A few days before the outbreak of the Egyptian Revolution on January 25, 2011, Mohamed Salmawi published Ajnihat al-Farasha [Wings of the Butterfly], a novel that has been described as foreseeing the revolution. The novel did in fact describe scenes that eerily resembled what Egypt would experience shortly following its publication: masses rallying throughout the country, occupied central squares, a population transformed into determined revolutionaries, united against a regime. Yet, these astonishing similarities between this pre-revolutionary imagination and the actual revolution are misleading. In the novel, the masses rise up to protest the arrest of a popular leader, whom everyone regarded to be the legitimate expression of their collective grievances. The imagined revolution looked like one from almost a century before – notably, 1919 – not the one that was just about to explode in 2011.
This pre-revolutionary imagination reveals a pattern of thinking among many intellectuals, namely a pattern in which the future is regarded to be knowable through the demonstrated and proven patterns of the past. The past, in other words, furnishes the materials needed to forecast the future. And the known tales of past revolutions have told us that revolutions are typically associated with personal charismas: there was a Lenin, after all, and not just a Bolshevik revolution. There was a Sa’d Zaghloul, and not just a 1919 revolution. And to illustrate the point even further, there was a charismatic Nasser, but probably not before the Suez Crisis of 1956 – the time when the colonial powers were demonstrably defeated – at least as most people had wanted to see the event. In all cases, the fact that a previous experience with charisma has been deposited into our historical memory, suggests that that memory itself now generates demand for future charisma. In this way, the expectation of charisma is built into the fabric of the culture. But does this expectation actually generate a future charisma? My thesis is that it does, but with an amendment: for historical memory is also a way of judging the record of the previous experiment, which means that the next charismatic experience, while expected, will not look the same as the previous one.
We see this in 2011, when the charismatic expectation represented in works like Wings of the Butterfly fails to materialize, precisely against expectation, and precisely in revolutions that were surprising in at least two ways: that they happened at all, and that they happened without charismatic leadership – again, against the customary expectation. Millions of Arabs rose up across the entire region in one of the greatest revolutionary events of our times. But as those movements went on, it became clear that they did not resemble anything that had happened before. In the end, no Nasser emerged to stand in for their great hopes; no Khomeini to express their messianic character; no Sa’d Zaghloul to represent their claim as social consensus; no vanguard to explain to people what they had just done, or what the next step should be. Even more importantly, there seemed to be no demand for a Nasser or a Khomeini or a vanguard. At best, in some places, like Syria, people spoke of a new species of activists called munassiqin, “coordinators,” but not of leaders. And even in Sudan in 2019 or in Tunisia after 2011, where there did exist some coordinating and mediating structures more so than in the other revolts, one could still hardly speak of a charismatic leadership. In no country were the personalities that vied to control the scene after the uprisings seen to possess any charisma. The victory in the Egyptian presidential elections of 2012 of a man like Mohamed Morsi, who was universally regarded to have little if any charisma, suggested that we were entering an age of ordinary leaders. Such leaders typically have one problem in post-revolutionary situations: while they may for a while express at best the hopes of a hesitant and slight majority, they were not, anywhere, seen to express a monopoly over the spirit of the revolution, nor a post-revolutionary social consensus. My thesis here is that charisma’s main difference between personality cults and populism lies in that charisma represents what appears to be a voluntary social consensus. Populism, by contrast, represents a condition of psychological civil war within a society, and cult of personality is an attempt at manufacturing charisma that nonetheless can only be maintained by force rather than voluntary conviction.
There is some evidence that what we see in the case of the Arab uprisings parallels a global pattern, in which mass rebellion or mass movements for social renewal are no longer associated with charismatic authority. We should not forget that 2011 also witnessed a global wave of large and broadly dispersed protests in other parts of the world, including the Occupy movement, the Indignados and the northern Mediterranean in general, and even in Russia. These too were similar to the Arab uprisings in many respects: they too spoke in the generic name of “the people” (or at least some “99%”), rather than of a specific social class or a specific disadvantaged group; they too were generally against vaguely defined “elites” or “the regime/system” (rather than, say, the government); they too were characterized, at least in their early stage, by artistic creativity, a festive character, feelings of joy, freedom, and capacity; they too had no clear structures or organization; and most importantly for our purposes here, they too produced no leadership and seemed to be disinterested in leaders, much less of the charismatic type.
