In his persistent efforts to make out a case for the historical efficacy of religious beliefs against the most reductionist forms of Marxist theory, Max Weber is sometimes led to privilege the notion of charisma in a manner that, as some writers have noted, is not without resonances of a Carlylean,‘heroic’philosophy of history-as, for example, when he refers to the charismatic leader as ‘the specifically creative revolutionary force of history’(ES, p. 1117). Yet he himself provides a means of escape from the simplistic alternative of which his own least convincing analyses are a product. The alternative in question is that between the illusion of absolute autonomy, which tends to have us conceive the religious message as a spontaneously generated product of inspiration, and the reductive theory, which sees that message as the direct reflection of economic and social conditions. He himself brings out elsewhere what these two opposed and yet complementary positions both equally neglect, namely, the religious work carried out by specialist agents. These agents are relatively autonomous in respect of external constraints (economic constraints in particular) and invested with the institutional—or other-power to respond to a particular category of needs proper to determinate social groups by a determinate type of practice or discourse. However, if we are to follow the line of thought indicated by Weber through to its conclusion-whilst remaining resolutely within the limits of interpretation (however free it may be)-we must first remove the difficulties he encounters in his attempt to define the ‘protagonists’ of religious action, the prophet, the magician and the priest. At the heart of all these difficulties, to which his long enumerations of exceptions bear witness, lies his conception of the ‘ideal type’. This commits him cither to being content with definitions that are universal in scope but extremely