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Charisma and objectivity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

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Extract

This essay analyzes the relationship between two ideas central to the social sciences and religion: charisma and objectivity. My goal is to interpret a longstanding theoretical dispute regarding objectivity in the social sciences by referring to sectarian charisma and its challenge to the legitimacy of ecclesiastical authority. In illuminating a religious pattern revealed in the confrontation between social science theory and political philosophy, I suggest that objectivity represents a form of ‘secular’ charisma. I describe the cross-cutting relationship between charisma and objectivity and examine both the religious implications of objectivity and the epistemological implications of charismatic phenomena.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Archives Européenes de Sociology 1988

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References

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(11) Earle, op. cit. p. 13.

(12) Where personal charisma was tempered by the constraints imposed by the need for social order, as in Methodism and Shakerism, a balance allowing for the diffusion of charisma provided for expansion. Where this critical posture was absent, as Barclay demonstrated in eighteenth-century Quakerism, sects disintegrated.

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(19) Ibid.

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(22) Ibid. pp. 55–57.

(23) Earle (op. cit. p. 61) pointed out that there is no factual description of values which does not evacuate those values of their value. In observing and identifying the social, scientist relativises and devalues, but ‘to strip the world of value does not mean […] that we have emptied obligation of all validity, or made values an affair of ‘taste’ which in turn would depend upon complex physiological, psychological or sociological conditions’.

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(25) Ibid. p. 9.

(26) Ibid.

(27) From What is Political Phylosophy? (New York 1959), p. 21.Google Scholar

(28) Midgley, op. cit. p. 67.

(29) Ibid.

(30) See Earle, op. cit. p. 47.

(31) See Shils, Edward, Charisma, , in Center and Periphery (Chicago, University of Chigaco Press, 1975).Google Scholar

(32) See Edward Shils, Charisma, order, and status, in Center and Periphery, op. cit.

(33) Frankel, C., Controversies and Decisions (New York, Russel/Sage, 1976), p. 30.Google Scholar

(34) In von Ranke, Leopold, The Theory and Practice of History, ed. by Igers, George and von Moltke, Konrad (Indianapolis 1973)Google Scholar.