The Routinization of Charismatic Authority

In recent years, there has been much academic discussion surrounding the routinization of charismatic leadership. The concept of charismatic leadership was first introduced by the German sociologist Max Weber.(1) Before Weber, charisma had always been understood in religious terms. Charisma was understood as superhuman qualities, always of a divine origin, which was present in only a select few individuals. Examples would be men like Moses or Jesus from Christianity, Muhammad from Islam, or Joseph Smith from Mormonism. Weber expanded the common understanding of charisma at the time from being a purely religious term to one with more secular application. In his work, Weber redefined the term charisma in two ways: First, he expanded the characteristics of charisma to include not only superhuman qualities but even exceptional or “exemplary” ones. The second point is even more important, Weber added that for an individual to be considered to be endowed with superhuman or exceptional qualities was enough to classify him as charismatic.(2) The primary implication of this definition of charisma is that its nature becomes more a product of the beholder than of the individual in question’s own characteristics. 

Weber’s work is particularly significant to the study of the American utopian movement because the overwhelming majority of these communities were founded and based on charismatic authority. Unfortunately, this dynamic exposed them to other weaknesses, most notably the routinization which has become closely associated with charismatic leadership in recent academic thought. Weber believed that authority is vested in three different types of social structures, traditional authority, legal authority, and charismatic authority.(3) Charismatic authority stands in opposition to traditional and legal authority. People are drawn to charismatic figures primarily due to dissatisfaction with the two ordinary forms of authority. But according to Weber, charismatic authority is inherently unstable, as already explained, its power resides in the perception that the individual has some extraordinary abilities, thus it is very difficult to transfer charismatic authority between individuals, but even the most successful charismatic leaders are still bound by the natural constraints of old age and will need a successor at some point. Thus, Weber posits that charismatic authority always has a tendency to morph into legal or traditional authority. Weber refers to this process as routinization.(4) It is my contention that all but two utopian groups failed to routinize the authority of their charismatic founders, and this dynamic was the primary factor leading to the movement’s precipitous decline after a brief period of seemingly world-changing socioeconomic potential.

As charismatic movements, the American utopian communes fit very well into Weber’s characterization of revolutionary or disruptive groups. The 19th century US that the utopian communes were born in was a religious landscape full of revivals, change, and reform. The majority of religious movements that began in that era showed strong charismatic characteristics. A few examples beyond the utopian communes are Joseph Smith’s Mormons, and Charles Finney’s revival meetings. While they share several characteristics with these other Christian splinter groups from the era, the utopians are, of course, set apart by their distinct communal practices. 

The Shakers’ Anne Lee was the original charismatic figure within the movement. She was the first to emerge on the American religious scene with a vision for religious social communes. With slight variation, every subsequent group was formed by an individual (or occasionally a small group of individuals) receiving some form of charismatic spiritual enlightenment and forming a communal society based on Shaker practices or their successor movements. 

In the following pages, we will examine three different utopian communes which highlight either unique challenges in the process of routinization, or the pitfalls of failing to do so. While the standard approach for most of the essays in this project has been to compare the three dominant groups, Oneida, Amana, and the Shakers, I have chosen to forego that format for this particular topic. I will instead replace the Shakers with the Owenites, one of the earliest groups to form after the Shakers. I believe the Owenite narrative captures some significant insights into the volatile nature of charismatic authority which will be important for our study.

Oneida

Oneida presents an excellent case study on the effects of routinization. John Humphrey Noyes is the poster child of charismatic leaders. Through decades of the community's lifespan, he steered the community’s direction through sheer force of personality. Noyes wholeheartedly believed that he was a spiritually special individual. In his early 20s, he had become convinced that not only was a sinless life attainable, but that he personally had already attained it. Noyes made it his life’s mission to disciple others into the same victory that he had attained. As the years went by and his following grew, his elevated spiritual state made him privy to direct revelation from God regarding the pastoring of his community. 

Noyes’ dominance was often cloaked, but still very much a reality. While Oneida prided itself in the egalitarian and democratic structure of their community, Noyes was exempt from much of the proceedings that created this environment. One of the primary disciplinary measures the community employed was the practice of mutual criticism. This practice involved the community splitting into groups every Sunday, which would then meet to give pointed and intense criticism into each other’s lives. While Noyes had originally started this practice with a small inner circle, when its value in maintaining group order and cohesion was recognized, it was extended to the entire community. Noyes eventually made himself exempt from criticism under the justification that the absence of sin in his life put him above criticism.

