Dramatic Intellectuals and the Social Power of Ideas
Date: 19 May 2026
Time: 12:30pm - 2pm
Location: Sociology Seminar Room
In this talk, the speakers will introduce the volume Dramatic Intellectuals (Palgrave Macmillan Cultural Sociology Series, 2025) and their contributions to it. The book challenges reductionist perspectives that portray public intellectuals as mere epiphenomena of social forces. Building on Jeffrey Alexander’s cultural-sociological concept of dramatic intellectual, the volume examines figures who shape public discourse by navigating collective anxieties and hopes through utopian and apocalyptic narratives of salvation and damnation. In these master narratives, the speakers identify key features such as simplistic binaries between the good-sacred-pure, on the one hand, and the evil-profane-polluted, on the other; the social construction of meta-adversaries and meta-saviors; the mobilization of cultural traumas and ideological packs; and the Cassandra complex. By articulating powerful moral and emotional coordinates in perceived or purported moments of crisis, dramatic intellectuals enchant the world. In doing so, they offer interpretive lenses through which broader publics make sense of their historical and social condition and, at times, provide scripts that radical movements appropriate for large-scale dramatization.
Websites:
Javier Pérez-Jara: https://ccs.yale.edu/profile/javier-perez-jara
Nicolás Rudas: https://sociology.yale.edu/profile/nicolas-rudas
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Link: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-89909-6
Speaker Biographies
Javier Pérez-Jara is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and East Asian Studies at the University of Seville, Spain, and Faculty Fellow at Yale University’s Center for Cultural Sociology. His work lies at the intersection of cultural sociology and philosophy, with particular focus on utopian and apocalyptic narratives, contemporary materialism, and the nature–nurture debate. He received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Seville in 2012 and was a visiting postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge from 2013 to 2015. He later served for eight years as Assistant Professor at the International Business School of Beijing Foreign Studies University, where he taught philosophy, critical thinking, and sociology.
He is the author of Techno-Utopia and Techno-Apocalypse in Global Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2026), Science and Apocalypse in Bertrand Russell: A Cultural Sociology (with Lino Camprubí; Bloomsbury, 2022), and La Filosofía de Bertrand Russell (Pentalfa, 2014). He is also co-editor of Dramatic Intellectuals (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), Beyond Nature and Nurture: Perspectives on Human Multidimensionality (Springer, 2025), and Contemporary Materialism: Its Ontology and Epistemology (Springer, 2022). Pérez-Jara has held visiting positions at academic institutions worldwide, including the universities of Stanford, Yale, Tokyo, Kyoto, Sangyo of Kyoto, Tohoku, Gothenburg, Aristotle of Thessaloniki, Fu Jen Catholic, and Minzu of China.
Nicolás Rudas is a sociologist and Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at Yale University, USA. He is a Junior Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale. Rudas's research examines the intersections of meaning, violence, and democracy. He recently co-edited the volume Dramatic Intellectuals (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) and published a critical revision of the "resonance" trend in cultural sociology (Thesis Eleven, 2025). His previous work, "Numbers as Fact-Icons" (Cultural Sociology, 2024), explores how statistics can become powerful galvanizers of moral and emotional effervescence, contributing to the construction of collective trauma surrounding past atrocities.
