As the third decade of the twenty-first century unfolds, traumatic economic and social change, mass cross-border migration, and the breakneck advance of technology are discombobulating societies across the global North and South. A worldwide rebellion against the entrenched, neo-feudalistic guilds and cliques that rule the roost is afoot, led by charismatic politicians of the left and right. These mesmerizing spellbinders and storytellers differ ideologically, but they all share a passionate populism as well as a talent for channeling their followers’ resentment and rage.
Topic Schedule (subject to change):
- WEEK ONE. The three types of authority and five categories of charisma.
- WEEK TWO. Donald Trump as a seminal figure of American and world history.
- WEEK THREE. A West African epic: Burkina Faso from Thomas Sankara to Ibrahim Traoré.
- WEEK FOUR. How Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) of Saudi Arabia employs the stylistics of charismatic rule to remodel the tribal and monarchical authority he inherited.
- WEEK FIVE. Caudillismo as a historical practice and twenty-first century promise.
- WEEK SIX. The People’s Republic of China and its decades-long charisma taboo.
- WEEK SEVEN. Elon is from Mars, Greta is from Earth: Global charismatics operating outside the political box.
- WEEK EIGHT. French President Emmanuel Macron loses his mesmeric mojo. Vladimir Zelensky vs. Vladimir Putin, and the Russia-Ukraine war.
Suggested Readings:
- Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. New York: W.W. Norton, 2020
- Chan, Alfred L. Xi Jinping: Political Career, Governance, and Leadership 1953-2018. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022
- Short, Philip. Putin: His Life and Times. New York: Penguin/Vintage, 2023
- Mudde, Cas & Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017
Instructor Details: Richard Tempest is a scholar and writer who is a Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Senior Editor at the Journal of Political Marketing (Chicago). He holds a BA, MA, and PhD from the University of Oxford and has published on Russian and world culture and history in English, Bulgarian, Russian and French. Tempest’s study Overwriting Chaos: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Fictive Worlds (Boston: Academic Studies Press) came out in 2019. The focus of his current book project is the poetics of charismatic leadership. Tempest is the author of the novel Golden Bone (Zolotaia kost’), which he wrote in Russian and published under the pseudonym Roland Harrington (Moscow: NLO, 2004).