Similarly, the century that gave us Zaghloul, Nasser, Khomeini, and so many other memorable giants, also gave us similar charismatic representations of social consensus elsewhere in the colonial south, from Juan Peron to Ho Chi Minh to Mao to Ataturk to Gandhi to Lumumba to Mandela to an endless list of saviors, all of whom, including failed and assassinated ones, were memorable “man of the people” type, who seemed to be a necessary ingredient for modern emancipation, and whose assumed greatness corresponded to the magnitude of the mission with which he was entrusted. The anti-colonial era, in which the vanguard, in a Leninist but not necessarily communist sense, overlapped with and sometimes reinforced the charismatic authority, was saturated with a charismatic climate that seemed natural to it.
With this historical record behind us, we can see how we moved from an era in which great events were naturally expected to be associated with great personalities, to one in which great events assume an anarchic character, in the sense that they seem to require the absence of the great person – indeed, they seem to be possible only where personal greatness, which may be celebrated elsewhere in the culture, disappears from revolutionary activity in such a way that the revolution may contemplate itself fully as a great event, rather than fixate on the handsome savior who is leading it. Instead, we see at the forefront of revolutionary action the ordinary person, who feels new capacity, though she is perhaps too worn by traditional modesty, so she covers herself under the cloak of “the people” for a while, and peoplehood becomes for a while as uncriticizable as the old charisma. Related to that is the feeling that the event itself, the revolution, is what seemed to assume some of the features of charisma, at least while it is in motion. Earlier forms of charisma were experiments in salvation at the hands of an authority. But now we have learned, via historical memory, that the agent is the little person. And if that is what historical memory has taught us, then its work in this case may consist of moving the little revolutionary person further along the lines of “enlightenment,” in the sense that Immanuel Kant defined it: enlightenment as capacity for maturity and autonomous self-expression, rather than through an authority.
If this is true, we would be led to the conclusion that charisma operates as one alternative to enlightenment, that it so say, charisma as a way of designating an agent outside the ordinary citizen to convey to the world, on behalf of the citizen, what the citizen had wanted to say, when that citizen did not regard oneself to be articulate, confident, or strong enough to convey his positions directly. In this sense, charisma resembles a relation of love in which it is not obvious why the love exists, while at the same time it appears inescapable. The reason for the love is not fully known, but the person in love finds it fulfilling all the same, and reason seems to be unnecessary or even distracting from the satisfaction provided by the experience of love.
While this may be the case sometimes, it is a vast exaggeration to claim that the formula “charisma versus enlightenment” captures the full range of charismatic experiences. For instance, it is noticeable how charisma has been an unusually effective means of unifying the opposition in conditions of great power imbalance, as in the colonial experience. Examples of this situation are abundant. They range across all kinds of ideological divides. For example, Michael Adas’s study of millenarian anti-colonial movements explores situations in which charisma becomes fused with grand millenarian visions of the struggle. He observes that fusion in widely dispersed societies ranging from interior Java to New Zealand Maoris to the Maji Maji in German East Africa to colonial Burma. All those movements, according to Adas, were typified by prophets emerging on the local scene, around whom the unity of previously independent groups was consolidated. The prophet, as we already know from Max Weber, is the ideal type of the charismatic authority. The anti-colonial prophets fit in fact Weber’s definition perfectly, in the sense that they were not subject to traditional limits to authority. They were believed to be capable of miraculous acts, apparently because defeating a superior colonial army did require miracles. For example, it is curious that almost all prophets in Adas’s sample promised their adherents formulas or potions specifically designed to make them immune to the bullets of the colonial army, bullets against which they otherwise had no defense.
In such cases, the effect of charisma consists in its unique ability to provide two essential tasks for which history has not provided the groundwork: first, forge unity among separate groups facing a common enemy, or within an otherwise fragmented society needing a feeling of unified purpose against such an enemy; second, furnish a sense of invulnerability, or at least previously unknown strength, against a previously unknown but demonstrably superior enemy. The fact that this type of charisma is sometimes associated with prophets or those designated by them – such as in the case of the Mahdiyyah in Sudan – does not mean that these tasks (unity of fragmented groups and invulnerability against the technological superiority of a modern enemy) necessarily require either prophets or millenarian thought, although millenarian thought and prophetic experiences express most clearly the perfect qualities that those who join the movement under the banner of the charismatic leader are looking for. The fact that the struggle in many cases goes on after the death of the prophet, shows that what matters most is the cause for which one is fighting, rather than the charismatic leader, whose role in these cases seems to consist of making the movement possible, but not necessarily sustaining it by his continuing presence thereafter. In fact, in some cases, like Izziddin al-Qassam in Palestine, the premature death of the charismatic leader even before the battles have started was insufficient to halt the movement for which he had provided the spark. The cause needed a spark, and the role of the charismatic leader consisted primarily in providing that spark, that is, creating a condition of possibility of the movement. And this he does, not necessarily by actually leading his people into battle, but rather by providing them with a sense of extraordinary capacity that they otherwise lack.
