Conférence de Tom F Wright  : “Influence”, Gender and the Nineteenth-Century Culture Wars
Channel: Université Bordeaux Montaigne
Date: 2021-03-23

This presentation comes from a book project, Primitive Charisma: The Pre-History of Our Most Magnetic Idea, that offers a historical re-evaluation of Max Weber’s famous and misunderstood concept. Focusing on the century before the term’s currency, it uses five keywords — magnet, vril, influence, orenda, and glamour — to offer a “rhetorical” pre-history of ideas about non-rational authority in sociology, ethnography, science and fiction. This talk explores one of these — influence — and the complex role the term played as a keyword in nineteenth-century culture wars around gender, women’s rights and race.