ABSTRACT
This chapter argues for the centrality of ‘charismatic domination’ among Weber’s ideal-types of legitimate authority and emphasizes its vital importance for our understanding of political life and modern democracy. It achieves this by providing an anthropological interpretation of charisma as a symbol of order expressing the classical Greek and Christian outlook on existence as metaxy. The argument exposes the errors involved in the application of positivist and critical methodologies to charisma and then elaborates the anthropological approach by linking charisma with the experience of liminality and with the political. In this context, charisma properly understood is identified as a restorative quality aimed at safeguarding against depersonalization processes and the corruption of gift relations. Charisma attains this by pointing towards right relations among three active powers characteristic of political life and the anthropological condition: the one, the few and the many. The chapter closes with a few reflections on the strains emerging between the practice of modern democracy and charisma. By introducing a fourth active power – the incommensurable all – modern democratic politics symbolically transforms the citizen body into a charismatic people, hence corrupting our understanding of charisma through reducing it to a mere electoral leader-shop, of puritan genesis.
