above but there also miracles and stories of harrowing adventures and escapes from the authorities. There appears to be a slight shift in emphasis from Mambu’s original message and  the one expressed by the myth fifteen years later. Mambu’s version of the myth-dream was the one in which no moral equivalence is possible between Kanakas and whites and the solution was to remove the whites entirely. The later myth of Mambu obviously still casts white men as the major problem but it also benefits from the help and support of white men. This moves closer to the version quoted at length above in which some cooperation, some moral equivalence is finally possible.

[69] This is a spare and unsatisfactorily simple account of Burridge’s rich and nuanced ethnography of Cargo, but perhaps there is enough to illustrate a point about charisma.  Burridge provides accounts of other Cargo movements in which Tangu take part and in which Mambu and the myth of Mambu provides an interpretive framework --  movements in which other important charismatic persons emerge. These movements sometimes sited Mambu as an influence and guide, sometimes they did not,  but in either case they were interpreted by Tangu in a framework provided by their understanding of Mambu.  They were understood as Cargo movements which confronted the problem of whites and which developed a native sense of identity as Kanakas.

[70] Cargo cults are sometimes classified as nativist movements or movements which seek to return to the past and the traditional pre-white man condition of things. If this is ever literally true of social movements among colonized peoples, it certainly is not true of Cargo movements. Cargo in general, and the myth of Mambu in particular, is more oriented toward the creation of not the former man but a "new man."  Of course, movements honor traditional culture, after all it is the only framework Kanakas have with which to interpret the world and give it meaning and value.  The goods in Cargo are never traditional goods but always introduced into native culture by whites. It is interesting that goods like sweet potatoes which were introduced into the culture by the missions, never appear as cargo. Sweet potatoes were simply made available to Kanakas for there use or not.  They chose to use it, grow it, and incorporate it into their diet and culture on their own terms. On the other hand, rice was also introduced by the white man as a cash crop, and was produced, distributed, and marketed under administration control.  Rice nearly always is among the goods that are cargo.

[71] This is not to say Tangu do not actually covet cargo, the white man’s goods, the accumulation and exchange of material wealth is important to Kanakas culture and the personal achievement of status, dignity, and honor. It also does not mean they wish to become new as white men. The connection between traditional man and aspirations toward a new man is moral equivalence. The white man has made that impossible, and a clear and external sign of it is his easy access to manufactured goods. To achieve cargo is to achieve moral equivalence, to assert a right to cargo is to assert a right to moral equivalence. To assert a right to participate in transactions which have at least the possibility of amity.

[72] The myth-dreams and the Cargo interpretations of myth-dreams contain material aspirations but mainly they are about what it is to be an honorable person,  the possible barriers blocking that goal, and tactics which may breach the barriers. To break out of these symbolically rendered understandings of one’s situation requires favorable material conditions and usually some agency which persuades victims that they understand the problem and have the power and resources to do something about it. The charismatic leader is historically just such an agent. Mambu, interpreting the world in the language of the traditional myth-dreams, concludes that the only way out is to get rid of the white man entirely. He provided a convincing interpretation of the absence of amity between themselves and white people, and most importantly, recommended action which atones for their own contribution to non-equivalence and prepared them for the return of the ancestors bringing cargo --  bringing moral equivalence.  This, of course, is just the first step, charismatic authority must be routinized. This was done in various degrees in Melanesia as a consequence of the Cargo cults. Peter Worsley has provided one of the better overviews of these movements and shows how in some instances they evolved into modern political movements.

[material on Martin Luther, reworking and supplementing  Erikson's study with EHE's emphasis on identity, K. Burke's idea of identity, as a major location of charismatic signs and the motivation to rebel. Another case study, from the 20th century, probably the U.S., maybe Huey Long.]

FOOTNOTES:

1. See for example: H.S. Hughes, Consciousness and Society: the Reconstruction of European Social Thought, 1890-1930, NY, 1961 [1958]

2.  Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, NY, 1947, pp. 358-359.

