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This book considers the current striking rise of 'outsider' political leaders, catapulted, apparently, from nowhere, to take charge of a nation. Arguing that such leaders can be better understood with the help of the anthropologically based concept of 'the trickster', it offers studies of contemporary political figures from the world stage - including Presidents Macron, Tsipras, Orbán and Bolsonaro, among others - to examine the ways in which charismatic and trickster modalities can become intertwined, especially under the impact of theatrical public media. Looking beyond the commonly invoked notion of 'charisma' to revisit the question of political leadership in light of the recent rise of new type of 'outsider' leaders, Modern Leaders: Between Charisma and Trickery offers an account of leadership informed by social and anthropological theory. As such, it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in political thought and the problem of political leadership.
List of contents
Introduction; Part I: On Charis and Charisma; 1. Beyond Charisma: Catacombing Sensual Governance by a Painful Breaking of Human Ties; 2. Charisma: From Divine Gift to the Democratic Leader-shop; Part II: Plato's Statesman; 3. The Virtues of Leadership: Beyond the Pleasure Principle; 4. Constituting Power: Plato's Weaving of Human Emotions; 5. Plato's Statesman: Defending Phronesis from Coding; Part III: Contemporary Case Studies; 6. A Study in Charisma and Trickery: The Case of Alexis Tsipras and SYRIZA; 7. The Trickster Logic in Latin-America: Leadership in Argentina and Brazil; 8. Political Leadership in Contemporary France: The Case of Emmanuel Macron; 9. The Failure of Democracy in Italy: From Berlusconi to Salvini; 10. Viktor Orbán's Leadership: The Prince, the Political Father, and the Doomed Trickster; 11. Duplicity, Corruption and Exceptionalism in the Romanian Experience of Modernity; Concluding Comments
About the author
Agnes Horvath is a founding and chief editor of International Political Anthropology. She taught in Hungary, Ireland and Italy, and was affiliate visiting scholar and supervisor at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Modernism and Charisma, the co-author of Walking into the Void, and The Political Sociology and Anthropology of Evil: Tricksterology, and the co-editor of Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality.
Arpad Szakolczai is Professor of Sociology at University College Cork, Ireland, and previously taught Social Theory at the European University Institute in Florence. He is the author of Max Weber and Michel Foucault, Reflexive Historical Sociology, Comedy and the Public Sphere, and Permanent Liminality and Modernity, and the co-author of From Anthropology to Social Theory: Rethinking the Social Sciences.
Manussos Marangudakis is Professor of Comparative Cultural Sociology at the University of the Aegean, Greece and previously has taught at Queen’s University in Belfast and the University of Ulster. He is the author of The Greek Disaster and its Cultural Origins, Greek Anarchism as a Religious Phenomenon, Genealogies of Sociology, and American Fundamentalism.
Summary
Presenting studies of contemporary political figures, this book employs the anthropologically based concept of ‘the trickster’ to shed light on the rise of the - often anonymous - political leader, looking beyond the commonly invoked notion of ‘charisma’ to revisit the question of political leadership in an increasingly populist era.
