David A. Bell’s Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution gallops through the eighteenth century to trace the modern emergence of charismatic leadership when romanticism met revolutionary politics. David A. Bell, WHAT MAKES leadership charismatic? That question has loomed large since the eighteenth century with transformations wrought by revolution and mass politics. Political hero worship has ties with authoritarian temptations, but it also has a place in the electoral politics of constitutional democracies with their demand for persuasion. Charisma inspires more effectively than rational argument, let alone the currently diminished claims of technical expertise or standing within bureaucratic hierarchies.