...Joshua Derman Charisma , a buzzword beloved by sociologists, political scientists, psychologists, self-help gurus, and scholars of celebrity, is in its modern secular usage a concept of very recent origin. Between 1915 and 1922 the German scholar Max Weber introduced it into the vocabulary...

.... At issue is in part the political and the eschatological dimensions of the Pauline usage of klēsis and of related political-theological concepts at work in Martin Luther, Max Weber, and Agamben. The essay should be read as a point of departure for two considerations that seem of particular interest...

...Gerard Passannante This essay locates in Max Weber’s body of work a theory of recognition in compulsion. With particular attention to Weber’s engagement with pre- and early modern sources, the essay argues that this theory illuminates his project of historical interpretation. For Weber, compulsion...

...Eva Horn Max Weber's concept of charisma is notorious both in social theory and in cultural analysis. This article elaborates some of the complex and sometimes contradictory implications of Weber's term, especially its political, theological, and aesthetical aspects. His term must be seen...

...Niels Werber The charisma of Ahab, captain of Herman Melville's famous whale-hunting vessel Pequod , is a well-established topic of inquiry in various disciplines. His charismatic leadership has been described with the help of Max Weber's Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft , deciphered as anticipating...

.... This ambivalence can be understood as rhetorical, since it is informed by a series of metaphors and figures that make up the complex fabric of these discourses. A close reading of selected texts of Max Weber shows how they were essential to formulating the concept of secularization around 1900. The present essay...

... as the product of a chain of operations in which one element is highlighted in a way that ascribes charisma to it. In the light of media theory, Max Weber's sociological approach can be put in perspective. Weber seems to ignore the “technical side” of charisma: the arrangements, stagings, and semiotic processes...

...Armin Schäfer In twentieth-century German literature, Alfred Döblin's novel The Three Leaps of Wang Lun is an outstanding example not only of the invention of a charismatic leader but also of an attempt to analyze those aspects of charisma that Max Weber did not want to touch on. Döblin saw...

...Claudia Schmölders Despite the German obsession with physiognomics, no one appears ever to have discussed the omission of physical features from Max Weber's 1921 theory of charisma. Beginning around 1800 with Johann Caspar Lavater, a Swiss priest and a friend of Goethe, the practice of deducing...

...Mathijs Peters Abstract This article focuses on the role that the notion of temporality can and should play in the tradition of Critical Theory. Following an overview of the critical analyses of time found in the works of Marx, Lukács, Weber, Adorno, Fromm, and Marcuse, the article analyzes Hartmut...

... with Adorno’s correspondence with Max Horkheimer sheds light on Spengler as an overlooked key (next to Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, and Walter Benjamin) to their Dialectic of Enlightenment , written in 1941–44. Adorno’s daring effort to appropriate Spengler’s analysis of Caesarism makes Adorno’s critical theory...

..., as in the sociology of Max Weber and Georg Simmel, but also to contemporary dialectical theology. Systematically, the unfolding of the sacred as a movement in the text opens up a critical perspective on the current turn to religion in theory, which often refers to Benjamin affirmatively yet overlooks the complexity...

...C. Stephen Jaeger Critical theory has made little use of “aura” and virtually none of “charisma.” Drawing on passages from Homer and Marcel Proust, this article broadens the view of aura that has developed among Walter Benjamin and his commentators and adds to the view of Max Weber and his...

...Eva Horn Recent biographies of Adolf Hitler's life, especially those by Joachim C. Fest, Ian Kershaw, and Ludolf Herbst, have referred extensively to Max Weber's concept of charisma. The article raises the question of what it means to narrate the charisma of a historical figure such as Adolf Hitler...

... does the fall from sacred formula to obscene profanity have to say about language or the profane? Political theology, from its crucial inception in Schmitt’s contribution to a 1922 posthumous festschrift for Max Weber, through its many infl ections and reroutings, concerns itself...

... aside. The machine now runs by itself” ( PT1 , 62). Schmitt has nothing against an understanding of the state as a machine as long as its sovereign engineer remains in charge of it. However, the great machine of the modern state, Weber’s “huge industrial plant,” runs by itself. If, as Schmitt claims...

... . The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory . Malden, MA : Wiley-Blackwell . Said Edward . 1983 . “Traveling Theory.” In The World, the Text, and the Critic , 226 – 46 . Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press . Scaff Lawrence A. 2011 . Max Weber in America . Princeton, NJ...

... . Stroech Jürgen . 1974 . “Die Solidaritätsbewegung zur Befreiung Ernst Thälmann (1933–1936).” MA thesis , Humboldt-Universität Berlin, Fachrichtung Geschichte (Fernstudium) . Weber Hermann . 1969 . Die Wandlung des deutschen Kommunismus: Die Stalinisierung der KPD in der Weimarer...

... to dominate the Weimar era, which, in any case, he did not live to see, Landauer was brutally murdered by Freikorps soldiers in 1919. 8 Accordingly, he is perhaps most helpfully understood in terms of what Max Weber evocatively describes as the “Jewish pariah intelligentsia.” 9 Nevertheless, the present...

... that Adorno remains within the paradigm of consciousness philosophy is questionable.3 Since the publication in the 1990s of Fredric Jameson’s Late Marxism and, subsequently, Peter Uwe Hohendahl’s Prismatic Thought and Shierry Weber Nicholsen’s Exact Imagination, Late Work, as well as recent essays...