CHARISMA

attribute of awesome and almost magical power and capacity ascribed by followers to the person and personality of extraordinarily magnetic leaders. Such leaders may be political and secular as well as religious. The term came into scholarly usage primarily through the works of the German sociologist Max Weber (18641920), especially his Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (1921; On Law in Economy and Society, 1954), in which he postulated that charismatic authority was a form of authority distinct from those of tradition and law. The process whereby charismatic authority becomes transformed, or changed, to any of the other forms is referred to by Weber as the routinization of charisma. Although in current usage many popular and attractive leaders are called charismatic, in the original sense of the word only such phenomenal personages as Jesus or Napoleon merit the description charismatic.