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It is primarily because of Max Weber that the concept of charisma has become part of the vocabulary of the social scientist and has entered into popular discourse. That the concept is widely used in both scholarly and non-scholarly circles is no guarantee that it is fully understood and correctly used. Indeed, it is a rather problematic notion. As Peter Ghosh has noted in his recent intellectual biography of Max Weber and his discussion of the Protestant Ethic, charisma "is another of those great Weberian themes that everybody knows, but where one sometimes wonders if anybody does." (Ghosh 2014: 305). In fact, it was the notion of charisma more than any other of Weber's concepts that initially prompted me to investigate Weber's sociology of religion and, more recently, it was the confusion over the origins and meaning of charisma that gave the impetus for this book. For Weber, charisma is an absolutely extraordinary power and Weber uses the concept throughout much of his later writings. While theological in origin, Weber used it in a variety of different fields, so an understanding of it is indispensable for understanding Weber's sociology.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137454799_7

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