Manussos Marangudakis

This original analysis of modern Greece’s political culture attempts to present a “total social fact”—a coherent and complex representation of Greek socio-political culture—to identify the cultural causes of Greece’s recent disastrous economic crisis. Using a culturalist frame inspired by the Yale Strong Program, Marangudakis argues that the core cultural orientations of Greece have determined its politics—Greek secular culture flows out of the religion of Eastern Orthodoxy with its mysticism, icons, and general “ortherworldly-nesses.” This theoretical discussion, bringing together Eisenstadt, Michael Mann, Banfield, and Taylor, is complemented by an innovative use of survey data, processed by political scientist and statistician Theodore Chadjipadelis. The carefully deployed quantitative data demonstrate that the culture previously described is actually shared by people living in Greece today. In his sweeping conclusion to this thorough cultural analysis, Marangudakis reflects on the prospects of Greek cultural recovery through the construction of a non-populist civil religion.

A Study in the Theory of Multiple Modernities

The Greek Crisis and Its Cultural Origins

Arpad Szakolczai

Agnes Horvath

This book considers the current striking rise of ‘outsider’ political leaders, catapulted, apparently, from nowhere, to take charge of a nation. Arguing that such leaders can be better understood with the help of the anthropologically based concept of ‘the trickster’, it offers studies of contemporary political figures from the world stage – including Presidents Macron, Tsipras, Orbán and Bolsonaro, among others – to examine the ways in which charismatic and trickster modalities can become intertwined, especially under the impact of theatrical public media. Looking beyond the commonly invoked notion of ‘charisma’ to revisit the question of political leadership in light of the recent rise of new type of ‘outsider’ leaders, Modern Leaders: Between Charisma and Trickery offers an account of leadership informed by social and anthropological theory. As such, it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in political thought and the problem of political leadership.

Manussos Marangudakis

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