Concept
Cult of personality
Overview
A cult of personality, or a cult of the leader, is the result of an effort to create an idealized and heroic image of an admirable leader, often through unquestioning flattery and praise.
Historically, it has been developed through techniques such as the manipulation of the mass media, the dissemination of propaganda, the staging of spectacles, the manipulation of the arts, the instilling of patriotism, and government-organized demonstrations and rallies. A cult of personality is similar to apotheosis (deification), except that it is established through the use of modern social engineering techniques, and it is usually established by the state or the party in one-party states and dominant-party states. Cults of personality often accompany the leaders of totalitarian or authoritarian governments. They can also be found in some monarchies, theocracies, failed democracies, and liberal democracies.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
Such phantastic pictures of future society, painted at a time when the proletariat is still in a very undeveloped state and has but a phantastic conception of its own position, correspond with the first instinctive yearnings of that class for a general reconstruction of society. But these Socialist and Communist publications contain also a critical element. They attack every principle of existing society.
Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party
The author is tied to Cult of personality in the knowledge graph.
Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, rush onward rapidly from success to success, their stage effects outbid one another, men and things seem to be set in flaming brilliants, ecstasy is the prevailing spirit; but they are short-lived, they reach their climax speedily, then society relapses into a long fit of nervous reaction before it learns how to appropriate the fruits of its period of…
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
The author is tied to Cult of personality in the knowledge graph.
These, of course, arose in a regular course of development out of the most primitive modes of life, and yet they were not directly derived from them. The creative power characteristic of all mental activity here manifested itself, not in the performance of miracles, but in a constant engenderment of new motives out of the interaction of existing motives with changing external conditions of life. In consequence of…
Wilhelm Max Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind
Close in meaning to Cult of personality; the term itself is not named.
Philosophers who discussed Cult of personality
Related ideas
- Durga
- Guinness World Records
- Cult
- One-party state
- Franklin D. Roosevelt
- Vladimir Lenin
- Turkey
- Princeton University Press
- Technocracy
- Great Purge
- Italy
- Internet
- Islamism
- Personalism
- Joseph Stalin
- Karl Marx
- Bhakti
- Trade union
- Immortality
- Leon Trotsky
- Latin America
- Middle Ages
- Spanish Civil War
- Argentina
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Scientism.