The millenarian variety of charismatic leadership was never the first choice followed in resisting colonialism. Indeed, the millenarian type of political charisma – requiring something like a prophet or at least a saint as a leader – seems to happen only after an ordinary traditional leadership had attempted an anti-colonial mobilization and failed. A good example of this from 19th-century Algeria is how the messianic revolt of Buziyan (1849) followed in the footsteps of the earlier revolt of Abdulkader (1831–1846). The difference between the two is illustrative of how traditional and charismatic authorities intersect and lead to each other. As Julia Clancy-Smith demonstrates, the old Sufi traditions that had formed both Abdulkader and Buziyan shared similar beliefs in otherworldly interventions. However, whereas the traditional Sufi perspective had typically highlighted the role of small miracles, or Karamat (blessings), when we come to Buziyan these are magnified and assume the character of mu’jizat (miracles), and Buziyan even declared himself a Mahdi. The obvious reason for this transformation is that the failure of Abdelkader, or the earlier, traditional leadership, now suggests that miracles and those capable of promising them are more needed than ever before.
Here we can tentatively say that charisma appears to be essential when the struggle itself appears to be essential. But this may only be temporary. Prophetic charisma, as attempted by Buziyan, must be seen as experiments in resistance, which may be abandoned when they fail, even though the struggle goes on afterwards by other means. Buziyan only emerged after the surrender of Abdulkader, and the failure of Abdulkader meant that the new styles of resistance will have to learn new tricks. And after the subsequent failure of Buziyan’s prophetic attempt, resistance to colonialism in Algeria went on, but took forms that no longer relied on charismatic expectation.
In the 20th century, anti-colonial movements continued to produce charismatic personalities, but now a new concept of leadership – typically identified with Lenin – began to travel around the world and give a certain structure to the more general ideas of resistance to a global capitalist system. In theory, the notion of the “vanguard” had no clear relationship to charisma, nor did it entail any charismatic expectation by necessity. If anything, the very idea of a vanguard could be seen as a later outgrowth of enlightenment logic, highlighting rational planning, theoretical knowledge, discipline over impulsive spontaneity, transforming passions into strategy, and enlightened guidance by a revolutionary elite. This conception of vanguard was appropriated by non-Marxist movements as well. We see it for example in religious movements such as Hizb al-Tahrir, as well as in nation-building projects in which a nation – rarely experienced as a feeling before by large segments of the population – is produced in educational curricula, language standardization, and media by an educated elite that sees itself entrusted with the task of “reawakening” the nation from its deep slumber. Ataturk, for instance, is an example of this project, and he was not unique in the sense of having combined charisma and a vanguardist mindset in the same person.
Much has happened in the century separating us from Max Weber’s original outline of charismatic authority to warrant some revisions of his thesis. For instance, it is more clear to us now than it was for Weber, who wrote before Stalin, that there should be a distinction between charisma and a number of other styles of domination that may at first sight seem close to charisma, but on closer inspection reveal themselves to be very different from it. These include populism, personality cults, and even the idea of a vanguard. For instance, Weber assumed that a cult of personality emerges in tandem with charismatic authority and is not to be distinguished from it, although by now we have ample evidence to approach cults of personality as state-engineered attempts to manufacture charisma without social basis for it. Cases such as Saddam Hussein or Mu’ammar Ghaddafi, for example, show how cults of personality require large investment in a coercive apparatus to maintain them, so much so that they could hardly be seen as expressions of charismatic authority, which by definition elicits voluntary following. Weber himself argues that charismatic authority, like all kinds of legitimate domination, is generally accepted without violence and therefore are less costly forms of domination.
Yet, charisma, just like cult of personality or populism, is highly dependent on personalities that carry them, and are always at risk of dissolving with the passing of the leader – unless replaced by equally acceptable alternative leaders. If an alternative charismatic leader becomes immediately available, this would suggest that charisma is produced by a social demand for charisma, indeed, a social need for charisma. And conversely, if a cult of personality is replaced by another cult of personality, this would suggest that the governing system is so structured as to require a cult of personality as one of its foundations – at least from the point of view of those administering it. Along these lines, populism seems to be closer to charisma, although it is more defined by the fact that the populist leader is a polarizing figure, rejected by a substantial part of the population: while the charismatic leader type that has emerged in anti-colonial situations embodies an appearance of social consensus, the populist leader represents the reality of a society in a condition of psychological civil war. He may be replaced, then, by an alternative populist leader so long there is need for the civil war to go on.