A major qualification of these general dynamics is Weber's belief that while rational-legal authority is relatively stable compared to social forms of charisma and raw power, it is still likely over time to shift slowly toward traditional authority. I will include a brief explanation of this point in the discussion of "power" and the "movement toward stable authority by referring dominance to routine meaning."

3.  I would not wish to deny that charisma is without important personal qualities. One of the reasons I continue to be interested in charisma is due to a personal experience. In about 1959 when I was a young man in graduate school, an even younger man appeared one day on my doorstep (with two friends). He was an aspiring musician (though not yet very skilled) and with Jack Kerouac's Dean Moriarty and Woody Guthrie as his guide was "on the road" and "bound for glory."  He and his friends on their way to New Orleans and the South  from Portland, Oregon, had been pointed my way by a mutual friend. Mel and his companions were hitch-hiking and  riding the rails and had come from Texas to New Orleans in boxcars. They were tired, very dirty, and far from any romantic view I might have of  the footloose bindlestiff.  About 20 years old, Mel was medium height, lean and bony, had long sideburns and oily hair combed back in a "duck's butt."  His nose was running and eyes bloodshot  from allergies and he sometimes had an alarming asthmatic wheeze. He was not a very physically imposing person.

He and his friends stayed with my wife and me for a week before they moved on.  Over the next three years, Mel, usually with others in tow and in beat up old cars made a regular grand tour of the U.S., from Oregon down the coast to L.A., across to Texas and into New Orleans and through the South, up into New York City and Boston, then back across the top of the country to Oregon. Our house was a regular stop on these tours and Mel usually stayed a week or two. In each trip around the cycle he had become not only a more and more accomplished musician (banjo and mouth harp) but was full of stories  and experiences which had moved him and, in the telling, it was equally clear that he moved others. He was struggling toward a view of life, a kind of epiphany which was both spiritual and utopian. By "epiphany" I mean that this was not an intellectual or political quest, nor a self-conscious  reflection on experience, but Mel assumed that at some point if he stayed open to it he would directly experience and immediately understand what the hell was going on and why. He believed music would mediate his relationship to people and with music  this walk through the world would bring the light. Of course, there is nothing particularly new or unusual about this in a young person. But Mel had great energy and enthusiasm and kind of relentless pursuit of life which took one's breath away. He also had confidence in his ability to struggle and survive and a striking ingenuity when confronted with practical problems – for example, he was an excellent "backyard" auto-mechanic.  He took a lot of chances and whatever the transitory difficulties or disasters he was confident he would learn from it and come out the other side. This energy and confidence was contagious and Mel became the center  of any group that gathered for whatever purpose. Without any apparent or conscious effort on his part, the topics of conversation and questions discussed tended to move toward those that interested him and on which he had strongly held views.  He had had a rough life, spent time in jail and was shrewd in many ways of the street but otherwise seemed innocent and open to others in ways which made people trust him. Indeed, people tended to trust him implicitly or were repelled by him.

This sense of confidence and purpose characterized Mel's usual "presentation of self" to others and, no doubt, to himself.  However, in the wee hours of the morning on long walks through New Orleans he talked of his doubts, guilt about his wife and children, and would occasionally have inklings of how he used his energy and enthusiasm as justification for his imposition and even exploitation of others.

I last saw Mel in 1963 and had no real contact with him over the next ten years. However, in that period and in the midst of the counter-cultural excitement of the late 60s, I did hear rumors and stories that Mel had his epiphany, founded a commune in Boston and was looked upon by others as a spiritual leader and "avatar."  In November, 1974, I received a letter from Mel and a copy of his book, Mirror at the End of the Road (American Avatar Publications, Roxbury, Mass., 1971)  The preface to the book is a letter to Mel from Wayne Hansen in which Hansen says, "For me to approach the book to read it is already an awesome responsibility. I stand in awe of its greatness and purity – I can't  believe it.  It's full of miracles and its greatest miracle is its reality. It really is the new bible, born to be read and read again, inexhaustible in its capacity to teach …. In the past Christian martyrs died for the Spirit and Christian crusades killed for it, but you make the greatest sacrifice of all, to LIVE for it!"

