Weber met a wide number of these charismatic leaders at first hand such as Stephan Georg and Otto Gross, a radical early psychoanalyst who was an early convert to Freudianism but who later became so eccentric and out of control that Freud had to repudiate him.

Otto Gross became involved with the Weber family and had some very entangled love affairs with people personally known to the Weber family. Gross was charismatic, got addicted to both morphine and cocaine (in those days the addictive potential of both drugs were not fully understood and physicians were especially vulnerable as they often self experimented and then found themselves trapped).

But Gross took Freudian psychoanalysis far beyond the safe limits advised by Freud and turned it into a method of Nietszchian self liberation and Gross also espoused polygamy and saw emotional and sexual fidelity as being inherantly oppressive. He would conduct hours long psychoanalytic sessions in cafes, free to all comers encourage people to get in touch with their secret desires, and then urged them to act this out.

According to Noll, the Webers were very concerned about the hazards of all this. Max Weber rejected one of Gross’ essays for publication, stating that if one has a programme of self transformation but does not have a stable set of ethical values to ground oneself, the hazards are too great.

Noll said, that it was to the Webers’ credit that they tried to understand what motivated Gross and his young band of erotic and social anarchists, but in the end, the Webers could only stand aloof and watch as many marraiges and committed relationships collapsed when people tried to live by Gross’s principles.

So Weber wrote his work on charisma and charismaticly led groups, precisely because he lived in an area full of such leaders and groups and had seen much of this at first hand.

Religion has no monopoly on enchantment-politics does too. And so does marketing.