From Benito Mussolini to Hugo Chavez
Intellectuals and a Century of Political Hero Worship

This book explores the roots of reverence and admiration expressed by many distinguished Western intellectuals for ruthless dictators.

Paul Hollander (Author)

9781107071032, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 9 January 2017

338 pages, 10 b/w illus.
23.6 x 15.8 x 2.4 cm, 0.6 kg

'Paul Hollander, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and an associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard, is well qualified to examine the impact and origins of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century love affair between many members of the Western intelligentsia and some of the most ruthless, bloody dictators and political systems of the age.' Aram Bakshian, Jr, The National Interest

During the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, political dictators were not only popular in their own countries, but were also admired by numerous highly educated and idealistic Western intellectuals. The objects of this political hero-worship included Benito Mussolini, Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro and more recently Hugo Chavez, among others. This book seeks to understand the sources of these misjudgements and misperceptions, the specific appeals of particular dictators, and the part played by their charisma, or pseudo-charisma. It sheds new light not only on the political disposition of numerous Western intellectuals - such as Martin Heidegger, Eric Hobsbawm, Norman Mailer, Ezra Pound, Susan Sontag and George Bernard Shaw - but also on the personality of those political leaders who encouraged, and in some instances helped to design, the cult surrounding their rise to dictatorship.

1. Introduction: intellectuals and politics
2. Mussolini, fascism and intellectuals
3. Hitler, Nazism and intellectuals
4. Stalin, Rakosi, Soviet communism and intellectuals
5. Castro, Che Guevara, and their Western admirers
6. Western intellectuals, Mao's China and Cambodia under Pol Pot
7. Other dictators and their admirers in more recent times
8. Conclusions: the personal and the political.

Subject Areas: Comparative politics [JPB], Social, group or collective psychology [JMH], Sociology [JHB], History of ideas [JFCX], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW]