‘A very modest man’: Béla illés, or how to make a career through the leader cult

Abstract

Among all nineteenth-century political ideologies, socialism was the one tofocus most on ‘classes’, ‘masses’ and other abstract historical and social entities and developments. Yet it also became the ideology of a political movement that produced a great number of ‘personality cults’. It can be hypothesised that it was the high level of abstraction of the socialist system of ideas that fostered the emergence of the cults of certain individuals. Narratives of heroic revolutionaries or martyrs that suffered for mankind could impersonate the ‘structures’ that promised to overcome the sufferings of humanity. The cults of communist leaders should therefore be understood as secularised forms of religious rituals. Here we define ‘cult of personality’ as a sum of symbolic actions and texts which express and ritualise the par-ticular meanings ascribed to a particular person in order to incorporate an imagined community.