A charismatic leader, on the other hand, would be followed by another charismatic leader so long there is need for social consensus to be maintained with minimal costs by an extraordinary authority – perhaps temporarily and until a certain collective mission is accomplished. For example, we know that Napoleon explicitly stated that he did not want to be followed by another Napoleon, but rather by a more law-bound ruler who would thereby express the expectation that the world mission that had called for a Napoleon will by then be regarded as having been fulfilled, thus requiring no more charisma. In this view, charisma is there for a reason, and it makes its appearance in the world not when a charismatic leader emerges. Rather, he emerges when we need him.
Less useful for our purposes is Weber’s notion of the routinization of charisma. More useful, I think, is detecting the variety of pathways after charisma. Sometimes, for example, the charismatic experience is followed by a highly repressive system, whose repression verifies the absence of charisma. At other times, charisma is identified ex post facto, locating it at the founding of society (as in the current image of Sheikh Zayed in the UAE). In this case, charisma is produced not through the actual experience of a population, but is attempted through educational curricula and public monuments, all of which encourage the population to retroactively feel the charismatic character of a moment in a past history that none or few have actually experienced. It is indeed possible that the profusion of charismatic experiences or attempts throughout the politics of the past century may have something to do with modern educational curricula, which brought to young minds everywhere a vision of national histories as a set of grand spectacles undertaken by exceptional characters, who nonetheless were presented as having something to say about present conditions.
Most useful for our specific analysis of charisma in the usual sense of the word is the concept of historical memory, but in the specific form that Jan Assmann calls “communicative memory,” that is, the non-institutional circulation of historical memory from below. This form of memory is perhaps most useful for an analysis of especially social movements that are borne at a distance from state-sponsored educational curricula, and I did experience it in conversations with school teachers in Tahrir Square back in January and February of 2011, who denounced the formal educational system and suggested that useful knowledge is produced elsewhere in society. And the fact that many participants, including less educated ones, freely referred to the 1919 revolution goes just a little further than Assmann’s suggestion that communicative memory cannot reach further than 80 years – the time span of three interacting generations.
What I want to suggest is that with regard to charismatic experiences, this type of popular historical memory circulates as an additive to the frozen school curricula, and takes on an experimental form: “we have tried charisma, and it has at best delivered only partial salvation. From that, we have learned that we need to seek salvation by means other than personal charisma.” We already see this learning much earlier than the events of 2011, notably in the first Palestinian intifada in 1987, some of whose defining patterns show remarkable similarities to the events of 2011 elsewhere in the region. Mass rebellions in the region with somewhat similar features can also be seen in the modern history of Sudan, notably in 1964 and 1985, both of which, just like the 2019 uprising, toppled at least the head of the regime. There too, just as in Palestine in 1987 and the larger waves of uprisings in 2011 and 2019, no charismatic authorities were produced and none seemed to be necessary for the rebellions to go on. This means that the sociological features of 2011 and after probably have a much longer social history behind them than we suspect.
I want to emphasize that we are speaking here only of mass revolts that are aimed at changing an entire system, rather than other mass uprisings that, while they may have a spontaneous character, fall into the realm of specific demands that require no overthrow of a regime. A good example of this is the bread rebellion in Egypt in 1977, which was a spontaneous mass protest of a specific government announcement, and which immediately receded once the government rescinded its decision. And we know from 2011 that in those countries where the mass protests focused on specific demands (so-called matlabiyyat), as in Jordan, the movement in those conditions never became a full-scale revolution. By contrast, in the countries of revolutions, both in 2011 and 2019, the central demand was regime change, and specific demands, while not forgotten, retreated to the background during the revolutionary climate, which seemed to require a more general way of thinking about the nature of society and of the role of the citizen.
Now, I want to suggest that the road that took us beyond charismatic authority has two primary sociological features: first, it signals a social transformation that has been taking place inaudibly in postcolonial times; second, it suggests the relocation of charisma away from being invested in persons as sources of authority, and into events and abstract ideas.