Problems related to routinization began for Noyes in the late 1870s. For several years, there had been a growing sense of unease with Noyes’ authority within the community. These individuals were emboldened in 1874 when a new group joined Oneida from the Berlin Heights Free Love Community in Ohio. The new group was led by an individual named James Towner, and within Oneida, his supporters gained the name Townerites.(5) In retrospect, tensions between Towner and Noyes were fairly predictable, the Ohio group had first requested membership in Oneida in 1866, nearly a decade before they finally moved in. For many years, they had been denied based on Noyes belief that their doctrines were incompatible. While the open marriage arrangements of the two communities might seem fairly similar to the undiscerning eye, for Noyes the practice of his contemporary free love groups was reprehensible. In Oneida’s complex marriage, relationship pairings were a tightly regulated affair. The chaotic anarchy of free love communities represented a grave threat to Noyes specifically because of their similarities to his complex marriage. If Oneidans were to be swayed to the influence of unregulated free love, it could quickly undermine Noyes’ authority and the community’s sense of order. 

After a decade of dialogue and visits between the two groups, the Townerites were finally accepted and moved to Oneida in March 1874. James Towner wasted no time in realizing Noyes’ worst fears. Within a few months of moving in, he had prepared a series of essays to be published in Oneida’s monthly magazine, the Oneida Circular.(6) These essays, whose topic Towner summarized as “Community Contracts”, advocated for a more codified form of authority within the community’s leaders, no doubt inspired heavily by Towner’s former occupation as a lawyer. 

In 1875, Noyes announced that one of his sons, Theodore Noyes, was to succeed him as leader of Oneida. Theodore lacked the gregarious, well-spoken nature his father so holistically embodied. He was quiet, withdrawn, and struggled to articulate ideas. While Noyes apparently believed that his own support for Theodore was sufficient to overcome all opposition, the appointment triggered an intense backlash from several senior members of the community. 

The chief opponent to Theodore’s leadership was another leading figure of the community, William Hinds. Hind’s opposition to Theodore’s appointment was a critical breaking point for the community, as it was the most significant disagreement between Noyes and another senior leader within 30 years of Oneida’s history. After several contentious months, Noyes caved and dropped the idea of stepping down for his son. Rather than choosing another successor, he continued on as the community’s primary authority. However, whether he was aware of it or not, Noyes’ authority had dealt a crippling blow. By challenging Noyes and ultimately getting him to reverse a decision of such magnitude, Hinds and his supporters had set a precedent that would ultimately prove fatal for Noyes’ spiritual authority. 

It is difficult to ascertain whether Hinds and Towner had been supportive of each other before the succession debacle, but they certainly seemed more amicable to each other in the aftermath. For Towner, the crisis greatly strengthened his argument that authority within the community should be codified within boundaries. With Noyes’ desire to withdraw from leadership clearly telegraphed, and his choice of successor uncertain, men such as Hinds now saw this as a much more serious concern. For the next four years, Oneida’s social atmosphere steadily deteriorated into a battleground of factionalism and discontent. During this period, critics from outside Oneida, mostly focused on the issue of complex marriage, began a campaign calling for Noyes’ arrest. Their charge was that Noyes and the rest of the community were sleeping with minors outside the confines of legal marriage. 

Noyes felt increasingly hamstrung in his efforts to lead the community, as his motives and discretion kept being called into question at an ever-increasing rate. Finally, in June 1879, the besieged leader reached the breaking point and decided that his situation was untenable. On June 23, he snuck out of the mansion house under the cover of darkness and a waiting carriage whisked him away to Canada. 

Noyes’ departure set the community into a tailspin. He had far too many supporters within the community for his exit to be a clear victory for the Townerites and their allies. The Townerites did make some gains as a committee of administrators was established to oversee the community’s affairs, a move which ceded much ground towards Towner’s desire to see a more systematic form of governance. In practice, however, Noyes proved rather difficult to replace, many of his supporters had spent decades willingly placing themselves under Noyes’ spiritual authority, and they were not about to switch that allegiance to anyone. His absence jeopardized many of the authority structures the community was built upon. Complex marriage in particular faced severe challenges without the leader. Noyes had played an irreplaceable role as the arbiter of every liaison within the community. While the administrative council was accepted for many of the community's more mundane decisions, very few were willing to accept their authority on this issue. The functioning of complex marriage had been grounded in Noyes’ charismatic authority, and there were simply no alternatives in place to replace him after his departure. Even he recognized this, when letters from his supporters started arriving in Canada, Noyes gave them the only advice he saw as sustainable. End complex marriage and return to monogamy or celibacy. 

