Autor

Andreas Leutzsch (University of Bielefeld, Germany)

Título

About the genealogy of demigods ­ the case of B. Obama

Resumen

Since the French Revolution western people started to imagine justice as equality and they fought many wars to save or to diffuse this concept. Therefore, equality is the key concept of modernity. Additionally, it marks ideologies like socialism, communism, fascism and liberalism in different ways. But, for all differences, they have one thing in common the utopian promise to reach equality in (immanent) history. It seems that all these ideologies have cut their boundaries to the transcendent world and that equality of man is just a secularized and political version of religion without god. Additionally, some of these ideologies seem to create their own demigods in times of crisis and B. Obama is considered to be one of them. Indeed, in the last two years we saw B. Obama doing a highly symbolical campaign and we witnessed how he tried to change the United States. Therefore, it seems interesting to do some research regarding the historical genealogy B. Obama used to legitimize his (charismatic) leadership and his politics of equality.