A History of Charisma by John Potts

Nothing, it seems, is too small to have its own history. As academic disciplines such as the history of ideas have grown and prospered, popular non-fiction has followed suit, offering the history of a word, a concept, a technology. This has proven to be a highly effective method of opening up the processes of culture for closer inspection, and for revealing the contingent or motivated roots of what we now take for granted. It has become an appealing and often lively way to write cultural histories. A History of Charisma, by John Potts – associate professor of media studies at Macquarie University – finds itself in this genre. While written in a scholarly mode, it is an accessible history of the word ‘charisma’ and its changing connotations. It is a spectacularly long history, as it turns out, beginning with the conversion of St Paul, and wending its way through the first couple of centuries of Christianity before being suppressed by an increasingly bureaucratic (and determinedly uncharismatic) organised Church. There it languishes, more or less, until the late nineteenth century, when Max Weber adopts it as a useful concept for the fledgling discipline of sociology to explain aspects of the power and authority of the political leader in mass societies. It is largely the legacy of the Weberian concept, Potts argues, that has carried over into widespread public usage today; we still see it shaping the media treatment of politicians such as Barack Obama (as having charisma in spades) or John Howard (as having none). It is also used, increasingly and in a much less Weberian sense, within what is now described as celebrity culture as a means of designating something called variously ‘star power’, ‘personal magnetism’, ‘personality’, the ‘X factor’ or, most ineffably, ‘It’. Over this history, then, the term charisma has taken on very different kinds of significance. As Potts has it, charisma was originally ‘invented’ by Paul to describe a miraculous spiritual gift, entailing supernatural powers. It was a gift from God to be shared with all members of the new Christian community. In its most common usage today, however, charisma is a property of individuals seen to have some kind of extraordinary personal quality. In this usage, charisma is bestowed not by divine grace but by entertainment producers, publicists or political spin doctors; rather than being used primarily for the benefit of the community, it aims at attracting that community to the individual concerned for his or her own benefit. Rather than facilitating the diffusion of grace throughout the community, in its current formation charisma seems to be most useful for its possessor as a means of acquiring political power or commercial success. In the historical comparison, perhaps we have the beginnings of an interesting story. Potts is less interested than we might expect, though, in that story. The bulk of his book is devoted to the history of charisma within the Christian Church and, as such, it is probably most directly addressing readers whose primary interest is in that history. Although the presentation of the book – the cover with its Rauschenberg montage around John F. Kennedy, the blurb highlighting the link with the contemporary concept of celebrity, even the hint in the title – alludes to its engagement with contemporary celebrity, that is not really its focus. The book is a little disappointing in this regard, in my view. While it certainly does riff interestingly around charisma ‘in the age of media’, it adds little to what has already been said about stardom and celebrity from within the academy or the quality end of the print media. As a consequence, some opportunities are lost. For instance, there are a couple of interesting writers (John Frow and Chris Rojek) who have investigated the consumption of celebrity as a form of religious practice. The memorialisation of the dead Elvis (or Jim Morrison, or Kurt Cobain), the sightings after the death, the yearly pilgrimages and so on, are not hard to map onto formal religious practices, and both Frow and Rojek have interesting things to say about the correlation. It is a shame that Potts does not appear to know their work. While I have read and respect Potts’s other writing, I have to admit that I was not as engaged by this book as I had expected to be. The reason for this is that, in the end, Potts never fully convinces me that charisma is indeed a worthy focus for a book. While it has considerable strength in the breadth of the history it presents, A History of Charisma simply does not operate in the way the best of this kind of work can do. In Potts’s hands, charisma does not become a means of opening up the connections that make cultural processes work, allowing new light to emerge as a result. Indeed, for a great part of the book I wasn’t sure why he had chosen this topic. The approach assumes that the appeal of the idea was self-evident; therefore, there is not much in the way of an argument aimed at convincing the reader of what is uniquely interesting about the story of charisma. Most disappointingly, the story lacks an ending. Even though Potts asks in Chapter 1 whether there is such a thing as charisma, he concludes without actually answering that question. What we have instead is a final chapter that claims that we have a word such as charisma to signify ‘the unfathomable’, helping us to recognise that, rather than explaining why, ‘certain very rare individuals seem to exert a spell on their contemporaries’. At the end, then, all that can be said is that charisma emerges an example of ‘the mystery, of the inexplicable, in human relations’. Writing this kind of cultural history can be tricky. The choice of the focus or the point of entry is crucial: it must be more than just a little resonant, and most reveal more than merely the shifts of time. There has to be a sense that what has happened to this idea also tells us about what has happened to a lot of other ideas, particularly those that might appear at first totally unrelated, or that it has played a part in directing some of the more significant winds of history. And the history that surrounds these apparently tiny concepts has to be exceptionally densely textured; the best ones are dramatically so. The trouble with Potts’s well-written and thoroughly worthy book is that the history of charisma is pretty much all it is; it does what it sets out to do, sure enough, but it still leaves us wondering why.

Graeme Turner

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