Charismatic Leadership

Newspapers argue every day over what qualities make good leaders. In the UK the focus is on the failures, where lies, association and incompetence are held up to disqualify individuals from positions of responsibility. Meanwhile in the US, being a mother or an outsider can be used to prop up political campaigns. The personal qualities of leaders are consistently used to justify or disavow beliefs, ideas and policies.

However, tying authority to a personality makes a leader's position unstable. In his work exploring authority, Max Weber tackled the role that personalities play (1994), classifying such leadership as charismatic authority. And where power is tied to the individual qualities of a single leader, there lies instability. This is due to continued power being dependent upon the ability of a charismatic leader to repeatedly 'prove their powers' (Hughes et al, 2003).

In practice this means a tyrant must always inspire fear, a mother must never lapse in devotion to family values and the democrat can never be seen to do the sorts of deals that other politicians make every day.

Such a system invites uncertainty, but can also be an effective means of generating a base around which to rally support. Personal qualities become the justification behind many actions; both means and ends. This offers a great flexibility to charismatic leaders, often enabling them to support the achievement of dissonant ends - with the ends justified as right by virtue of the leader's qualities.

Rational authority has a much more difficult time in making its case. Such leadership and authority has to depend upon reasoned, rational & consistent logic - where political means and ends are legitimate because they have evidence to support there conclusions.

However, Joe Chamberlain & HH Asquith discovered in the run up to the 1906 UK election that rational authority is immensely strong when good evidence is available and is well distributed. Chamberlain's soaring rhetoric was undone by Asquith's own approach - travelling up & down the country to address crowds and put the evidence to the people (Marr, 2009).

Charismatic Authority can (and has been) a dangerous tool in the wrong hands. Yet it remains a seductively powerful one. If we are to have real & legitimate democracy, those who would support a more accountable politics would do well to mix campaigning with the scientific method - to bring strong evidence to the ears of voters everywhere. It is a method whose effectiveness has precedent.

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References:
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+ Max Weber's 'Basic Concepts in Sociology'; Chp 4, Pt 4: Bases of Legitimate Order; Citadel 1994.

+ John A Hughes, Peter J Martin & Wes W Sharrock's 'Understanding Classical Sociology: Marx - Weber - Durkheim'; Chapter 3: Max Weber; Power and Forms of Domination, Pg 112; Sage, 2003.

+ Andrew Marr's 'The Making of Modern Britain'; Pt 1: Living in the Future; Joe's Great Rebellion, Pg 34-35; Macmillan 2009.