Charisma and Religious Innovation: The Social Location of Israelite Prophecy

relating to his environment, but as a group's organized response to its peculiar disadvantage, the features of radicalism appear as calculated and efficient mechanisms. That they must be compatible with or even feed on the emotional life of the persons who implement them is almost a foregone conclusion. It was Karl Mannheim who remarked about the revolutionary proletariat: Here then we are confronted with the combination of the most extreme rationalism with some of the most extreme irrational elements; this shows that the 'irrational' proves on closer observation more complex than we are at first inclined to imagine. 39