A study in charisma, trickery, and antinomianism: The case of SYRIZA and Alexis Tsipras (draft) Manussos Marangudakis In: Modern Leaders - Between Charisma and Trickery Edited by Agnes Horvath, Manussos Marangudakis, and Arpad Szakolczai One of the main topics of sociology is the processes of institution building, social transformation, and symbolic creativity; processes that involve the formation, reproduction and transformation of major types of institutions and cultural symbols. If the long accumulative process of minor changes in various spheres of life is one way to achieve such a response, Max Weber’s “charisma” is the other. Charisma stands for these abrupt and radical alterations of the main contours of social life, of the basic rules of social organization and the symbolic premises which constitute the public sphere. The result of a sudden dramatic innovation -which usually starts at peripheral spheres of life and then infiltrates and impinges on the central stage-, charisma is the most dramatic expression of human creativity. This is to say that creativity does not exist outside institutional frameworks but is found in certain aspects of social relations, it constitutes a radical reinterpretation of the systemic organizational and symbolic contours of a certain social configuration, it entails its own constrictions and rigidities, and often co-exists with processes of destruction of institutions that it wishes to replace or utterly eradicate. More specifically, creativity lays in the tensions inherent in the construction of social order, in the relations between the social division of labor, the regulation of power, and the construction of trust and meaning. Construction of social order, in turn, generates tensions (a) between the creative dimension of human life, and the neutralization of these visions through the institutional development of impersonal bureaucracies; (b) between a vision through which the world makes sense, and the dissolution of meaning through the autonomous development of multiple institutional, economic, political and cultural sectors; and (c) between human autonomy and the restrictive control inherent in the institutional realization of modern life. Creativity then is both an endemic and an epidemic feature in the framework of any social order. It takes the form either of an accumulation of a long series of piecemeal activities of individual social actors in different walks of life to infuse routine social action with originality, or of a comprehensive, “holistic” interpretation of meaningful social interaction and institutional structures, and consequentially the replacement of a meaningless or corrupted social order with a new one, based on new criteria of trust, solidarity, legitimation and meaning. In this essay we will examine a paradigmatic case of the second possibility, of a radical and comprehensive interpretation of creativity as charismatic action that occurred in Greece when the country went virtually bankrupt in 2010. We will examine the structural,