Sociologists have treated intellectuals and their ideas for a long time as mere products of external social structures. Recently, however, researchers shifted their focus to cultural explanations, appreciating more fully the role cultural structures play in shaping their biographical trajectories and success. At the same time, I argue that these theories do not fully integrate the insight of performance theories and focus usually on textual self‐presentation of intellectuals. Although such an approach is valuable, I propose that sociologists should pay attention also to the processes of meaning‐making that make up intellectual appeal on stage. In the second part of the paper, I argue that the sociology of intellectuals has been for too long obsessed with questions of success and prestige, and I propose that sociologists should shift their attention to the underappreciated and marginalised among intellectuals.

This paper explores the role anger plays in charismatic movements. Although scholars have long recognized the importance of emotions to the etiology of charisma, they tend to focus on mutual affection among leaders and followers, paying less attention to how anger—and particularly its subspecies, ressentiment—patterns charismatic power. Drawing on literature from political science, populism research, and the cultural sociology of charisma, we argue that ressentiment, which is associated with self-disvalue and an invidious need to blame outsiders, is key to theorizing the emotional energy that charisma delivers to revolutionary upheaval. The Weberian source for the intervention is his lesser known concept of ‘berserk-charisma’. Reorienting the focus of charisma research to account for its aggressive, ‘outward’ dimension has the benefit of drawing us closer to the vision Weber had for its social-historical relevance. We demonstrate our insights using the case of charismatic/populist support for Trump.

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The phenomena of myth and mythogenesis (the process of myth creation) have been a perennial moot point for humanities, theology, and the social sciences. Why do people demonstrate an inexhaustible capacity to create stories that have little relation to everyday life and conventional physics, stories which feature gods, demigods, demons, and other unreal figures struggling with exceptional and unexceptional human beings over the control of their world, but also assisting them in everyday tasks?