Karl Marx was the first to use 'personality cult' politically, as a complaint
In an 1877 letter, Karl Marx told a German activist how much he disliked what he called the personality cult, recalling that he had refused public honours during the International. The irony is sharp: in the twentieth century, some of the most extravagant leader worship in history was built by regimes claiming his name.
A cult of personality is an organised effort to build an idealised, heroic image of a leader through relentless flattery. It resembles the old practice of deifying rulers but relies on modern social engineering: controlled media, propaganda, staged spectacles, art bent to the purpose and mass rallies. It is usually created by the state or ruling party in one-party systems, and often accompanies authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, though it also appears in some monarchies and failed democracies.
Reverence for rulers is ancient. Egyptian pharaohs, Inca and Aztec rulers and Roman emperors were treated as god-kings, and China's emperor bore the title Son of Heaven; medieval Europe had the divine right of kings. Democratic and secular ideas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries made that aura harder to sustain, though Napoleon III and Queen Victoria still enjoyed seeing collectable portrait cards of themselves circulate. Radio then allowed leaders to project themselves to whole populations, and the most notorious cults followed in the twentieth century, often functioning as political religions.
The phrase itself entered English, French and German in the first half of the nineteenth century, originally linked to the Romantic cult of genius with no political meaning. The historian Jan Plamper identifies five features separating modern cults from older ones: they are secular and rooted in popular sovereignty, their objects have all been men, they target entire populations, they depend on mass media, and they thrive only where media are controlled enough to block rival cults. Adrian Teodor Popan points to patronage networks, absent dissent and pervasive falsification as necessary conditions.
The phenomenon is not confined to dictatorships. Robert N. Bellah observed that American politics is dominated by leaders' personalities to an unusual degree and that the media have at least contributed to it. Social media disinformation and the round-the-clock news cycle have given personality cults new life in the twenty-first century, alongside a broader rise in authoritarian government.
Source: Cult of personality
