>The Cambridge Dictionary reports that #charisma is “a special power that some people have naturally,” but this association with individual influence is criticized as just another tedious expression of the **Great Man Theory** and overlooks much interconnected complexity. In her book, “Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leaders,” Erica Edwards argued that this view has “privileged charismatic leaders, from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King Jr., over the arduous, undocumented efforts of ordinary women, men and children to remake their social reality.” This uncritical faith in charisma as a motor of history, she wrote, “ignores its limits as a model for social movements while showing us just how powerful a narrative force it is.”

https://www.noemamag.com/the-secret-history-and-strange-future-of-charisma/