Why Study Charismatic Leadership?
The concept of charismaliterally meaning the gift of gracewas introduced to the social sciences in the writings of the great German scholar Max Weber early in the 1900s. Since that time the term has gained a wide and often misused currency in our popular vocabulary. Part of the rationale for this course is to correct those misunderstandings and to gain a theoretically grounded and clear insight into the meaning of the idea. Fortuitously, recent history has provided us with two powerful exemplars of charismatic leadership in the persons of Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler. In 1940 they were locked in what historian John Lukacs has characterized as the eighty days duel in which Churchill was the opponent of Hitler, the incarnation of the reaction to Hitler, the incarnation of the resistance of an old world, of old freedoms, of old standards against a man incarnating a force that was frighteningly efficient, brutal and new. These two figures commanded the worlds attention during what wa