That the community ended up following his advice says much about the level of influence that Noyes held in Oneida even after his departure. When the situation came to a head, the Oneida commune proved unprepared and incapable of transferring authority away from their charismatic leader. A significant majority of the members could not be brought to accept any alternative authority. Noyes, for his part, was unable to return to the community due to fear of arrest. The cessation of complex marriage in 1879 was a death knell for the community. As the Oneidans attempted to sort out the complex web of family and maternal relations left behind by complex marriage, the divisions and bitterness between the factions only deepened. Less than a year after complex marriage ended, the community voted to divide the assets and make each member a shareholder of the community’s profitable enterprises. Oneida as a religious commune had ceased to exist. 

John Noyes passed away in 1886, seven years after his departure from the community he had invested his life into. There was no serious attempt at restarting a new community after Oneida closed its doors. Although the majority of the community had been pro-Noyes, only a small handful of former members joined their leader in Canada. Surprisingly, the vast majority stayed on in the mansion house for many years after the community’s dissolution. The Townerites, who had never amounted to more than a minority within the community, continued to rally around their leader. James Towner led his group of supporters to California, where Towner eventually played an instrumental role in the formation of the modern-day conservative bastion of Orange County.

Owenites

Another example of the ultimate unsustainability of charismatic authority within the utopian movement is that of Robert Owen, the leader of the Owenites. The Owenites have remained largely uncovered throughout this project for a variety of reasons. First, Owen was a staunch atheist, and my focus has been predominantly on the religious groups within this movement. Second, the Owenites were an extremely short-lived group that never really formed a cohesive group identity in the way that the other utopian groups did, the reasons for this will become evident in the narrative here. 

Robert Owen was a fascinating figure. His entry into the utopian scene shares some fascinating parallels with Anne Lee, the founder of the Shakers. Both of their utopian journeys began in the factories of Manchester, UK. Manchester in the late 1700s was a booming factory town caught up in the mechanistic fury of the Industrial Revolution. Conditions for workers were horrible. Men, women, and even children spent 14-hour days in the city’s soot-covered cotton mills. They lived stacked into cramped tenant houses, and food was perpetually in short supply. Lee’s communistic convictions took form during her time as an employee in these cotton mills. She and her small group of followers eventually immigrated to the United States to build a Christian society free from the greed and oppression of capitalist industry. Owens arrived in Manchester a decade after Lee and her Shakers left for the United States. His experience in the city was much different from Lee’s, Owen proved quite successful at climbing the corporate ladder within the cotton industry. Eventually, he was even able to afford to purchase his own operation, the mill complex of New Lanark, Scotland.

New Lanark was a factory town, most of the pre-Industrial Revolution factories were hydropower rather than steam, and therefore located along rivers, often some distance from major population centers. In this setting, everything from lodging, food, and amenities had to be provided for the workers, and all were usually established by the mill owner. This gave these early factory owners incredible influence over the lives of their employees. Not only was your employer signing your paycheck, but it was his stores and taverns where you spent it. It was in this environment that Robert Owen began to experiment with social reform at scale. Like Anne Lee, his experience in the factories of Manchester made the plight of the working class the central concern occupying his thoughts. He, too, was intrigued by communism as a solution. Owen enacted many revolutionary social reforms in New Lanark, he spent large sums of money on plumbing and sanitation for the worker’s apartment complexes. And when the textile markets collapsed due to American trade embargoes, Owen kept paying his workers full wages for months as the factory stood silent. He opened schools for the employees’ children at his own expense. Needless to say, he was immensely popular with his employees, but as words of his exploits spread, and his factory proved to be incredibly successful financially, he quickly became nationally famous as well. 

As the story of the philanthropist tycoon spread, Owen’s popularity skyrocketed. Over two decades, thousands of visitors came to see his operation at New Lanark. Owen became an international figure, he made acquaintance with numerous high-ranking members of the English nobility, and even several heads of state from across Europe. Urged on by his newfound fame, Owen turned his ambitions to legislation, drafting bills on education and worker reform for parliament. But his efforts in politics were almost completely ineffectual. After 5 years, whatever bills on workers' reform he did manage to get passed had been so neutered by committees that they were hardly recognizable, and they proved to be nearly completely unenforceable. 

