The Palgrave Handbook of Mass Dictatorship pp 217-228 | Cite as
Rituals, Emotions and Mobilization: The Leader Cult and Party Politics
Abstract
The leader cult is a near ubiquitous phenomenon in the history of twentieth-century mass dictatorships. Leaders of Fascist, National Socialist, communist or Baath Party organizations, Latin American and Southern European “strongmen” (caudillos), African and Asian autocrats, they all came to fuse their personal imagery to different degrees with the symbols and discourses of national liberation movements or, in post-revolutionary settings, the nation state itself. Prior to Khrushchev’s secret speech in 1956, the term “personality cult” or “cult of the individual” and the associated meanings of personal aggrandizement, media control and enforced public rituals of worship were rarely used to denote a specific form of governance. The word “cult” was used in derogative fashion to discredit certain competitors or enemies or it was employed to characterize types of seemingly irrational allegiance. Karl Marx thus sharply criticized the “repugnant … and nauseating … cult of the Crown” in Britain or the “Napoleon cult” in France (Heller and Plamper 2004, pp. 24–25). The notion of “cult” with its religious references to church rituals and liturgy has remained notoriously opaque and, with the exception of Mao Zedong, no twentieth-century dictator has self-consciously argued for the need of sustaining a leader cult. Even Hitler was careful to distinguish the “high-reasoned approach to reality” (Burleigh 220, p. 11) of National Socialism from what he perceived as mystic and primitive cult movements.
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