 For a fair and comprehensive assessment, however, it should also be brought into purview that Weber’s leadership democracy is not solely reliant upon the fortuitous personality traits of its leaders, let alone a caesaristic dictator. “[A] genuine charisma is radically different from the convenient presentation of the present ‘divine right of king’… the very opposite is true of the genuinely charismatic ruler, who is responsible to the ruled” [1922/1978, 1114]. Such responsibility is conceivable because charisma is attributed to a leader through a process that can be described as “imputation” from below [Joose 2014, 271]. In addition to the free electoral competition led by the organized mass parties, Weber saw localized, yet public associational life as a breeding ground for such an imputation of charisma. When leaders are identified and selected at the level of, say neighborhood choral societies and bowling clubs [Weber 1910/2002], the alleged authoritarian elitism of leadership democracy comes across as more pluralistic in its valence, far from its usual identification with demagogic dictatorship and unthinking mass following. Insofar as a vibrant civil society functions as an effective medium for the horizontal diffusion of charismatic qualities among lay people, his notion of charismatic leadership can retain a strongly democratic tone to the extent that he also suggested associational pluralism as a sociocultural ground for the political education of the lay citizenry from which genuine leaders would hail. Weber’s charismatic leadership has to be “democratically manufactured” [Green 2008, 208], in short, and such a formative political project is predicated upon a pluralistically organized civil society as well as such liberal institutions as universal suffrage, free elections, and organized parties.