20
in its practice. Its grammar is never juridical or technological, it at best can be
called poetic, as Gandhi himself said.
Failure in Success
The final piece to the story of Gandhi, is its ultimate tragic disavowal by his
followers – the eventual defeat of his politics in the success of his political
struggle. There is a Weberian narrative to the story of that demise, and that offers
us certain valuable theoretical insights. But I feel that one should take the
paradoxical nature of that statement, the idea of failure in success more seriously.
Charisma, noted Weber with a sense of fatality that often permeate through his
writings, must give way to a legal rational form of domination. The
transcendental possibility of the charismatic moment, that ruptures the
established structures of domination has to finally arrest that possibility, and
“routinize” it. Routinization always follows the charismatic phase, it is the
inevitable end to the story of charisma. Weber writes,
"Charisma is a phenomenon typical of prophetic movements or of
expansive political movements in their early stages. But as soon as
domination is well established, and above all as control of over large
masses of people exists, it gives away to the forces of everyday routine.”
29
The marker for this shift is control, and the motivation security. When the old
order has been successfully overcome, the movement has to secure its own
29
Max Weber, Economy and Society, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1978 (1956), at
252. For a general discussion on routinization of charisma, also see, pages 246-254.
Convention