The History of a Word

Abstract

This book is a history of the word ‘charisma’, and the meanings associated with that word, over a duration spanning the first century AD to the twenty-first. In a severely brief outline, this history is as follows: the term ‘charisma’ emerged in the early Christian church of the first century; charisma was eclipsed as a religious concept within the church by the end of the third century; it lay submerged for many centuries, with intermittent appearances; charisma was reinvented in Max Weber’s sociology in the early twentieth century; the word is widely used in contemporary Western culture, in media, academic scholarship and popular discourse. My analysis of the history of this term — its invention, eclipse, reappearance and transformation — explores its shifting cultural role over two millennia.KeywordsCharismatic LeaderContemporary CultureGrand NarrativePopular DiscourseReligious IdeaThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.