As is usually the case with charismatic leaders and movements there is also a dark side, disillusionment, and bewilderment.  This experience of Mel was reported, in part, by David Felton in Rolling Stone, 1971 ("The Lyman Family's Holy Siege of America," Rolling Stone, 98:43 (Dec. 23, 1971). Also reprinted as "Dangers of Charisma: Mel Lyman and Fort Hill" in Rosabeth M. Kanter (ed.) Communes: Creating and Managing the Collective Life, NY, 1973, pp. 209-221.)

I have not made a study of  Mel's movement nor have I corresponded with him since the letter in 1974. I have only fragmentary and contradictory information about the movement and the commune and consequently have no substantive opinion about its nature and outcome. In the years I knew him in the early 1960s I considered Mel a very interesting and dear friend.  My only point is that there were personal qualities in Mel apparent to me and others in 1959 which must have played a crucial role in what he came to be and the impact he had on others. I certainly did not predict in 1963 that Mel would become a spiritual leader of a charismatic movement, but subsequent events involving him and in the context of the turmoil and excitement of the 1960s, did not surprise me. I was surprised neither by the enthusiasm and commitment to him, nor the witness to Mel's darker side.

4. Edward Shils, "Charisma, Order, and Status," American Sociological Review, April, 1965, pp. 199-213.

5.  Ibid., p. 203        6.  Ibid., p. 205

7.  Of course, "disorganization" and "lack of control" are not equivalent. Control presupposes organization and consequently disorganization implies lack of control. However,  it is possible to lack control, i.e. power or knowledge, in a context which is highly organized.

8. Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther, NY, 1962; Gandhi's Truth, NY, 1969

9. Susan K. Langer,  Feeling and Form, London, 1953; see also, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, vol. I & II, Baltimore, 1967.

10.  Feeling and Form, p. 48                  11.  Ibid., p. 49

12. John Searle, Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts, 1979, chapter 1.

13. Stephen C. Pepper, Concept and Quality, 1967, chapter 2

14. Feeling and Form, p. 40

15. Pepper, Concept and Quality, p. 22, [54].

16. Talcott Parsons, Structure of Social Action, second edition, 1949; Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science, 1958.

17. John Dewey, "Theory of Valuation," International Encyclopedia of the Unified Sciences, vol. II, no. 4, Chicago, 1939.

18. A case might be made for slavery as a distinct social formation, but it is largely a social invention of early state societies. It is especially useful in early states because it provides economic, military, even administrative resources which are not encumbered by traditional claims on the time and resources of the ruler. When it exists in proto-state societies, as domestic or household slaves, the material life of the master and slave is usually not very different. Even the status distinction is not always easy to detect by external observation though it is, in fact, qualitative and dramatic.  Enslavement is the de-legitimation of persons,  the opposite of the process under discussion here.  Orlando Patterson, in Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Harvard University Press, 1982) demonstrates how the institutions of slavery systematically remove from chattel any status or honor which might be the basis of some personal or collective claim of right or rights.  The removal and suppression by the master of any surname attached to the slave is a denial of the most rudimentary claim one might have on another, kinship.  The master need not be concerned with the slaves relationship to her parents, siblings, spouse, children, or any other kin, since this status was not recognized as applicable to a slave.