First, because charisma monopolizes the attention of the spectator, it tends to hide from view much that could otherwise be seen. The fact that charismatic authority delivers a myopic view of a larger reality is verified by the events of 2011 and after, when participants begin to see much more. What they see are essentially two grand replacements of charismatic authority, both of which, just like personal charisma, and just like experiences of love described by Freud, becomes for a moment uncriticizable: the revolution itself, and the idea of al-sha’b, “the people.” Thus here we have an event and a collective agent, but not a leader, as the new locations of the charismatic experience.
In this case, both event and agent assume the same characteristics long associated with charismatic authority: so long as the revolution is in motion, both the revolution as an event and “the people” as its agent are seen to be capable of extraordinary acts; both possess an uncontestable truth; both are uncriticizable; both are objects of unlimited love; the truth they expound is certain, requiring no proof; they provide participants with an original feeling of immense capacity hitherto known neither through ordinary life nor previous experience; and, I think most importantly, they bring logos and eros into temporary union, whereby unshakable truth is verified only by boundless love, and vice versa. In charismatic experiences one loves the truth not because it has been logically proven, but because truth has made a sudden appearance as a grand spectacle that was not previously known to be possible, and by an agent that was previously not known to be capable of discovering it directly.
Now, the little person was in fact herself the creator of the event and its agent. The fundamental fact of the events of 2011 and 2109 was that they were made by ordinary persons, not heroic saviors. But what interests me here is the other fundamental fact, namely that no one seemed to be interested in heroic saviors, and indeed we see a post-revolutionary culture in which the ordinariness, even simplicity, of the revolution and of the revolutionaries seem to be highly valued. Where does this newly found confidence come from?
One possible source would be cultural transformations that had been taking place throughout the region for three decades preceding the revolutions of 2011. This new culture emerged as popular responses to a number of related factors, including the policies of the neoliberal era that had put an end to the hopes that had previously been invested in the “free officers” era and, more generally, the vanguard model of social transformation. It also responded to the increasing incapacity or willingness of various governments to handle social problems resulting from rural to urban migrations; demographic growth; the increasing inequalities that had made the Arab World into the most unequal region in the world; and finally, it responded to the rise of a new neoliberal class that was directly attached to governments, a class with no relation to the old patrimonial elites that had provided a modicum of welfare to their clients in exchange for loyalty. The replacement of the old patrimonial elite with the new neoliberal elite finally removed any remaining connection that most people had to the structures of power in society. By 2011, society and state had become sworn enemies in much of the region, and remain such until today. What Khalid Fahmy said about the Egyptian state could now be applied to any state in the region: our states exist only to serve themselves, and no one else.
Much research has been done about the growth of parallel societies throughout the Middle East over the past three decades, and the works of Salwa Ismail and Asef Bayat stand out in their minute portrayal of everyday patterns of mutual help, conflict resolution, and the way by which the unorganized efforts of millions of individuals result in whole new urban settlements emerging without legal permits or even infrastructural support, sustained only by internal solidarity against an external force such as the police – all of which, incidentally, parallels the earlier experiences of the Palestinian refugee camps. The fact that this intensification of mutual help and solidarity networks could easily be mobilized in the direction of revolutionary activity at the right moment was abundantly clear in 2011, as millions of previously non-political citizens, who had never joined a demonstration before, found it second nature to trust each other in the novel task of becoming revolutionary subjects.
The feeling of capacity by the confident little person, so evident in 2011 and after, can also be detected in the tactics of the revolutions themselves. For example, the preference for spontaneity over deliberate planning, essentially extended the already familiar propensity for spontaneous action in chaotic urban environments teeming with surprises. This tactic itself became an element of faith in achieving results by simply moving. As one protester told me: “ana nazel ‘ala al-shari’ faqat la’ani u’men bi-harakat al-shari’” (“I am heading to [join the others in] the street only because I believe in the dynamism of the street”). Otherwise, he had no plan. This attitude shows a continued lack of faith in organizations, and a belief that moving on its own brings change, or rather, moving and acting is the only method we know, since we have been doing it all our lives, as experiments from which we learn, until we get it right.
There are two other large pre-revolutionary social processes I would like to add to this mix, although their relation to the question of charisma is less certain. Both, however, had a role in increasing the sense of capacity among certain parts of the populations. One is Islamic social movements, and the other is the growth of educational opportunities. With regards to pre-revolutionary Islamic movements, the largest of those were by far the ones that provided their adherents with opportunities for everyday participation in socially beneficial services. I have explored these practices at length elsewhere, so here I would only stress my earlier conclusion that that form of everyday participation in helping others operated in the pre-revolutionary era as an alternative to formal democracy, which did not really exist anywhere in the region. Unlike formal democracy, one great advantage of everyday participation was that it provided participants with a tremendous feeling of self-worth and of being useful to society, thus decreasing their alienation from others especially in rapidly expanding urban areas, and teaching them the art of doing good on their own initiative. The fact that the motive to do so was religious should not distract from the fact that in that way, religion proved itself to be useful and therefore worthy of being followed still.
