The Palgrave Handbook of Mass Dictatorship by Paul Corner & Jie-Hyun Lim

Author:Paul Corner & Jie-Hyun Lim
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

Leader Cults and Modernity

While cults around secular or religious leaders may be observed in premodern societies as well, such as the symbolism surrounding absolutist rulers like Louis XIV, these traditional forms of venerating the king’s body as representation of the state differed in many important aspects from its modern-day successors. The worship of modern dictators was no longer based on the divine right of kings or czars but on the notion of popular sovereignty. Therefore, the impact of the French Revolution deserves special attention. The decisive break with former grounds of legitimacy, the creation and propagation of Republican symbols, the championing of reason and rationality, and the transfer of religious terminology to the secular realm all provided important preconditions for the emergence of modern leader cults. Napoleon III was probably the most prominent example of a sovereign during the nineteenth century, who adapted his ruling strategies to this changed environment by way of relying on populism and the emerging mass media to elevate his personal image. Contemporaneously, this style of leadership was referred to as “Caesarism,” a phrase harking back to the noninstitutional power seizure of Roman emperor Julius Caesar, or as “Bonapartism,” a form of quasi-dictatorial rule based on occasional public plebiscites. During the late nineteenth century, these concepts also came to be attributed to the rule of German chancellor Bismarck by his enemies, and although Bismarck never achieved unrestrained political power, a veritable cult was fostered around him both during and after his lifetime. The statues and towers devoted to the “iron chancellor,” as well as the multifold commodity items, ranging from huge statues to Bismarck beer mats, reveal a dimension of genuine public veneration that was common to some but not all modern leader cults.

Public sentiment was particularly strong in settings, where leaders were able to merge their personal symbolism with discourses of national liberation or in the context of the actual founding of a nation state. The worship fostered around “fathers of the nation” such as Mustafa Kemal, the “Atatürk,” in Turkey or Sun Yat-sen in China in the early twentieth century attest to the potency of crafting narratives of personal destiny by means of mass media, even if these did not always translate into political power. The cults of these two leaders, who promised to lead the former Ottoman Empire, the “sick man of Europe,” and the partly colonized Qing Empire into a brighter future, were founded on doctrines of nationalism, republicanism and, more generally, a scientistic belief in historical progress and change. Both leaders strongly sensed the importance of inventing modernizing ideologies to replace or at least to refashion traditional systems of belief. While other late nineteenth-century thinkers in China thought to transform Confucianism into a vehicle of modernization and change, Sun Yat-sen opted for a conscious break with traditional thought and religion. He famously compared the Chinese people to a sheet of loose sand, in dire need of a modern, unifying ideology, which came to be known as the “Three Principles of the People”: nationalism, democracy and people’s welfare.

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