Frustrated by politics, Owen turned to the pen. He began by publishing his own biography, detailing his rise to fortune while strongly affirming two convictions which he had been developing for some time. First, that “communities of cooperation”, Owen believed, were the path forward to a new era of human utopia. And second, religion was the chief obstacle keeping humanity from peaceful cooperation. 

Inspired by his experience running New Lanark, Owen became convinced that the factory town was a model from which a new utopian society could be born. He feverishly published papers outlining the concept of massive single-building complexes he called parallelograms, which would each house self-sufficient societies. Like nearly all the utopian thought leaders, Owen was completely convinced that the advantages of such a society were so manifestly self-evident that should one be built, the model would perpetuate itself through the whole world purely by example. This, Owen claimed, would be the beginning of what he called the New Moral World, a worldwide utopia free from conflict, self-interest, and competition. Owen’s theory was published across Europe and the United States, and he quickly became one of the most broadly recognized thought leaders in revolutionary social theory. Both Marx and Engels would eventually trace the origin of Communism back to the social theories of Robert Owen.

In 1824, Owen received an offer from a utopian commune in Indiana calling themselves the Rappites. The Rappites intended to return to their native Pennsylvania, but they needed to sell their property in Indiana to do so, and they figured Robert Owen was just the man for the job. This was an incredibly fortuitous opportunity for Owen. For $150,000 he would get the complete framework for a thriving commune, workshops, livestock, housing units, and plenty more than enough acreage to support the entire community. Owen set right out for Indiana, and two months later, he signed the deed which would put the first physical manifestation of Owenist utopianism on the map. He named the community New Harmony.

Owen was ecstatic, leaving his son William to iron out the details, he immediately went on a publicity tour of the United States, announcing to anyone who would listen that the great revolution had begun, utopia was finally within grasp. Everyone was welcome, this was Owen’s defining conviction which set him apart from the religious utopians such as the Shakers and Rappites, all of whom Owen had been studying for many years. The New Moral World was a universal utopia, he was absolutely convinced that anybody would be able to integrate into the communal society that he envisioned. 

As he toured the East Coast, his charisma proved just as alluring as it had been in Europe. Again, the political elites rushed to hear him speak, he gave two speeches on communism, social reform, and the New Moral World to Congress. Both speeches were attended by both the outgoing president James Monroe, and the incoming John Quincy Adams, as well as the entirety of their cabinets and the Supreme Court. Many were quite impressed with his presentations, as he traveled the East Coast, a steady stream of arrivals started to arrive in New Harmony. What they found was a long shot from the utopia of Owen’s speeches, the humble structures the Rappites left behind weren’t much to look at. There was a lot of work to be done, but at least if there was one thing the New Harmonists had in abundance, it was enthusiasm. 

After four months, Robert Owen returned to New Harmony to see to the fledgling community. By this point, the community already boasted a thousand occupants. Owen’s first order of business was to choose the site of the parallelogram and oversee the assembly of building materials. Next, he began to strategize how to transition his one thousand new followers over to communism. The first problem on this front was financial viability. The diverse group which had assembled in New Harmony was dense with intellectuals, artists, light craftsmen, and general laborers. What was sorely missing were both farmers and tradesmen who could run the community’s primary money-earning endeavor, a wool-working industry. For the moment, Owens covered the community’s expenses out of his account. He set about drafting an interim constitution for the new community, which he dubbed the “Preliminary Society”. In this arrangement, everyone would begin to get credit for the work they performed within the community, and this credit could then be allocated to cover room, board, and whatever other living expenses arose. 

Shortly thereafter, Owen set off east again. In Philadelphia, he recruited some 40 men from the city’s thriving scientific community to join him in New Harmony. His dream was to turn New Harmony into a bastion of scientific research. One of these men was William Maclure, another wealthy Scotsman who had moved to the United States to pursue his scientific interests. He shared Owen’s passion for educational reform, and he would go on to become a major stakeholder in New Harmony. 