19.  Ronald Cohen, "State Origins" in H.J.M. Classen and Peter Skalnik (eds.), The Early State, NY, 1978, pp. 35-6.

20. G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 1967 [1952, 1821].

21.  Charles Tilly, "War Making and State Making as Organized Crime," in  Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (eds.), Bringing the State Back In, Cambridge, 1985, p. 171

22. Ibid., p.174

23.  Kenneth Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 1962 [1950], p. 522

24. Ibid., p.637  The analysis of charisma in particular and authority in general needs a more coherent view of rhetoric.  A view which does not look at rhetoric as merely sophistry or the cynical manipulation of signs or "word tricks" but a systematic study of how people come to believe what they do – how in Peirce’s phrase, we "fix belief." (C.S. Peirce, "The Fixation of Belief," Essays in the Philosophy of Science, Bobbs-Merrill, 1957 [1877], also, http://www.door.net/arisbe )  This would include not only how we come to believe in such things as the efficacy of penicillin, Bernoulli’s law, the characteristic patterns created by the interaction of energy waves, or the statistical distribution of genetic traits, but  the best use of the block plane, the appropriate fasteners for framing a house, or how to glaze a window, and also firm beliefs in virgin birth, the power of prayer, or the efficacy of a dowsing rod, as well as a sure eye for design in textiles, the quality of a line that animates a drawing, or the path of sound which stirs a person to move and dance, and including  the commitment to a social philosophy which supports the rule of a king, or insists that it is true that only democracy will work in the end. Which is to say, a study of how we fix belief regardless of the relevant domain of that belief. If the framework is cognitively adequate it would also help explain the way in which we are likely to make errors and fix false beliefs.  Weber’s analysis of the Protestant Ethic not only shows how a belief motivates people to behave but how their behavior and its consequences influence and modifies what it is they actually believe. The mix of causal analysis and verstehen in Weber’s methodology is suggestive but is not, nor intended to be, a theory of rhetoric.  Hegel’s view of reification and Marx’s adoption of it in the idea of false consciousness is also a powerful rhetorical insight but defined an important dimension of the problem more than it provides a full conceptual scheme which helped explain how the process of hegemony actually works.  Of course, the issue of hegemony has received a great deal of attention in recent years, most of which have some tie back to Marx and the idea of false consciousness, fetishism, etc. but the views are pretty divergent. Indeed, any sort of convergence tends to make a view suspect and a symptom of the very rhetorical/hegemonic  problem under scrutiny. For example, Michael Foucault has argued that science is the pursuit of power and if one wishes to make a discipline scientific the question at base should be how does one wish to develop and articulate power.  Efforts to develop a general theory of power and hegemony either participate in this articulation of power or indirectly support existing hegemonies by providing little insight into how it works. Foucault includes himself and his prior work under this blanket indictment.  He goes on to argue that power and authority – domination – operate at the level of everyday social interactions, at the level of habit.  The key to understanding power is not to focus on its expression at the level of consciousness or intention but as an ongoing, quotidian exercise in self and other subjection. Its clarification will be won only by a detailed contextual analysis of everyday situations of dominance and submission. ( Michael Foucault, "Two Lectures" in Nicholas Dinks, George Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner (eds.), Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, 1994.)

