The Mine Bosses' Union--A Study in Group Leadership

Abstract

of his fellows who align themselves with the commercial interests of uptown New York. The artist and intellectual can assume such a position successfully only because he stands outside the ties of the more mundane world, free from occupational routine and social obligations. In essence charismatic authority is unstable. The intellectual knows no legitimacy other than that provided by the recognition of his followers. Should this recognition fail, his position is lost, for he cannot deduce his authority from code or statute. He must constantly prove himself anew to his followers. His polemics against society must be comprehensible in terms of the life experience of at least a segment of society's members. His followers are loyal to this inner vision of society and not necessarily to him as a person and certainly not to his office or position. Weber pointed out that it is the fate of charisma whenever it comes into contact with the permanent institutions of a community to give way to tradition, rational socialization, and discipline.32 The chief factor determining this routinization of charisma has been the desire of a particular social strata or interest group to legitimize and thus preserve their privileged position. Prestige and influence which were charismatically acquired are legalized and rationalized into a cosmos of acquired rights, duties, and functions. Allegiance no longer adheres to the individual but to his office or social position. That such rationalization has not taken place in the case of the intellectuals is largely due to the accessibility of intellectual status and the fact that intellectual leadership has so generally been in opposition to social restraints of any kind. In addition the social position of the artist intellectual has seldom been one which it would be to his great advantage to preserve and the artist by very definition has never been a practical man of affairs who would undertake its systematic institutionalization. It is precisely because the intellectual artistic elite have never been a governing or administrative group that they have escaped internal discipline and have as a group maintained their charismatic authority. 3 Gerth and Mills, op. cit., p. 253.