The New Harmony which greeted its founder upon his return was one in desperate need of leadership. In his absence, the community had accomplished pitifully little. No major businesses had been re-established. The extensive farmland, which had plenty more than sustained the Rappite community two years earlier, now lay fallow, as New Harmony still had a critical shortage of skilled farmers. Owen was undeterred. Fresh with enthusiasm from his latest marketing campaign, he almost immediately declared that the time had come to establish full communism. The New Harmonists were more than happy to oblige, they had been waiting for nearly a year in anticipation for their leader’s return to breathe fresh direction into the ailing community. A committee was formed to establish a new constitution. The new constitution was ratified, but in what had become a typical Owenite fashion, it was remarkably vague on any practical specifics of how communism would be enacted. American historian Arthur Bestor observes that the community’s confidence in Owen’s plans was so complete that this crucial oversight was completely overlooked. In the long meetings in which they debated over the constitution, the chief dispute was in how to structure the community’s administration. When all was said and done, the new constitution was even more vague on the practical economics of communism than the Preliminary Society constitution had been.(7) 

Just two weeks after signing their new constitution, the New Harmonists were back in committee. This time the subject was the community’s utter failure to turn a profit, a fact which had rapidly become more glaring when the ownership of the community’s financial state had begun to shift away from Robert Owen’s pocketbook to that of the collective. In short order, the communist society of New Harmony voted to give fiscal ownership right back to their wealthy founder.

Once the seeds of disillusionment set in, the dominoes began to fall quickly. One of the key divisions that began to fester under the surface was Owen’s longstanding opposition to religion. His outspoken atheism attracted many other atheists to the community, but the majority was still largely Christian. Owen’s many public speeches deploring religious belief became a constant sore spot to many of the community members, and across the nation, the conservative press began to turn increasingly hostile to the freethinking communists in New Harmony. Eventually, a large contingent of Methodists decided to break away from the community. In his infinite optimism, Owen chose to see this as proof that his theory of utopian growth was working, and sold the new group the acreage to begin their new community. Shortly thereafter, a group of the community’s best farmers chose to do the same, and they again received the same gracious treatment. 

Confidence in Owen’s leadership received another fatal blow when he again determined that personally bearing the financial burden of the community was unsustainable, and offered to sell the community back to its members. Desperate to save what he could of his personal finances, Owen transferred ownership of the community over to any individuals still optimistic about its success. 

With Robert Owen divested of the community, it quickly became apparent that there was little else which held the community together. Without the theological frameworks of groups like the Shakers or Amana colonies, once Owen’s utopian vision disappeared, all sense of group identity fell apart.(8) While the new shareholders tried valiantly to keep the community functioning, the situation rapidly deteriorated into an every-man-for-himself scramble to extract anything of value from the property.

In 1827, only three years after the great New Harmony experiment began, Owen packed his bags and returned to England. So ended the single most widely publicized manifestation of a utopian movement. In Robert Owen, the utopian movement reached the zenith of its worldwide recognition, but unfortunately, here more than anywhere else, it proved completely incapable of bridging the gap from one man’s dream to a practically sustainable societal movement.

Amana

The Amana Inspirationists offer an interesting twist to our examination of routinization. They are one of the few communities within the utopian movement which managed successfully to transcend charismatic authority. For this essay, we will particularly be focusing on research by Jonathan Andelson, in which he examines the process of charisma routinization within the Amana colonies. Andelson attempts to expand the Weberian concept of routinization by demonstrating that sometimes it is not only the structures surrounding the charismatic individual which routinize, but the actions of the individual themselves. To prove his theory, Andelson focuses on creativity, which he defines as the ability of a charismatic figure to exercise his authority in ways that radically disrupt the status quo. He demonstrates how creative authority gradually diminished over time within Amana’s charismatic authority figures, ultimately heralding the end of charismatic authority within the society.(9)

In terms of charismatic leadership, the Amana Society was structured very differently than the two groups we have observed so far. The Inspirationists believed that individuals within their congregation were “inspired” by God to communicate his will to the church, they called these individuals Werkzeug. There were originally two Werkzeuge in the mid-1700s, but after their death, the group went into a recession for some 80 years until 3 new individuals appeared with the prophetic gift. 

Before they moved to America, the Amana colonies counted three Werkzeuge among their members. One in particular bears special mention, Barbara Landmann was one of only two female charismatic leaders within the utopian movement.(10) Originally born Barbara Heinemann, her inspiration was recognized at a fairly young age, when she was 22. Unfortunately, most of the details surrounding the recognition of her prophetic gift are lost to history. However, she was removed from her position as Werkzeug when she chose to get married to a fellow Inspirationist by the name of George Landmann in 1823. While the Amana society was not a celibate group, they believed that marriage was a distraction from spiritual pursuits. Deciding to get married had serious repercussions within their society because they believed it was consciously choosing to accept an aspect of worldliness. Due to Landmann’s position as a Werkzeug, hers was an especially controversial choice. Landmann ostensibly lost the gift of inspiration shortly before her marriage, and both she and her husband were excommunicated from the community.(11) Landmann returned to Amana in her later years following her husband’s death and began receiving visions again in 1849, at the age of 54. 

