But within two decades, the word was widespread enough for a 1969 piece in Time to call it “one of the dominant clichés of the 1960s.” Google Books data confirm this, showing charisma and charismatic leaping 1,700 percent from 1940 to 1970, and continuing the same exponential curve through to the 2000s, by which time it had grown 6,000 percent. In 1949, the sociologist and journalist Daniel Bell tried to slip the word into a Fortune magazine piece only to have it rejected by the editors as elite jargon. Charisma owes its popularity to its journey across the Atlantic, where it was enthusiastically adopted first by postwar American intellectuals sympathetic to Weber, and then by a mass public eager to explain the new world of televisual political celebrity. This new usage remained obscure for almost half a century. Rather than economic forces or ideologies, it was the “ecstatic state” between rulers and their followers that explained politics. Weber, famous as a chief architect of modern social science, was not rejecting nonempirical, magical ideas such as telepathy, the Polynesian mana, or the Iroquois orenda, but repackaging them. ![]() We shall henceforth employ the term “charisma” for such extraordinary powers. ![]() It is primarily, though not exclusively, these extraordinary powers that have been designated by such special terms as “Mana,” “Orenda,” and the Iranian “Maga” (the term from which our word “magic” is derived). Not every person has the capacity to achieve the ecstatic states which are viewed, in accordance with rules of experience, as the pre-conditions for producing certain effects in meteorology, healing, divination, and telepathy. Here’s how Weber described the concept in his posthumous 1920 book, Sociology of Religion: Charisma, he argued, is the “specifically creative revolutionary force in human history.” In the 1910s, Weber dusted off this obscure theological term to describe forms of political authority based on the “extraordinary powers” of specific individuals. Yet its modern usage is only a century old. Perhaps the most influential of these anti-positivists was the German sociologist Max Weber, and among his more influential contributions was the word charisma.Ĭharisma comes from the ancient Greek for “gift for grace.” Its classical origins give it a timeless feel. In the 19th century, positivists like Auguste Comte, who believed that society could be explained in coldly scientific ways, split with anti-positivists like Friedrich Nietzsche, who argued for more subjective, affective approaches. ![]() At the end of the 18th century, Romanticism pushed back against empiricism, as symbolized in William Blake’s 1795 painting of Isaac Newton: The scientist’s obsession with measurement leads him to literally turn his back on the natural world. T he rejection of hard evidence in favor of emotional intuition is one of the oldest moves in modern political thought. What also interests me is that, not too long ago, the commentators who reach for vibes now would have reached for charisma, and that latter word may help us understand what vibes conveys about emotional politics today. It expresses the suspicion that dry objectivity is never quite sufficient. It’s a way of saying: Numbers lie, and emotion always lurks beneath the surface, so let’s stop pretending. What interests me about this form of analysis is that it is a rejection of analysis itself. In place of data, vibe-talk promises instead to capture deeper emotional currents. To the political commentator Will Stancil, “‘vibes’ is the idea that politics is rooted in and governed by mass psychology, which makes political behavior intrinsically difficult (and sometimes impossible) to model as a series of quantifiable inputs and predictable outputs, the approach favored by econometrically-inclined disciplines.” ![]() Graham argued that John Fetterman won the Democratic Senate primary for Pennsylvania less on policy than “ on vibes.” And Rolling Stone pronounced that Fetterman was “neither centrist nor a progressive. In this magazine in 2021, Derek Thompson invited readers to think of politics as a “ vibes war.” This spring, again in these pages, David A. It is the prevailing shorthand for a cultural atmosphere, mood, and zeitgeist. V ibes has become a ubiquitous word in the past half decade, one many people now reach for when describing the distinct emotion given off by a place, or a thing.
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