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What Follows To the Stanford History of Political Thought Workshop: What follows are the Introduction and first chapter of my forthcoming book, tentatively titled The Idols of the Age of Revolutions: Charisma and Power in the Atlantic World, 1750-1830. My apologize for the inordinate length. If you are pressed for time, I would suggest skimming pages 20-30, 36-41, and 58- 64. As this is very much a work in progress, please do not cite this material in any way without my permission. I look very much forward to discussing this with you on January 24th! All the best, David Bell INTRODUCTION: Charisma Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world Like a Colossus, and we petty men Walk under his huge legs and peep about To find ourselves dishonorable graves. Julius Caesar, Act I, scene ii When Shakespeare’s character Cassius used these words to describe Julius Caesar, he evoked one of the most durable myths in human culture: there are giants among us; titans, heroes, Übermenschen. They may be mortal, but something about them nonetheless seems miraculous and supernatural. They have extraordinary genius, vision, courage, strength, virtue, sheer magnetism. They seem to burn with a flame that leaves the rest of the human race looking cold and gray. In a word—and it is a word that literally means “a gift of divine grace”—they have charisma. But read the rest of Cassius’s speech, which this febrile, anxious conspirator, he of the “lean and hungry look,” makes to an audience of one: his fellow Roman senator, Marcus Junius Brutus. Cassius has not come to praise Caesar, and his description of Caesar as a Colossus comes slathered in thick, pungent irony. For Cassius, Caesar is a man like any other, despite his oversize reputation. The idea that Caesar is a superman in fact both alarms and disgusts him. He recalls episodes in which Caesar showed himself weak and helpless, like a “sick girl,” and concludes, in a tone of heavy sarcasm: “And this man is now become a god.” To call Caesar a god is blasphemy; to call a him a king, treason. If Caesar lives, and the Romans raise him to royal or divine dignity, then the Republic, in Cassius’s 1 view, will die. Caesar’s charisma is something both false and dangerous, and Cassius’s intention is to enlist the wavering Brutus, Caesar’s protégé, into the conspiracy against him. And yet, as so often with Shakespeare, the words have a power that goes beyond the characters’ intentions. Cassius wants to ridicule Caesar, to bring the false god down to earth, to smash the idol. But his description of Caesar as a Colossus bestriding the narrow world is magnificent, and when his barbed condemnations of Caesar have faded from memory, these words remain, a glimmering reminder of the myth that Cassius wants so desperately to expose as a lie. * * * Both the lure and the dangers of charisma pointed to by Cassius remain with us today. Around the world, in both democratic and autocratic states, there is a perennial longing for leaders with magnetic appeal and extraordinary abilities who can unite viciously divided communities, overcome apparently intractable problems, and by the sheer force of personality give whole nations a new start. But charisma also generates anxieties—especially in democracies. Democracies pride themselves on being governments of laws, not men. What will happen if we treat ordinary, limited, and perhaps even corrupt and criminal people as superhuman, making them into idols? What if the intensity of attraction leads whole countries to follow such leaders blindly, unquestioningly, even as constitutions are flouted, human rights trampled, minorities oppressed and killed, and nations marched off to war? It is no coincidence that the historical figure to whose charisma scholars have devoted the most intense, concentrated study is Adolf Hitler.1 1 See notably Ian Kershaw, Hitler: A Biography (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2008). 2 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 birth of modern democracies: the late 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, that the powerful forms of political charisma we are familiar with today took shape. To an extent that has never properly been recognized, the relationship between ordinary people and their political leaders underwent a revolutionary transformation. That transformation is the subject of this book. Before this period, in Europe and the European overseas empires, political power had had a very different visage from today. It was intensely personal, but it was largely concentrated in monarchs whose legitimacy derived from royal inheritance, and from the blessing of established churches, both of these things grounded in long centuries of tradition. While some rulers—Elizabeth I of England, Louis XIV of France—certainly had a strong charismatic appeal, their rule did not depend on it. A few rare figures—Oliver Cromwell, or Masaniello, the oddly mesmerizing fisherman who briefly seized control of Naples in 1647—may have come to power largely on the basis of their personal appeal, but usually quite fleetingly. They were exceptions to the monarchical rule. For literate men and women in the early eighteenth-century West, the most prominent examples of leaders who rose to power on the basis of their charisma alone were not their own contemporaries, but ancient Romans and Greeks, who belonged to a seemingly closed chapter of history. The most prominent of these Roman and Greek figures, of course, was Julius Caesar. 3 But in the later eighteenth century, the tectonic plates of Western political culture shuddered and broke apart. Even before Minutemen and redcoats opened fire on each other at Lexington in 1775, an intellectual and cultural revolution of sorts had already made it far easier for figures without royal pedigrees or religious sanction to rise to supreme power on the basis of their personal attributes. On the one hand, powerful new ideas of human equality were circulating, according to which even the most ordinary of men—although not women—might well possess greater talent, leadership ability and moral worth than nobles and princes. The century’s most audacious writers argued that it was the worthiest, most talented men who should rule. Meanwhile, striking changes in the world of print were making it possible for ordinary men and women alike to achieve enormous, unprecedented prominence. They could become, to use a word invented in the period, celebrities.2 Periodicals reported on them on a daily basis – and not just on their public actions, but on their private lives as well. Engraving technology made their faces (or, at least, what engravers imagined they looked like) familiar to a broad public. And new literary styles, associated with that dizzily developing genre, the novel, helped authors to present them as familiar, approachable characters. In this book, I will put particular stress on the consequences of the eighteenth century’s revolution in media. Media revolutions tend to have enormous political consequences, because they can fundamentally alter the way ordinary people perceive and relate to their rulers – and the way rulers communicate with them. The invention of the printing press in early modern Europe, and the invention of radio and then television in the twentieth century all had such consequences. We are living today, in the early twenty-first 2 See Antoine Lilti, Figures Publiques: L’invention de La Célébrité, 1750-1850 (Paris: Fayard, 2014). 4 century, through yet another media revolution with enormous political consequences, thanks to the rise of the internet and social media. In the eighteenth century, the rise of new forms of print media, and the exponential increase in the amount of print in circulation, had similarly profound effects. In the eighteenth century, these effects made themselves felt above all after the start of the political revolutions in the 1770’s. The birth of representative democracies put the choice of leaders in the hands of voters – in most cases, exclusively male, white and propertied voters, but voters nonetheless. Then as now, many different factors would feed into voters’ choices, including ideology, party loyalty, regional and class interests. But then as now, personal appeal counted, and frequently counted more heavily than everything else. In regimes that were still fragile, untested, and forbiddingly strange to men and women raised in monarchies and empires, the lure of a leader they could trust and admire, with whom they felt an intense emotional bond, mattered very heavily indeed. Charisma mattered. It came to matter even more as the revolutions continued, and the frail new constitutional structures born out of them trembled, and sometimes collapsed. In such moments of turmoil, the lure of charismatic leaders came to loom over all of political life. These new leaders were not substitute monarchs. Their charisma, and the political authority that derived from it, was something different from what the Western world had known in previous centuries. It was shaped by new political ideas, by the new media culture, and also by the demands of revolutionary politics. In revolutions made in the name of the people, even the most haughtily authoritarian of leaders could not let their bond with the people appear to fray. They needed to be loved, and they needed to appear loved. An absolute monarch of the seventeenth century like France’s imperious Louis XIV welcomed 5 the applause of the common people but did not require it to be seen as legitimate, and would have thought it undignified actively to seek it out.
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