The Inspirationists had two other Werkzeuge in the 19th century, Christian Metz and Michael Krausert. Krausert was the first to become inspired and revive the movement. He discovered and confirmed Landmann’s inspiration, but was ultimately excommunicated due to disputes with her several years later. Christian Metz became inspired shortly after Krausert’s excommunication. He led the Inspirationists to America and ultimately to Iowa, where they founded the Amana colony. After Landmann’s excommunication, he served as the community’s sole Werkzeug for 25 years until her return. When Landmann took up the Werkzeug mantle again in 1849, the two served together for about 20 years. After Metz’s death in 1867, Landmann served as Amana’s only Werkzeug until her own death in 1883. Landmann’s death marked the end of the charismatic period in Amana’s history, they would not have another charismatic leader up to their dissolution as a religious community in 1937.

The Inspirationists kept meticulous records of the testimonies from the Werkzeuge. Andelson was able to take advantage of this in his research to obtain some fascinating insights into the evolution of the Werkzeug process. While Metz was alive, it is clear that in spiritual functions he maintained superiority over Landmann. She never received any inspiration which affected the entire congregation while he was alive.(12) Furthermore, he would occasionally directly overrule inspirations that she had delivered.(13) In general, Landmann seems to have struggled to be accepted by the Inspirationists after her return. By contrast, The 25 years Metz served as the group’s only charismatic leader are viewed by all Inspirationists as the golden years of the movement. Andelson observes that even in his own interviews in the 1980s with members of the group—most of whom would have been born nearly a century after Metz’s death—they universally affirmed that Metz had a stronger gift than Landmann’s. Andelson further points out that while they both held the same position, and Landmann served as sole Werkzeug 14 years after his death, Metz is the only one to have an annual commemoration in his honor, as well as a double-wide plot in the community’s cemetery.(14)

We can see in these examples how strong an influence perception plays on a charismatic figure’s authority. Metz’s agreeable and magnanimous personality did most of the legwork in securing his authority within Amana. Landmann, on the other hand, had an uphill battle on account of her gender, and her harsher, confrontational personality did her no favors. While people accepted her authority due to Metz’s unwavering support of her, the situation was tenuous. This is particularly evident after Metz’s death in 1867. 

The Werkzeuge’s authority changed dramatically after the death of Metz. There were some immediate actions taken to establish more routinized authority within the community. A council of community elders had for years handled the secular affairs of the community and affirmed the Werkzeuge’s authority. Throughout Metz’s life, the elder council had only met when called by the Werkzeuge. But immediately following Metz’s death, the elders set up a regular schedule of meetings. That this event represented a clash of authority between Landmann and the elders seems to be affirmed by Landmann’s inspirations. In the days following this change, she received a veritable barrage of inspirations, targeting and reprimanding the community elders.(15)

 Routinization and the decline of Werkzeuge intervention is evident in the community’s religious calendar. Throughout Metz’s life, the occurrence of special religious holidays such as their communion services had been on his discretion. This served as an important spiritual barometer for Amana, as the primary reason for delaying these meetings was an inadequate spiritual state within the congregation. Immediately following his death, Landmann set all such ceremonies to a calendar schedule, effectively removing the spiritual health of the congregation, and any decision on her part, from the equation. Furthermore, as time went on, Landmann began to increasingly relegate the delivery of inspiration to these special services. 

The most striking change in Werkzeug's authority was the major shift in the delivery of inspiration which followed Metz’s death. During Metz’s tenure, inspirations addressed to a single individual were instrumental in maintaining community discipline and social cohesion. These inspirations could be delivered at any time, in private, work settings, or public meetings. While Landmann still delivered such inspirations, the previously mentioned addresses to the elder council being one example, testimonies delivered during special ceremonies rapidly became her dominant form of address. Furthermore, Landmann’s inspirations in such meetings rarely became any more specific than addressing the general congregation’s spiritual health. Because the Werkzeuge’s authority rested in their inspired revelations, this effectively diminished the authority the Werkzeuge exercised within the community.