Reprinted in the same volume as the Foucault lectures is Pierre Bourdieu’s article in which he (in 1977) gives us his now well known idea of habitus.  A view which in many respects agrees with Foucault’s emphasis on the social context of domination though, perhaps, still in what Foucault would call the contract-oppression scheme for the analysis of power. (Ibid., p. 210.)  Bourdieu has influenced a great deal the recent examination of  hegemony. Kenneth Burke’s work though its major argument was developed over 50 years ago,  comes close to providing a systematic and coherent theory of rhetoric and devotes a large share of his attention to the social and symbolic process of establishing power and authority. It would be useful to present a full review of Burke and how his view of rhetoric applies to the idea of charisma but I will not do that here. I’ll just  mention three salient points. 1) Burke accepts the usual definition of rhetoric as the ability to persuade, but argues that the major underlying process which provides its persuasive force is identification. The emphasis on the establishment of identity is particularly useful in the analysis of charisma and the charismatic movement. Two of the better works on charisma, though not written from a Burkean point of view, are nevertheless concerned with historical crises in personal and social identity, namely, Eric Ericson’s studies of Martin Luther and M. Gandhi.  2) Rhetoric understood as the conscious intentional effort to persuade others limits our understanding of the force and significance of rhetoric in the establishment of power and authority. The categories of rhetoric are more fruitfully applied if they also include the "taken for granted" or "pre-conscious" domains of human cognition. 3) Rhetoric is neither science nor "word magic" but the inducement of action in people. The domain of rhetoric is not science in the sense of testing propositions,  nor is  it merely the emotive manipulation of the feelings of others, but induces action by providing a motivation to act, a "meaning" in Weber’s sense of the term.  This is approximately the same domain as discussed and labeled by Talcott Parsons as the non-rational.  But Parsons merely asserts that these substantive  values and goals provide meaning to and motivation for human action, he does not approach the on-the-ground social and symbolic processes which discover, create, and commit to this meaning. Rhetoric is not science, it is not magic, it is not merely the emotional  manipulation of others, but it has its own logic which can be discovered and which will clarify how substantive cultural beliefs arise and are sustained.

25.  Burke, Ibid., p. 637.

26.  Milan Kundera, "Somewhere Behind,"  The Art of the Novel, NY, 1988 [1986], p. 102-3.  Kundera draws the parallel commonly drawn between  The Trial and The Castle and modern bureaucracy but more specifically and saliently between those works and the totalitarian bureaucracy of his native Czechoslovakia when under Communist domination. But even more radically, he says Kafka’s apparently bureaucratic environments are a metaphor for the  authoritarian nature of the ordinary family, comparing K waking up with strangers in his room ordering him about arbitrarily or for reasons he can’t fathom, to the experience of a child waking with a parent in the room and finding they expect, indeed insist, she respond to arbitrary or  unfathomable commands.  It is the common experience of being arbitrarily treated and having one’s privacy violated in the family which provides the force of Kafka’s trope.  Totalitarian regimes usually insist they exercise their power in the interest of  dependent and helpless others in order to protect them from themselves and the impure and hostile force of strangers. Of course, this suggests a common process by which power is transformed into authority,  the integration and control of the equally bewildered recalcitrant citizen and uncooperative child. Each must somehow make sense of, even take responsibility for,  their restraint by arbitrary power.

27.  Max Weber, Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, NY, 1958 [1930, 1904-5].  Calvin’s view of predestination was largely the result of an intellectual/theologians struggle to resolve the problem of theodicy.  If the condition of grace or damnation  was removed from the world of will and works, whatever existed, perforce, was a part of God’s plan.  This plan and the motivation behind it was beyond the puny reason and imperfect spiritual body of humankind.  The presence of sin, cruelty and injustice, was beyond the pale of our reason, but that fact did not contradict the view that  God was omniscient, omnipotent, infinitely loving.  While Weber recognized the doctrine of predestination as a theologians idea he did not conclude that it was merely a theologian’s arcane philosophy but provided evidence that it was widely held by lay persons. (Ibid., pp. 109-110; Sociology of Religion, 1963 [1922], chapter X)  A critical dynamic of any institutionalized belief system is not just among those who have devoted their professional lives to the rationalization of belief and their own everyday experience, but the average  persons of belief who take the doctrines of a rationalized faith into daily life, using those beliefs as a guide and a way to give meaning to the mean and mundane experiences of that life. The fact that the abstractions of Calvin were taken seriously and presented difficulties for the lay  interpretation of a life in a profane world was a source of stress in a creature needing to give meaning to daily experience. The popular view that material success was evidence of salvation presumes the doctrine of predestination while de-emphasizing or ignoring certain agnostic aspects of Calvin’s theology.

28. Daniel T. Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920, Chicago, 1978.

29. Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America, NY, 1992, p. 99.

