In Our Time

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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas, people and events that have shaped our world.

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In Our Time: Charisma

17/03/2022

Charisma

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Charisma

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Max Weber's idea of charismatic authority in leadership

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how Weber drew on the idea of charisma in religion to explain why people follow some leaders loyally rather than dutifully, for better or worse

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the idea of charismatic authority developed by  Max Weber (1864-1920) to explain why people welcome some as their legitimate rulers and follow them loyally, for better or worse, while following others only dutifully or grudgingly.  Weber was fascinated by those such as Napoleon (above) and Washington who achieved power not by right, as with traditional monarchs, or by law as with the bureaucratic world around him in Germany, but by revolution or insurrection.  Drawing on the experience of religious figures, he contended that these leaders, often outsiders, needed to be seen as exceptional, heroic and even miraculous to command loyalty, and could stay in power for as long as the people were enthralled and the miracles they had promised kept coming. After the Second World War, Weber's idea attracted new attention as a way of understanding why some reviled leaders once had mass support and, with the arrival of television, why some politicians were more engaging and influential on screen than others. 

With 

Linda Woodhead
The FD Maurice Professor and Head of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at King's College London

David Bell
The Lapidus Professor in the Department of History at Princeton University

And

Tom Wright
Reader in Rhetoric at the University of Sussex

Producer: Simon Tillotson

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