Landmann’s diminishing influence, and the subsequent rise of eldership authority filling the gap, almost certainly served as a preparation stage that enabled the community to survive the transition away from charismatic authority. By the time of her death in 1888, no prophetic voice had been found to carry on the Werkzeuge torch. Amana records and personal memoirs are pregnant with the expectation that another Werkzueg would be found. Considering the movement’s long recession in the 18th century up to the arrival of Krausert, Landmann, and Metz; there seems to have been enough basis on which to sustain this hope for quite some time. But by the 1930s, the Great Depression began to exert heavy pressure on the community’s economy. And the shrinking world of automobiles, radio, and cinema, brought the outside world to the isolated community’s doorstep in an unprecedented fashion. In 1930, the Amana elders announced that they were indefinitely suspending the biannual communion services, citing untenable spiritual drift as the cause. Two years later, the community finally fractured under economic stress, and both the church and communism were dissolved. 

Andelson contends that Landmann’s tenure as sole Werkzeuge can be understood as a unique form of routinization not yet considered in the Weberian framework.(16) Rather than routinizing the community structures around a charismatic leader, the leader’s own actions become routinized. Rather than transitioning the community into a new era, her tenure as sole Werkzeuge served primarily to maintain and affirm the status quo established by Metz. This is a fascinating distinction in the utopian landscape because Amana stands in the slim minority of groups that were able to transcend the leadership of their founder. Even if you consider Christian Metz as the key charismatic figure within Amana—an assertion that is completely fair considering his proximity to the group’s revival and his legacy—it is still exceptional that the Inspirationists were able to successfully overcome his death and succession. But even more impressive was their ability to survive as a religious commune for 50 years after a complete break from charismatic authority. Amana stands as one of only two utopian communes which were able to achieve this feat.

Conclusion

As the three examples in this essay demonstrate, the utopian communities lived—and largely died—by charismatic authority. While prophetic individuals brought the spark which for a brief moment seemed like it might just set the whole world ablaze, more often than not, these individuals lived to see their own fall from grace. Through the utopian visionaries, there seemed to be an opportunity to transcend our fallen humanity and join a movement directly connected to the will of God (or some universal truth, in the case of the non-religious). Yet time and again, these visionaries proved to be as fallible as any other man, and this revelation was ultimately too much for their communities to bear. Ultimately, Weber’s theory of routinization seems to be validated in the utopian movement. Charismatic authority had to routinize within these communities to secure longevity. But this proved extremely difficult, and ultimately failed for the majority of utopians. The result was a series of movements that rarely outlived their founders. Considering the surge of charismatic populism worldwide and the historical prevalence of charismatic revivals within the church, the challenges faced by utopian movements in reconciling charismatic leadership with long-term sustainability offer valuable insights. These observations prompt us to contemplate the enduring viability of charismatic movements in any given context.

(1) Fittingly, the development of his theory coincided with the peak of the utopian movement. 

(2) Willner, A. R., & Willner, D. (1965). The Rise and Role of Charismatic Leaders. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 358(1), 79. https://doi.org/10.1177/000271626535800109

(3) ibid. 78

(4) Weber, Max, 1864-1920 and Guenther Roth, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1978. 237-254

(5) Spencer C. Olin, Jr. “The Oneida Community and the Instability of Charismatic Authority.” The Journal of American History 67, no. 2 (1980): 293. https://doi.org/10.2307/1890409.

(6) ‘Community Contracts’, Circular, 23 March 1874, 100-101. https://archive.org/details/simoneida-circular1874-03-231113/page/100/mode/2up?q=community+contracts

(7) Bestor, Arthur. Backwoods Utopias: The Sectarian Origins and the Owenite Phase of Communitarian Socialism in America, 1663-1829. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970. 140

(8) Jennings, Chris, Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism. New York, Random House, 2016. 142

(9) Andelson, Jonathan G. “Routinization of Behavior in a Charismatic Leader.” American Ethnologist 7, no. 4 (1980): 730-731. http://www.jstor.org/stable/643478.

(10) The other being the Shaker’s Anne Lee.

(11) It is worth noting that Landmann’s was an extreme case, there are no other known cases of marriage leading to excommunication among the Inspirationists. 

(12) The prime examples of such inspirations were the decision to move to America, or beginning to practice communism, both revealed to Metz.

(13) ibid. 726

(14) ibid. 717

(15) ibid. 727-728

(16) ibid. 716