30. Among the more interesting and important questions about the evolution of United States culture and institutions is how the Calvinist sense of  a chosen community in covenant with God was transformed in the seventeenth century to a union or national covenant of great people chosen to unite the people of the world under God.  The most eloquent expression of this sense of nationhood was made by Daniel Webster on the floor of the Senate, January 26, 1830.  The occasion was  debate of a resolution by Senator Foote of Connecticut on the sale of public lands in the west.  The context was a constitutional question raised by the doctrine of nullification in which at issue was the priority of federal union or states rights.  Webster rose to defend the union with Vice-President  Calhoun in the chair -- the Vice-President was at the time the most important and eloquent defender of nullification and states rights.  The speech went on for hours and had a great impact, probably including the change in President Jackson’s view of nullification. The speech’s text was studied for decades thereafter, its peroration declaimed thousands of times by schoolboys over the next generation, establishing "… in the hearts of Northern and Western people a new semi-religious conception of the Union." (S.E. Morison and H.S. Commager, The Growth of the American Republic, vol. 1, 1955 [1950], pp. 480-481.) Abraham Lincoln was among those schoolboys and it was he who presided over the war which consummated the conflict of principle joined in 1830.

Garry Wills’ study of Lincoln’s "Gettysburg Address" shows how deeply the President was influenced by Webster in rhetorical style and substance. Lincoln and Webster believed that the founding document of the United States was the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution.  The Constitution presumes the union and was written and ratified "… to form a more perfect union."  Wills on Lincoln’s First Inaugural address:  "… where he admits that some states have spoken for disunion, but not ‘my rightful masters, the American people’… The people’s existence precedes and makes possible the Constitution. Otherwise, ‘The United States [would] be not a government proper, but an association of States in the nature of a contract [or pact] merely." (Wills, opus cit., p. 130.)  Which is to say, the union is a covenant, a family-like bond which cannot be broken like a contract when it ceases to reflect the narrow interests of the signers.  Such a union is a pre-condition of the Constitution, a "non-contractual element of contract" in the words of  Emile Durkheim.  The thesis argued by Wills is that Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in its historical context, reshaped the nation’s understanding of the Constitution.

… he not only put the Declaration in a new light as a matter of founding law, but put its central proposition, equality, in a newly favored position as a principle of the Constitution (which, as the Chicago Times noticed, never uses the word).  What had been a mere theory of lawyers like James Wilson, Joseph Story, and Daniel Webster – that the nation preceded the states, in time and  importance – now became a lived reality of the American tradition.  The results of this were seen almost at once.  Up to the Civil War, ‘the United States are a free government.’  After Gettysburg, it became a singular: ‘The United States is a free government.’  This was the result of the whole mode of thinking Lincoln expressed in his acts as well as his words, making union not a mystical hope but a constitutional reality. (Ibid., p.145.)

Slavery was a threat and obstacle to a society that was indeed the heir of the Puritan, American, and French Revolutions.  Southern society was based firmly on hereditary status as the basis of human worth.  With the West, the North, though in the process of change, was still committed to notions of equal opportunity.  In both, the ideals were reflections of economic arrangements that gave them much of their appeal and force.  Within the same political unit it was, I think, inherently impossible to establish political and social institutions that would satisfy both. If the geographical separation had been much greater, if the South had been a colony for example, the problem would in all probability have been relatively simple to solve at that time – at the expense of the Negro. (Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, 1966, p. 152.)

32.  Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: the Formation of the Western Legal Tradition, Harvard U. Press, 1983, pp. 409-414.

33.  Arthur Efron, " ‘War is the Health of the State’: an Anarchist Approach to Henry IV, Part One",  Works and Days, Spring, 1992, pp. 7-75

34.  Kenelm Burridge, Mambu: A Study of Melanesian Cargo Movements and Their Social and Ideological Background, Harper Torchbooks, 1970 [1960].
 

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