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Personality and Power: Builders and Destroyers of Modern Europe

byIan Kershaw

Ian Kershaw compares twelve leaders who shaped twentieth-century Europe, asking how personality interacted with institutions, crisis, ideology, and opportunity. Dictators and democrats—including Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Churchill, de Gaulle, and others—demonstrate different paths to power and radically different uses of it. Kershaw rejects the idea that individuals alone make history while showing that certain moments allow personal choices to have enormous consequences. The book offers a framework for judging leadership through goals, constraints, methods, and legacies, explaining why some figures destroyed political orders while others rebuilt them.

Publisher

Penguin Press

Publication date

Nov 15, 2022

Format

Print edition

Pages

496

ISBN

9781594203459