The other process, namely the vast expansion of knowledge cultures in the three decades preceding the revolutions of 2011 is now better known to us, largely through the extensive documentation we have managed to undertake through the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS), which showed an exponential increase in the number of universities, research centers, publications, civil society groups using social science, across the entire region, and in rich and poor countries alike. Our subsequent exploration of some contents of this knowledge culture shows major research themes to cluster around key areas, all of which are concerned in one way or another with social change.
Let me end with a few notes about contemporary populism, which has been easily confused with charisma, since I think the two terms refer to very different social situations. In recent decades the literature on populism tended to regard it as a style by which leaders bring into the political process individuals who are weekly incorporated or not at all incorporated into stable political parties. In this line of thought, populism appears as an expression of disenchantment of a certain part of the public with the existing structures of formal politics. In light of much literature on the pre-revolutionary Arab region, that is, literature that tended to highlight the importance of “street politics” and its tendency to generate riots rather than purposeful political participation, it would seem that we have a region that had always been populist in its political style. This means that there can be no meaningful distinction here between charismatic and populist experiences. However, if we follow the fundamental character of the historical anti-colonial charisma as an expression of temporary social consensus and popular unity, and note the rootedness of populism in the different psychology of civil war, the distinction not only becomes clear, but also explains why a popular revolution happens without a populist leader, and how that revolution itself assumes a charismatic character that had earlier been expected to radiate only from actual leaders.
Here it is important to keep in mind a clear distinction between the politics of consensus and the politics of civil war, or the general views of social order provided by charisma and populism, respectively. But it is also important to not forget that a revolution expressing popular unity against a regime may also become a civil war, and here we have no shortage of unfortunate examples. Elsewhere I have explored some of the reasons for the move in the direction of civil war. Here I only want to stress the root of this shift in a dual condition: 1) the ideological diversity of any popular revolution; and 2) the potential for such diversity to generate a civil war psychology when coupled with the decline of communicative culture, as one moves into a post-revolutionary, more ordinary political struggles over the spoils left over from the old regime.
If charisma had supplied worthy services and educational lessons during past struggles, what do we lose when we no longer feel a need for it, at least in its usual sense? In the Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx asserts that Louis Bonaparte’s charisma could be explained not by his personal qualities, but by the existence of a social need for unity within a certain class – the well-off but separated farmers in the Vendée – who would through a leader feel themselves a unified class finally, as potatoes in a sack becoming a sack of potatoes. The charismatic leader then, is one who puts a sack of potatoes together. But in a different tradition of inquiry, which registers the same unifying effect but with leaders out of the picture, Max Scheler singles out Einsfühlung, or emotional identification, as a way by which experiences of many fuse into a single direction, which in turn helps establish the unity of a multitude. Scheler’s formulation, which is inspired by the experiences of World War I, would less than a generation later reveal the dark side of this experience of identification, which early recruits to the Nazi party would cite it to the sociologist Theodor Abel as their invitation to fascist politics.
But back to the sack of potatoes: as we have seen in 2011 and 2019, no charismatic authority provided this sense of organic and effortless unity. Rather, peoplehood was felt directly, and in those revolutionary moments, the abstract concept of “the people” assumed a concrete and felt character. Why, then, did no charismatic authority emerge to maintain the sense of social consensus that was so valued during the revolutionary moment? Is it because charismatic authority is no longer trusted, no matter the cost of its absence? Or is it what I have elsewhere called an anarchist enlightenment, that is, enlightenment from below that is gradually making its appearance in experimental forms? If that is the case, then the virtue of this reorientation of the charismatic experience away from leaders and into grand events and little agents signifies the emergence of a new attitude toward emancipation: emancipation not as a gift delivered by a new system that would govern the little person in new ways, but emancipation as an autonomous act, from below, that gives rise in an experimental way to a new personality and new cultural dispositions of the little person. And this is what these great and tragic, but necessary and ongoing revolutions seem to be doing: the person in the revolution does not want to be governed, and has no faith in so-called “legitimate” domination, charismatic or otherwise.