I begin by considering various leadership aetiologies, wherein someone comes to obtain the various rights and obligations associated with the status function of a leader. Searle imagines two possibilities. First, someone comes to be a leader by way of established (e.g. democratic) constitutive rules or procedures. Second, someone might simply be declared a leader if they already wield sufficient coercive, non-deontological power. The deontological power associated with the status function of a leader is different from the antecedently existing coercive power (...) in that the former works, not under the force of threat, but by way of the imposition of rights and obligations. I consider a third leadership aetiology based on charismatic power. The possibility of charismatic power, in turn, recommends a normative, aesthetic source that cannot be reduced to either deontological power or coercive power. I begin by looking, in Sections 1 and 2, at examples which gesture towards the plausibility of aesthetic norms as a constituent of some status functions. Using a largely Humean account of the aesthetic (Section 3) in Sections 4 and 5, I argue that aesthetic evaluations have the right formal properties to underlie a status function. In particular, they are suitably epistemically objective, and they can provide desire-independent reasons for action. Finally, in Section 6, I argue aesthetic norms that are necessarily unprincipled, decisively account for a class of status functions which resist articulation in terms of explicitly codified rights and obligations. (shrink)