Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution
David A. Bell
Hardcover: 384 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (May 19, 2020)
ISBN-13: 9780374207922

An immersive examination of why the age of democratic revolutions was also a time of hero worship and strongmen

The word charisma may trace its origins to ancient Greece, but its meaning has never been fixed in the solid schist of Classical Athens. For Saint Paul, to possess charisma was to be filled with divine grace; for Max Weber, it demonstrated how authority could be wielded successfully in defiance of rules and traditions. The word entered our modern lexicon via the pages of Fortune magazine in the 1940s, where it has remained ever since. In Men on Horseback, Princeton historian David A. Bell offers a dramatic new interpretation of charisma, arguing that its contemporary resonance is best understood by refracting it through the lives of five extraordinary revolutionaries.

From Corsica's Pasquale Paoli, a favorite subject of James Boswell, to George Washington; from Toussaint Louverture to his betrayer, Napoleon Bonaparte; and finally to Simón Bolívar, who witnessed the coronation of Napoleon and later sought refuge in newly-independent Haiti: taking these five leaders as his subject, Bell weaves a spellbinding tale of power and its ability to mesmerize.

Ultimately, Bell tells the crucial and neglected story of how leadership was reinvented for a world without kings and queens. If leaders no longer rule by divine right, what underlies their authority? Military valor? The consent of the people? Their own Godlike qualities? Bell’s subjects struggled with this question, and learned from each other as they did so. They were men on horseback who sought to be men of the people; as he shows, modern democracy, militarism, and the cult of the strong man all emerged together. Today, with democracy’s appeal and durability under stress around the world, Bell’s account of its dark twins is timely and revelatory. Charisma is democracy’s shadow self, and it cannot be dispelled; in the end, Bell offers a stirring injunction to reimagine charisma as an animating force for good in the politics of our time.

Author

David A. Bell is the Sydney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the Era of North Atlantic Revolutions at Princeton University and the author of six previous books, among them The First Total War and Shadows of Revolution.