The desire for a states-manlike leader in the 19th century.
Michael Gamper turns his attention to a figure that gained extreme power-political significance in the long 19th century, shaping the history of the social imagination of the epoch: the ›great man‹, as personified by Napoleon, called for by Schleiermacher and described by Treitschke.
This book is not about rehabilitating the history of events relating to ›great men‹. Rather, Gamper analyses an abundance of material to provide a convincing and confident explanation of how, in the early modern period, a political saviour figure emerged from traditional principles of antiquity, idealistic concepts, innovative power strategies and literary fiction: a figure who was expected to create a social whole from the circumstances that governed post-revolutionary modernity.
The analysis focuses on the techniques and functions of discourse on the great man, the knowledge registers to which he owes his career, the wishes, hopes and fantasies of the many people associated with the figure, and the forms and formats of its media production and distribution.
Perspectives on the pre- and post-history of the great man and a digression on great women complete the portrait of an extinct form of personalised political violence that has many repercussions, exerting its influence on political fantasy up to the present day.
Michael Gamper, born in 1967, is a professor of German literature, specialising in the history of culture and knowledge, at the University of Hanover.
Publications include: Elektropoetologie. Fiktionen der Elektrizität 1740 –1870 (Electropoetology. Fictions of Electricity, 2009); Masse lesen, Masse schreiben. Eine Diskurs- und Imaginationsgeschichte der Menschenmenge 1765 –1930 (Reading the Masses, Writing the Masses. A History of Discourse and Imagination on the Crowd 1765 –1930, 2007); »Die Natur ist republikanisch«. Zu den ästhetischen, anthropologischen und politischen Konzepten der deutschen Gartenliteratur im 18. Jahrhundert (»Nature is Republican«. The Aesthetic, Anthropological and Political Concepts of German Garden Literature in the 18th Century, 1998).
