Men on Horseback--The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution

The word “charisma” itself comes from the Greek. It literally means a gift of divine grace, and it appears both in the New Testament and in the earliest Greek translations of the Old Testament.

Yet even as historians kept their distance from anything like a “great man” theory, the social-scientific disciplines continued to ponder the relationship of prominent individuals to society

Historians today have surprisingly few analytical tools to help them understand the role of key individuals in history.

See Sudhir Hazareesingh, Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture (London: Allen Lane, 2020).

Democracies are particularly suspicious of charismatic leaders. Yet, paradoxically, the longing for such leaders acquired new importance, and a distinct new shape, during the very same period that witnessed the first stirrings of modern democracy: the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was during the moment of extraordinary intellectual fermentation that we now call the Enlightenment, and then in the great revolutions that washed across much of the Western world between 1775 and the 1820s, that the powerful forms of political charisma we are familiar with today took shape. These forms of charisma posed challenges to democracy but were also symbiotically linked to it. Indeed, from this period onward the stories of charisma and democracy have wound tightly around one another in their own political version of the double helix. They have done so thanks to a revolutionary transformation in the relationship between ordinary people and their political leaders that began in the eighteenth century but that has never been fully understood. That transformation is the subject of this book.