Stir into flame: charisma in the US draft resistance movement.

Sociologists have studied charisma almost exclusively as a form of authority, following Weber's original conceptualization. While there have been many elaborations on Weber's work, the full richness of charisma as a concept has remained unexplored and its potential applicability to radically egalitarian movements limited. This paper offers a more democratic conceptualization of charisma by putting Weber's classic theorization into conversation with Hannah Arendt's theory of action. It argues that charisma is best understood as a latent capacity to act, a quality that is not exclusive to a few extraordinary individuals but rather is quintessentially and universally human. Using the US draft resistance movement during the Vietnam War as a case study through which to develop this conceptualization, the paper centers the charismatic act and explores the conditions of existential distress that elicit such acts and the conditions of (emergent) political community that enable and are constituted by them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]