In 2010 Eva Giloi and Edward Berenson published a volume of ten essays entitled Constructing Charisma: Celebrity, Fame and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe.1 This new book on authority is also co-edited by Giloi and contains chapters by Berenson and Martin Kohlrausch, both of whom were contributors to the earlier book. It picks up again the topic of charisma as an important element of authority but is far broader than its predecessor. Staging Authority characterizes itself as a handbook and so addresses the topic chapter by chapter, each one taking a different approach and thus building up a complex and nuanced picture. The topic, as set out in the title, consists of five elements. The easiest to define is staging: presentation and self-presentation through public performances and spectacles, architecture, images (portraits, photographs, maps), places, and even sound. As the editors argue in the introduction: “authority needs to be staged to be felt” (p. 5). Equally uncontentious is the choice of the period to investigate: the long nineteenth century from 1789 to 1914, with its huge innovations in many different spheres, political, societal, scientific, mercantile, and technological, is a rich field in which to investigate how authority was presented and how it diversified throughout the period. The development and expansion of the mass media throughout the century are other reasons for choosing this time-span. Though Europe is a central focus of the book, with chapters on France, the German Empire, and Britain, there are also articles on the Middle East, on Eurasian empires and on Colombian cities. Authority, the main topic of the book, is the trickiest to define. The editors base their definition on Max Weber’s differentiation between Macht – political power – and Herrschaft the kind of authority or dominance that is often taken for granted. Yet by introducing “power” into the very title of the book, the editors show how slippery the distinction is: the scientists and engineers discussed by Kohlrausch have authority but Emperor Wilhelm I, as analysed by Frederik Frank Sterkenburgh, has not just authority but also political power. As the editors concede, elites claimed consensual authority “but their Herrschaft was still upheld by Macht in the last resort” (p. 14). Heikki Lempa returns to Weber and Arendt on pp. 395f., setting out Weber’s distinction between legal, traditional, and charismatic authority and Arendt’s definition of authority as a self-evident force. Bourdieu’s concepts of doxa and habitus are other important building blocks in the theoretical underpinning of the book.

The book consists of an introduction and fourteen chapters divided into five sections. In the first section, “Traditional and New Forms of Authority”, Xavier Marquez tackles the question of charisma, distinguishing between it, prestige, celebrity, fame, and popularity. He shows how Max Weber took the theological concept of charisma and connected it to secular authority and distinguishes clearly between charisma and modern personality cults. Edward Berenson gives an overview of the work of such scholars as Sudhir Hazareesingh, Juliette Glikman, and Matthew Truesdell to demonstrate how Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, staged his authority as “the people’s king” (p. 50f.).

In the second section, entitled “The Diversification of Authority: New Actors among Old Elites”, Martin Kohlrausch has a fascinating chapter on scientists, inventors and engineers, discussing “the conditions in which a new type of expert could gain authority in the nineteenth century” (p. 92). Tine Van Osselaer discusses the authority of religious leaders of various kinds, taking her analysis right up to such twentieth-century figures as Billy Graham and Pope John Paul II. Betto van Warden shows how, through the development and expansion of mass media, “public authority became increasingly invested in single political actors rather than in collective institutions” (p. 157).

The third section concerns itself with political authority, though here the actors under discussion also have power. It contains three excellent chapters: Philipp Nielsen on the ways in which architecture was used by governments as a space in which emotions could be aroused, for instance, in nineteenth century parliament buildings; Ben Griffin on British political culture and parliamentary authority; and Frederik Frank Sterkenburgh on four of Emperor Wilhelm I’s entries, namely into Berlin in 1848 and 1866 and into Dresden in 1872 and 1882, culminating in his funeral procession in 1888. Sterkenburgh argues convincingly that Wilhelm “was an assertive and astute political actor operating within Germany’s webs of meaning as he sought to stage his interpretation of political authority” (p. 300).

In the fourth section, “Nationalism and Empire as Modes of Hegemony”, Matthew Unangst discusses how maps were used as colonial tools by administrators and explorers, culminating in so-called “suggestive maps” (p. 333), structured not according to scientific accuracy but designed to convey a political message. Sally Totman discusses European explorers and imperial agents in the Middle East, while Darin Stephanov brilliantly analyses the way in which Ottoman and Russian imperial rulers staged their authority by making themselves progressively more visible. He discusses “the fascinating hybridity between Western form and Ottoman content” (p. 383) and shows a similar evolution in the Russian empire.

The fifth and last section, “Taking Possession of Public Spaces”, is the most innovative. In it Heikki Lempa discusses the embodiment of authority and the way in which the mastery of the body which was now expected as a tool through which to demonstrate authority was achieved with the help of physical education experts of various kinds. Eva Giloi analyses cultural tourism, contrasting royal tours as tools of possession and place-making, cultural tourism “as a form of cultural hegemony that reinforced the dominance of educated middle-class men” (p. 417), and finally armchair tourism. Her conclusion is that these activities enabled both sovereigns and private citizens to “take possession of space and demonstrate their authority over the urban landscape through the habitus that guided their movements” (p. 417). In an illuminating final chapter Juan Fernando Velásquez Ospina discusses how sound can be disciplined in order to create and enforce authority. His example is the Columbian city between 1886 and 1930. Columbian cities were originally built on a colonial European plan but were inhabited by a range of different social and racial groups who expressed their identity in their production of and attitude towards sound and noise. He points out how “policies of silencing and censorship aimed to restrict the visibility and audibility of Afro-Colombian and indigenous people in Colombia’s public spaces” (p. 484). Enforcing silence meant “a whitening of urban soundscapes” (p. 484) as a way to establish authority.

In sum, this well-edited and well-organized handbook is an impressive achievement.

Note:
1 Edward Berenson / Eva Giloi (eds.), Constructing Charisma. Celebrity, Fame, and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe, New York 2010.