Whether it’s because of the uncertain times in which we live, the dismal nature of our political leaders, or the rise of rightwing populism, we have had a spate of books in recent years on leadership in modern history. From Frank Dikötter’s How to Be a Dictator to Henry Kissinger’s Leadership, the format seems to be to string together chapters on various world leaders who changed the course of history, for good or bad, and reflect on the patterns between them.
The latest offering is Ian Kershaw’s Personality and Power, in which the great historian of Hitler and his movement pens a dozen lucid portraits of the leaders – half of them dictators, the others democrats, to varying degrees – who shaped Europe’s 20th century.
His starting point is Karl Marx’s dictum of 1852: “Men make their own history, but not as they please, in conditions of their own choosing, but rather under those directly encountered, given and inherited.” How far is the leader’s power shaped by personality, and how much by circumstance, Kershaw asks. Each chapter follows the same sequence of subsidiary issues from the preconditions of the leader’s rise to a brief discussion of his legacy.
Kershaw also draws from Max Weber’s theory of “charismatic” leadership: the charisma of the leader is created by his following of believers, whose ideals are invested in the “chosen one”, or manufactured for him by his movement or the state through a personality cult. Kershaw was a pioneer of this approach. One of his best early works, The Hitler Myth (1987), showed how Hitler’s power rested on his propaganda image and its public perception.
He emphasises how extraordinary leaders are created by crises. This goes for the dictators who came to power through social revolution (Lenin), the collapse of parliamentary politics (Mussolini) or economic depression (Hitler), and leaders in democracies whose greatness came as saviours of their nation in a time of war (Churchill and De Gaulle), or for those who steered their country to democracy after ruinous dictatorships (Adenauer, Gorbachev).
Crises can be fabricated too, a point Kershaw might have made more of. It was the “war scare” of 1927 (when Pravda published fake news of a British planned invasion of the USSR) that enabled Stalin to defeat his rivals for the leadership and force through his version of the five-year plan; and whipped-up fears of Bolshevism that allowed Mussolini and Franco to rally frightened Catholics behind their cause.
Kershaw fills his lively profiles with revealing details of the leaders’ characters, their working style and relations with the ruling structures that supported them. Margaret Thatcher “thrived on abrasive argument and combative dispute”, relying on her “workaholic habits” and ‘“forensic interrogative powers” as a trained lawyer to “carry her case against cabinet colleagues who were less well prepared or more submissive in their character”. Franco wore down the resistance of his ministers by not allowing toilet breaks in meetings that could last all day and night. His bladder control was “extraordinary”, Kershaw informs us.
He also highlights the mistakes that leaders made to bring about their fall, analysing how far these can be explained by their own stubborn personalities, ideological blinkers, or by the hubris that affects so many leaders, especially dictators, when they’ve been in power for too long. Such mistakes are apparent only in hindsight. Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine will go down in Russia’s history as a mistake if it ends in a defeat, but “victory” will erase the military blunders and atrocities from the national memory. Power decides everything.
As you would expect, Kershaw is at his most masterful in his sketches of the three German leaders in this book. He is also very good on Mussolini and De Gaulle. He is less convincing on Lenin and Stalin, where his reliance on secondary sources makes for a flat and conventional account. He doesn’t really understand the sacred base of charismatic power in Russia, the Byzantine tradition of saintly tsars and princes that transmogrified into the cults of Lenin and Stalin; nor the patrimonial nature of autocracy in Russia, where the leader is the master of the land and its people, a form of despotism and enslavement of society that goes from the Mongols to Stalin (“Genghis Khan with a telephone”, as the Bolshevik Bukharin described him). The very word for power in Russian (vlast) comes not from action, as in western languages (puissance, potenza, macht, etc), but from the term for a fiefdom, a territory owned by its ruler.
Kershaw devotes the final chapter to a summing up of the factors that defined the exercise of power by all 12 leaders in the book. His purpose, as he tells at the start, is to test seven propositions about personal leadership. They are all fairly obvious. Did we really need to read this book to learn, for example, that “single-minded pursuit of easily definable goals and ideological inflexibility combined with tactical acumen enable a specific individual to stand out and gain a following”? Or that “concentration of power enhances the potential impact of the individual – often with negative, sometimes catastrophic consequences”?
Perhaps in the end the cultural specificities of the seven countries explored in this book, their differing traditions of understanding power and authority, do not lend themselves so easily to general principles. Is it even meaningful to compare the modes of leadership in systems as diverse as the Third Reich and Tito’s Yugoslavia or Britain under Churchill and Thatcher? There is much to be admired in Kershaw’s cogent and astute analysis of these leaders in power, but I’m not sure there are any general lessons to be learned.
• Orlando Figes is the author of The Story of Russia (Bloomsbury)
• Personality and Power: Builders and Destroyers of Modern Europe by Ian Kershaw is published by Penguin (£30). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
