Populist leadership and charisma

Research on populist leadership has brought back the question of charisma. What is it? Can it be defined? Is it good or is it bad? In this chapter, I resist both the definitional and the normative imperatives, and suggest instead that what we call ‘charisma’ points us toward a foundational, latent dimension of social and political life. I focus especially on two aspects of this latent dimension, both of them part of Max Weber’s canonical discussion of charisma: its ‘anti-economic’ and its always emergent character. Drawing on insights from sociology, political theory and psychoanalysis, I argue that the problem of charisma requires us to attend to the sorts of political enjoyments that liberal theory too quickly dismisses as pathological.