Word: charisma
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Dorchester school repairs contractor got him into the headlines. Thievery, or the hint of it, is popular in a city that once elected a mayor after he had served a jail sentence for embezzlement of city funds. One could turn fraud into election if he attached a Robin Hood charisma to it. In the best James Michael Curley tradition. Kerrigan won in a landslide...
...consciousness of the epitome of Roman decadence. His hyper-intellectual views are in opposition to the blind devotion, "pro patria" attitude of his court. He feels obliged to affect Rome's end, because he sees through its facade of greatness. He is a Superman in mind but not in charisma...
...Your recent Essay "Charisma" [Oct. 17] was splendid and timely, but I must take issue with your characterization of Clement Atlee's postwar government in Britain as "dull, bureaucratic but quintessentially normal." The Atlee regime inaugurated six years of the most far-reaching social reconstruction in British history. It established the vast welfare state at home and presided over the dissolution of the British Empire abroad. The Atlee regime may have been dull and bureaucratic, but it most assuredly was not "quintessentially normal...
Except in art and conversation, blandness is not a mortal sin; and even in politics, charisma is not always a virtue. Nkrumah and Sukarno stirred the blood of their countrymen, but they very nearly ruined their countries. Two of the most persuasive leaders of the 20th century were also two of its greatest monsters-Hitler and Mussolini. Particularly in advanced nations, the leader who governs by emotion and style is apt to be regarded as a dangerous indulgence, one that people with stable institutions should not hanker...
...Charisma,* as defined in political terms by Sociologist Max Weber, refers to a leader who has a special grace or extraordinary power to rule by the force of personality alone. In more primitive lands, such a ruler was frequently revered as a father figure with magical capacities. Peasants in Turkey, for example, believed that Dictator Kemal Ataturk was impervious to bullets. Even in relatively sophisticated societies, there is a deep-rooted need for magic. The fact that the magician may not really have talent or wisdom is less important than the popular belief that...